It’s All Semantics: Open Data, Linked Data & The Semantic Web

Yesterday we summarized some of the main developments in the Linked Data world over the past year. Linked Data is a W3C-backed movement that is all about connecting data sets across the Web. It can be viewed as a subset of the wider Semantic Web movement, which is about adding meaning to the Web. However, there is some confusion in the Semantic Web community about the crossover . To add to the confusion, there is a term called 'Open Data' that is being bandied around too. This commonly describes data that has been uploaded to the Web and is accessible to all, but isn't necessarily "linked" to other data sets. So what's the beef with all of these terms? In this post we seek clarity! Sponsor The Difference Between Open Data and Linked Data In the discussion over yesterday's post, a few people tweeted that the U.K. government's public data website Data.gov.uk is mostly populated with 'Open Data' and not 'Linked Data.' But what does that mean? It means that much of the data on the site is available to the public, but it doesn't link to other data sources on the Web. It could be data that has been uploaded in CSV format (i.e. spreadsheet data), which Sir Tim Berners-Lee said in an interview with me last year is a common occurrence with government departments. Or it could be data in another non-Web format. Screen from a Tim Berners-Lee presentation on Linked Data , circa 2008 Titti Cimmino put it nicely : Open Data is simply 'data on the web,' whereas Linked Data is a 'web of data.' However, the idea of Open Data is to turn it into Linked Data. As John S. Erickson pointed out , the first priority of Data.gov.uk (and its U.S. counterpart) is to publish lots of Open Data. The next step is to work towards linking it all up. This is already starting to happen. Answering a question I posed on Twitter, Kingsley Idehen confirmed that Data.gov.uk is currently a combination of Open Data and Linked Data. Linked Data and The Semantic Web So may we then suggest that the idea of Linked Data is to turn it into a Semantic Web? Or are they the same thing already? Lorna Campbell from the University of Strathclyde in Scotland tackled those and other questions in an excellent post earlier this month. She started by warning of the potential for another "holy war" about terminology. I won't delve into that in this post, however this excerpt from Campbell's post gives you a flavor of the terminology angst: "Some argue that RDF is integral to Linked Data, other suggest that while it may be desirable, use of RDF is optional rather than mandatory. Some reserve the capitalized term Linked Data for data that is based on RDF and SPARQL, preferring lower case "linked data", or "linkable data", for data that uses other technologies." Even Wikipedia can't define Semantic Web... Campbell quotes from a number of other articles, in trying to come to a conclusion about how Linked Data and the Semantic Web relate. Perhaps the best definition she found was this one by Paul Walk : data can be open , while not being linked data can be linked , while not being open data which is both open and linked is increasingly viable the Semantic Web can only function with data which is both open and linked " Why This Matters So there you have it, Linked Data is NOT the same as the Semantic Web. It's also not necessarily open, in other words accessible to developers. Whatever the definitions, the key points about all of Open Data, Linked Data and the Semantic Web, are: data is being uploaded to the Web that wasn't online before (e.g. much of the data on Data.gov.uk). structure is being added to the data using Linked Data and/or Semantic Web technologies. The bottom line is that the more data we have on the Web that is linked and has defined meaning, the smarter our web applications will be. This is why these activities are so exciting, despite the terminology confusion! Image credit: Semantic Web Rubik's Cube, dullhunk Discuss

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It's All Semantics: Open Data, Linked Data & The Semantic Web

Tags:Campbell, data, data-gov-uk, John S. Erickson, Kingsley Idehen, Lee, Linked, linked-data, Lorna Campbell, Paul Walk, Scotland, semantic, sir tim berners lee, Sir Tim Berners-, structured data, terminology, tim berners lee, Tim Berners-, U.K., U.S., university, web, Wikipedia, words

Are You Ready for the New, Easier Wikipedia?

Wikipedia , the online user-created encyclopedia and the number six website on the Internet today, is about to get a makeover. And it's a big one. According to a blog post from the Wikimedia Foundation User Experience team detailing the changes, the upcoming Wikipedia redesign, due to launch April 5, aims to make the site easier to navigate, easier to search and, perhaps most importantly, easier to edit. Sponsor Easier is Better The upcoming design, code-named "Vector," has been in use over the past six months by a group of 500,000 beta testers. Included in the update are changes like simplified navigation, a relocated search box, clutter reduction and even an updated Wikipedia logo. Also, all English Wikipedia users will soon be able to create PDFs and printed books from Wikipedia articles, a service previously available only to logged-in users. However, the most interesting change is how Wikipedia is making the page edit functions easier. A new toolbar will be provided which lets editors more easily insert links and tables, and an included cheatsheet will help users access the most commonly used functions. These editing changes launching next month are only the beginning, notes Naoko Komura on the Wikimedia blog . Later this year, the site will see even more radical revamps to the editing process. This includes the following: Reducing the amount of wiki code users see in the edit system and making it possible to change data in tables and information boxes through simple forms. Cleaning up the edit page itself, to use more understandable language and get rid of confusing clutter. Providing a new outline tool to navigate a long article while you're editing it. Wikipedia Needs More Editors Now the question is whether or not these changes will encourage more people to actually edit the online encyclopedia because, surprisingly, few users actually do. Wikipedia is often heralded as a shining example of how there's power in the "wisdom of the crowds," a phrase that implies how a diverse collection of individuals can be more accurate than individuals or even experts. However, the dirty little secret about the supposedly "crowd-edited" online encyclopedia is that, even though anyone and everyone can edit it, few do so. In fact, only 1% of Wikipedia users are responsible for half of the site's edits . Wikipedia's founder, Jimmy Wales, has even been quoted as saying that the site is really written by a community, "a dedicated group of a few hundred volunteers." Given these statistics, it's no surprise that Wikipedia wants to make some changes. Recent reports point to slowed growth , a downward trend that may be partly to blame on the increasingly complex editing process, according to some experts. Dr. Ed H Chi, a scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center in California, told the Telegraph that the site had become a "more exclusive place", where only a handful of the most experienced editors were responsible for editing and maintaining the site. In other words, Wikipedia became a site that wasn't representing the "wisdom of the crowds" anymore, but the "wisdom of an elite group." That in, turn, may have caused the slowdown. Over the past several years, the number of new articles per day has dropped from 2,200 in July of 2007 to 1,300 today. Is It Too Late? Or Just in Time? By simplifying the editing process, Wikipedia could potentially reverse this trend -

Tags:crowds, crowdsourcing, editing, internet, online, organization, over-the-past, research, research-center, wikimedia, Wikipedia, wikipedia-needs, words

Three iPhone Apps To Save Yourself & The World

We saw a cartoon recently that shows the attendees of a "Climate Summit", with a single naysayer yelling out from the back of the crowd "What if it's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?" Well, in the spirit of creating a better world for nothing, we bring to you three iPhone apps that we hope can help do just that. Sponsor In her panel on " Handheld Awesome Detectors: World Changing Mobile Apps " last week at the South By South West festival in Austin, Rachel Weidinger got to talking about a number of iPhone apps that could help us all do just that - change the world. While some, like Ushahidi are certainly world changing, they're not much use for day to day life, so we decided to let you know about three apps she clued us in on that can help you make world-changing decisions in your simple, everyday life. Seafood Watch Seafood Watch , the free iPhone app put out by the Monterey Bay Aquarium helps you make sustainable choices when buying fish. But how does it do this? The app offers a seafood guide, which customizes content according to geographical region, lets you search according to what type of fish you're considering buying or eating at a restaurant. The guide rates your choices according to a number of criteria, from whether or not it is overfished to how much the methods employed are affecting the environment. The ratings also take your health into account, warning you to avoid certain types of fish because they may contain chemicals. So, while everyone always says to eat fish because it's good for you, download this app and it could be good for the environment too. Locavore Another bandwagon you have may have seen careening past in recent times, and may have even hopped on yourself (good for you!) is sustainability through eating locally grown and harvested foods. This can be a difficult endeavor at times, though, and Locavore is here to help you. The app sells for $2.99, which is chump change in comparison to those organic, locally-grown, vine-ripe tomatoes, but it's all for a good cause, right? Locavore shows where and when certain types of foods are in season, nearby farmers' markets and links to Wikipedia and Epicurious to help with context on 234 different fruits and vegetables. GoodGuide GoodGuide is the more all-encompassing package, looking at more than 60,000 products and rating them according to "health, environmental and social performance". The guide gives you information about the product your buying, from whether or not it contains carcinogens to how the company handles water management. Here's a quick explanation from the website on how GoodGuide arrives at its ratings: GoodGuide aggregates and analyzes data on both product and company performance. The team employs a range of scientific methods--health hazard assessment, environmental impact assessment, and social impact assessment--to identify major impacts to human health, the environment, and society. Each of these categories is then further analyzed within specific issue areas, such as climate change policies, labor concerns, and product toxicity. Currently, GoodGuide's database includes over 1,100 base criteria through which we evaluate products and companies. The guide is still in the beta stages - and this is quite an ambitious project - but if you can have and pay attention to this sort of information, then you can get past flashy advertising and get to the bottom of where you're spending your hard earned money. Discuss

