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. So what's the beef with all of these terms? 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.' 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. 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? Even Wikipedia can't define Semantic Web...
Welcome to the Age of Curation Forrester Research analyst Sarah Rotman Epps coined a phrase Friday for something many have been talking about since Apple launched the iPad about six weeks ago. “Curated computing” refers to the way Apple staff examines each piece of software written for iPhone OS devices before allowing it into (or blocking it from) the App Store. Epps is almost certainly not among the first 10,000 people on the planet to observe that the iPhone OS does not allow users to install whatever programs they wish, unless the devices are jailbroken. For that reason, it’s tempting to write off her coinage as an attention-grabbing rehash of a well-worn meme — especially because she plans to take this show on the road at conferences to talk about this observation. However, Epps is onto something with this word, curated. Curation is the positive flip side of Apple’s locked-down approach, decried as a major, negative development in computing by many observers, present company included. For example: See Also:
Phil Windley's Technometria | Web Science: Do We Need a New Disc I'm in a panel at WWW2007 on Web Science, essentially a proposal for a new discipline. The field would be interdisciplinary, taking things from areas as diverse as sociology, physics, biology, law, and psychology, as well as the areas you might immediately think of like computer science or math. What is Web Science? Here's a quote from a Science paper on Web Science: When we discuss an agenda for a science of the Web, we use the term "science" in two ways. The Web Science Method, is a cycle, which Tim Berners-Lee used as an underlying framework for his talk this morning. So what makes Web Science worthy of being a new discipline? Peter makes the point that if Web Science is merely a collection of informaticians with a common application area, that's not a new discipline. Danny responds that the Web is more than an interesting application. Nigel makes the point that names and slogans can have real force. Danny makes a clarification regarding fields and disciplines.
Capitalizing On Curation: Why The New Curators Are Beating The Old Barring the invention of a "time turner" like the one Hermione Granger sported in 3rd Harry Potter novel, most of us will never have enough time to consume the information we might otherwise want to absorb. There's simply too much info and too few waking hours. Enter the notion of curation, a relatively new term that is not unlike the editor of old, a trusted person or organization that filters information and aggregates it in an organized fashion for others to enjoy. According to Steve Rosenbaum, author of Curation Nation, "curation is the new way of organizing the web going forward." You can't curate for everyone, so be targetedIn Brian Solis's recent tribute on FastCompany.com to Rosenbaum's book, Solis noted, "the social capital of a curator is earned through qualifying, filtering, and refining relevant content." Thrillist, for the uninitiated, started in 2005 with a newsletter to 600 New Yorkers and is now in 18 markets with 2.5 million subscribers.
Tim Berners-Lee Announces Web Science Initiative - Studying the This morning I participated in a conference call by MIT and the University of Southampton in Britain, announcing an initiative called Web Science. Tim Berners-Lee is leading the program, which is essentially about formalizing a new kind of scientific discipline called Web Science. The goal is to understand the deeper structure of the social Web and how people are using it. But as well as studying the Web, they also hope to shape the future of the Web. Web science will have both social and engineering dimensions. As Berners-Lee summarized it in a pre-conference interview with the BBC: "What we're saying is that it's becoming so important that things like Wikipedia are being created, new business models are emerging and that it's changing our lives so much that we have to have a science to understand this." Highlights from conference call In the conference call Tim Berners-Lee started off by mentioning the 100 million Web sites milestone recently reached by the Web. Summary
Editors as Curators: What's Taking So Long? These are tough times for editors. Senior editors are being forced to make deep, painful cuts in their newsrooms. Assignment editors are being phased out at some papers, seen as extraneous layers in the production process. But the news judgment skills of editors should be more valuable now than they've ever been before to newspapers and other news organizations. The buzzword for this is "curation," and that's a good way to think of it. The buzzword for that is "aggregation." On the Web, you're not limited only to the content you own. This sort of picking, choosing and assembling from a wide range of sources—curation and aggregation—is precisely what modern editors should be doing online, not just regurgitating the limited content they get from their parent organization. Incidentally, I by no means assign this role solely to editors—good reporters should be able to use the same expertise on their beats to provide readers with the most complete report possible. PS: Must be Curation Day.
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Scoop.it masterclass I've written about Scoop.it several times recently, but I'm still getting blank looks from lots of folks, so here's the how, and more importantly the why, of Scoop.it: Curation, it's all about curation. What is curation? Adding value to information. Activity - publish, don't just read. Share - don't just publish. RSS - use Scoop.it's "RSS everywhere" to keep up to date with what your community is doing on the site, especially topics/followed. If you like playing games, remember to check out the leaderboard. Don't try to reproduce a community you are already a member of on another network, create a unique Scoop.it community composed of the best contributors. The Big One: Why do I want to do this?
Headmagnet | Get stuff in your head and keep it there! Content Curation: It's Going to Be HUGE It's counter-intuitive--especially to Americans. But often less is more. When Erin Scime wrote a blog titled: "Content Strategist as Digital Curator", it's pretty clear that she didn't expect to stir up a whole lot of emotions and anger. Yet, that's what she did--at least in part. "I feel like there are a lot of bitter librarians out there," Scime told me. But the buzz around curation threatens more than librarians--there's a posse of PhD's with pitchforks and torches that didn't much like what Scime had to say. What heresy did Scime actual dare to blog about? Scime today is the Content Strategy Lead at HUGE in Brooklyn--whose clients include CNN IKEA, Pepsi, Jet Blue, IVillage, and Penton Media. For a former student of Curatorial studies and information sciences to embrace the democratization of the word "curation" rattled some cages. "When I was in library school it was very oriented toward managing digital collections, even archives. Among her key bullets in the presentation: