Bill Roberts on the Web of Data

The Scottish Government is now publishing monthly reports of all items of expenditure over £25,000. That’s great and a positive step towards transparency and open data. But can we have them as CSV files? or even Excel? Currently they are only available as PDF which makes it a pain to do a...

I think we need to establish a common practice to link RDF datasets and named graphs. I’ve been working recently on discovery of linked data: how people can find out easily what is available and how they can use it, either directly or by building it into new applications. The dataset is cle...

I’ve been at a couple of great Web of Data events in the last ten days or so. On 13 July, I organised a Linked Data meetup in Edinburgh that I’m pleased to say went very well. Around 25 people showed up to hear interesting talks from Zach Beauvais of Talis (slides) and Paola di Maio ...

We’re in the very early days of the UK government’s new approach to open data. While it seems to be going in the right direction and progress has in many respects been remarkably quick (eg this recent announcement on public sector transparency), clearly we still have a lot to learn an...

You can now register for the Scottish Linked Data Interest Group meetup on 13 July. The event is free but places are limited and there has already been a great reaction, so if you’d like to come please do sign up.

The first meeting will be at 7pm on Tuesday 13 July at the Outhouse in Edinburgh. I’ll set up an Eventbrite page for registration in the next few days and put together some more details about the event, but please put the date in your diary if you are interested. Also, we’re on the lo...

At the recent Open Knowledge Scotland meeting, Paola di Maio suggested setting up a Scottish interest group on linked data. Jeff Pan and I agreed with her and we decided to give it a try. I’ve volunteered to organise the first meeting. We know that there’s a lot of interesting work ...

At Swirrl we’re working on a new platform for publishing Linked Data. (It’s called PublishMyData). It’s still at an early stage and we’d like to test our ideas against the constraints and objectives of the people who we hope might make use of it. A good example of what we ...