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Three iPhone Apps To Save Yourself & The World

Tags:arrives-at-its, context-on-234, health, looking-at-more, mobile, seafood-watch, such-as-climate, the-environment, whether-or-not, Wikipedia, world-changing

Multimedia Wikipedia: Can Video Be Collaborative?

This morning, the Open Video Alliance is launching a campaign to bring video to Wikipedia . The project encourages Wikipedia users to add videos using the "100% free and open source video stack powered by HTML5 and Theora" that is the standard for the site. Our contention, however, is that while technical issues in adding media have certainly had a limiting role, is this all that has kept multimedia from dotting the pages of our favorite collaborative encyclopedia? Can video be collaborative? Sponsor While we wonder about the collaborative nature of the site versus the more fixed nature of video, others have already been hard at work making collaborative video a (potential) reality. We spoke today with Michael Dale, a self-professed "open-video evangelist" for Kaltura , who said that "we haven't really seen yet the collaborative sequencing aspects of the software," but that these tools are currently in development. Kaltura is the online video editing company that is working with Wikimedia to enable video on Wikipedia. Through meta data and other tools, the company is trying to make video a more collaborative media. The " Let's Get Video on Wikipedia " page offers a simple five-step how-to on how to add video to the site, but the only thing we're thinking it's missing is the "wash, rinse, repeat" aspect of adding any content to Wikipedia. While it is rather simple to go in and edit a sentence here and a paragraph there in a text format, editing a video is not nearly as simple. Now videos can be easily uploaded, how will Wikipedia's users contend with the medium? If a three-minute long video is added to an article, but 30 seconds of it contain somewhat disputed ideas, interspersed through out, will these parts simply be cut? Will the whole video be scrapped or will another user take the video, slice those parts out and insert their own? And in the end, if this is the case, what sort of mish-mash multimedia will we end up with in the end? This is the next step, it would seem. "Once there are more tools available," said Dale, "I think we'll see more experimentation." It's not as if these questions are new to the Wikipedia community, as you can read in its proposed guidelines , which suggest that videos will should likely be limited to "snapshot-type", "performance-type" and "tour-type" videos. Even with these limitations, if you've ever looked through the history of changes on Wikipedia articles, then you know how even the finest points of an idea can be discussed and dissected. According to a video interview with Kaltura co-founder Michal Tsur on Beet.TV , "users should be able to use video just the same way they're using text", but a word is a word is a word. A video, even a tiny bit of video, can differ in lighting, sound, angle and any number of other variables. "The actual fact is that we're just getting started," Dale pointed out. "There's not a clear idea of how video will work and be used." In the end, we think video sounds like a great idea, but wonder how widespread it can really become on a platform that holds collaboration in such high esteem. Whether or not video collaboration takes off on Wikipedia, we would love to see what could be created within other contexts (i.e. not encyclopedic) with the collaborative video tools that Dale says are currently in development. Discuss

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Multimedia Wikipedia: Can Video Be Collaborative?

Tags:collaborative, collaborative media, crowdsourcing, Dale, easily-uploaded, even-the-finest, history, meta data, Michael Dale, online, site, tools, video, video alliance, Wikipedia

