Bill Roberts on the Web of Data

Tim Berners-Lee recently gave a short talk to TED, reporting back on a year of great progress since his 2009 cry of “Raw Data Now”. One of the big contributors to this has been the UK government via the data.gov.uk initiative, which I’m sure all readers of this blog are well a...

Sorry for introducing lots of articles into your feed reader. After moving this blog over to its new platform, we had a few problems with the feed caching system, which meant that articles from Ric’s blog (ricroberts.com) found their way into my feed. The problem is now fixed, so we should...

I’ve just moved this blog over to a new platform: SemanticJournal, written mainly by Ric Roberts, my Swirrl co-founder (with a little bit of help from me here and there). The platform automatically generates and inserts RDFa markup describing the blog and each post. So far, this is rather ...

Via Nathan Yau’s Flowing Data blog, I came across this fascinating visualisation of Netflix data, published in the New York Times. It shows the top 50 most rented Netflix movies, zip code by zip code for several US cities. It’s very nicely done and it’s very engaging. It made me think of S...

Martin Hepp’s work in creating, promoting and implementing the GoodRelations ontology for e-commerce reached another milestone this week, with the first concrete indications that including RDFa metadata in your page will improve its ranking on Google. Martin and others have been talking abou...

I’ve been involved in a couple of discussions in the last few days about speed of access to Linked Data and whether that will limit what can be done with it. This was kicked off by some questions on Twitter by Greg Boutin. Greg was particularly interested in queries on distributed data, par...

A few weeks ago I asked on this blog “What makes good linked data?”. A recent blog post by Mike Bergman and Frédérick Giasson really helps to get to the heart of this question. If you are interested in how to use linked data effectively you should definitely read Mike and Fred’s article. T...

This interesting question was asked yesterday by Stuart Myles on Semantic Overflow. I spent a fair bit of time trying to answer it, so I thought I would repost my thoughts here. Stuart’s call to arms was “Convince me (and others) to join the Linked Data cloud. Sell me on the benefits!”. He...