Why Wikipedia Should Be Trusted As A Breaking News Source

Most any journalism professor, upon mention of Wikipedia , will immediately launch into a rant about how the massively collaborative online encyclopedia can't be trusted. It can, you see, be edited and altered by absolutely anyone at any moment. But how much less trustworthy is the site for breaking news than the plethora of blogs and other online news sources? Sponsor Even Moka Pantages , the communications officer for the WikiMedia Foundation , said she agreed with this sentiment when she spoke this morning at the South By South West festival in Austin, at a panel entitled " Process Journalism: Getting It First, While Getting It Right ". Here's the thing - we have to say that everything she said before answering this question seems to say otherwise. Tackling Real-Time Content The panel featured journalists from the New York Times , SeattlePI.com , Journerdism.com and Gizmodo and a common theme was that user-created content - whether tweets, YouTube videos, or otherwise - could and should be used in breaking news coverage. The panelists all agreed that this content should be verified in some way and should be presented to the audience with a high degree of transparency. Each panelist spoke about a specific case study - the New York Times' coverage of last summer's protests in Iran, for example - and discussed how they gathered crowd-sourced information and attempted to verify its authenticity. Robert Mackey, the reporter for the New York Times, gave examples of translating chants heard in YouTube videos and matching up street signs that flashed on screen with Google Maps. Once he was sure of its validity, he said, he would add it to the coverage. "When you're sitting in an office in New York and you're trying to confirm that something was shot in Tehran that day was actually shot in Tehran that day, you're not going to be able to verify that," he said. "The idea is that it's a conversation on the web about this event." The Newsroom Moves Online Monica Guzman, a reporter for SeattlePI.com, spoke similarly about her website's breaking coverage of a shooting and the subsequent day-long man hunt. SeattlePI, formerly a print publication, has existed solely online for nearly a year now. Most of the breaking information that day, she said, came from Twitter. "The media collaborated with itself and it was one big swirling newsroom on Twitter," said Guzman. "We ended up using tweets as starting points. And Twitter did end up breaking a bunch of stuff." While SeattlePI was able to send reporters out and verify some of the information in person, how was the rest of it verified? "Common sense," she answered. The Seattle Times, she said, had more than 500 people collaborating on Google Wave to gather information on the same story. Wikipedia Takes On The Mumbai Terror Attacks Then came Pantages' turn to discuss how the Wikipedia community addressed the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai . While it is said, as we started out with, that Wikipedia just shouldn't be trusted, the case we heard for its coverage of a breaking news situation far surpassed what you might often see on your average blog or even traditional newspaper. One particular user, Kensplanets , was a driving force behind the coverage, using breaking news from IBN.com as a source. In cases such as this one, the crowdsourcing aspect not only allows multiple points of view, but also allows aggregation from multiple points in a number of different languages and locations. "It's not just U.S.-centric information," Pantages explained, "You have the New York Times, Reuters, Times of India - they're all there." According to Pantages , by the end of the first day of the Wikipedia article's life, it had been edited more than 360 times, by 70 different editors referring to 28 separate sources from news outlets around the web. While this could seem like a situation rife for misdirection and misinformation, the constant discussion swirling around the creation of an article, Pantages explained, is "really similar to what you would think should be in a newsroom." Nonetheless, we still disparage Wikipedia as an untrusted source of news. Wikipedia As News Aggregator Just like other news aggregation services, Wikipedia takes many sources and puts them in to a central location, but with the added benefit of human curation instead of algorithmic collection. "There's no real-time reporting going on in Wikipedia, it's real-time aggregation," Pantages said. So the very first level of information vetting, which happens at the reporting level, has already taken place by the time it reaches the site. Then the hundreds or thousands of editors continue to scrutinize the information, discussing edits and potential changes in the back channels. The news we read in our daily newspapers, on the other hand, is curated by only a small number of people. Surely, there is the question of qualification, but many of Wikipedia's contributors and editors are, themselves, professionals. In contrast, we often accept news from other blogs as immediately trustworthy, while a Wikipedia article such as this one, which is transparent in its creation, its sourcing and its transmutation over time, we dismiss as flawed from conception. Today, the 2008 Mumbai Attacks article sits at more nearly 43,000 words with over 150 different sources cited and 1,245 unique editors. While Pantages argues that "Wikipedia should not be a source, it should be a starting off point," we would have to argue the same for news media in general. In this crowd-sourced news environment we've entered, blindly consuming news and content, from any source, is an ill-advised path to follow. With that said, if we are willing to take crowd-sourced content - whether tweets, Facebook updates, blogs, videos or whatever else - as valid sources for information about our world, then a collection of these same media as carefully poured over and curated as found in a Wikipedia article should be even more trusted, not less, than those bits on their own. Traditional media get bits of breaking news wrong all the time, but we accept that as part of the game. To vilify Wikipedia for the same errors sets unequal standards and besides, you'll likely never see the same level of transparency in traditional media about where it went wrong. With Wikipedia, it's all laid bare for the world to see. Discuss

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Why Wikipedia Should Be Trusted As A Breaking News Source

Tags:aggregator, coverage, daily, facebook, game, India, online, pantages, question, reporter, seattle, sxsw 2010, times, Wikipedia