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More Transit Agencies Opening Up Their Data We’ve been following the trend of transit agencies providing developer access to timetables, routes and more for some time. Big cities, like New York and Boston are on board and helping fuel new transit applications. There now seems to be more momentum, with organizations and influencers making the call for open data. StreetFilms talked to some of these people, several within transit companies themselves, and created A Case for Open Data (embedded below). One particular case study shows just how fast developers started in on projects when Boston made its data available. “If you take the model of the national weather service and apply it to the transit agencies you realize you can have just as many ways to get transit information as you do to get weather information. When we profiled the developer who is trying to open transit data earlier this year, City-Go-Round showed 91 agencies with public data. But it’s a good sign when big metros get behind open transit data. via Jehiah

DBpedia DBpedia ( from "DB" for "database" ) is a project aiming to extract structured content from the information created as part of the Wikipedia project. This structured information is then made available on the World Wide Web.[1] DBpedia allows users to query relationships and properties associated with Wikipedia resources, including links to other related datasets.[2] DBpedia has been described by Tim Berners-Lee as one of the more famous parts of the decentralized Linked Data effort.[3] Background[edit] The project was started by people at the Free University of Berlin and the University of Leipzig, in collaboration with OpenLink Software,[4] and the first publicly available dataset was published in 2007. Dataset[edit] From this dataset, information spread across multiple pages can be extracted, for example book authorship can be put together from pages about the work, or the author. Examples[edit] Use cases[edit] DBpedia Spotlight[edit] See also[edit] References[edit] External links[edit]

More Search Options and other updates from our Searchology event Today we are hosting our second Searchology event, to update our users, partners, and customers on the progress we have made in search and tell them about new features. Our first Searchology was two years ago, when we were excited to launch Universal Search, a feature that blended results of different types (web pages, images, videos, books, etc.) on the results page. Since then Universal Search has grown quite a bit, adding new types of results, expanding to new countries, and triggering on ten times as many queries as it did when we launched it. But as people get more sophisticated at search they are coming to us to solve more complex problems. To stay on top of this, we have spent a lot of time looking at how we can better understand the wide range of information that's on the web and quickly connect people to just the nuggets they need at that moment. The Search Options panel also gives you the ability to view your results in new ways. Check out a video tour here:

Emotional Interface We’re changing. Our relationships online and in real life are shifting as we become more public with our private lives. Online social networks have helped our real world social networks transcend time and space making it easy (and seemingly essential) to share the triumphs, tragedies, and trite moments of life. No longer do you simply tell your best friend that you’ve broken up with your boyfriend. It feels natural to many people to tell hundreds of Twitter followers, and Facebook friends. No matter how you feel about the appropriateness of over sharing, the shift towards a public private life is changing our expectations of the relationships we create online. Figure 1: Kenny Meyers uses humor in his portfolio to connect with his audience. Oh how times have changed (figure 1). Usable = Edible We’ve spent the last decade-plus striving to create usable web interfaces. When we go out to dinner at a fancy restaurant, we’re hoping for more than just an edible meal. Figure 2: Basecamp is usable

Semantic Web roadmap Up to Design Issues A road map for the future, an architectural plan untested by anything except thought experiments. This was written as part of a requested road map for future Web design, from a level of 20,000ft. It was spun off from an Architectural overview for an area which required more elaboration than that overview could afford. Necessarily, from 20,000 feet, large things seem to get a small mention. This document is a plan for achieving a set of connected applications for data on the Web in such a way as to form a consistent logical web of data (semantic web). Introduction The Web was designed as an information space, with the goal that it should be useful not only for human-human communication, but also that machines would be able to participate and help. This document gives a road map - a sequence for the incremental introduction of technology to take us, step by step, from the Web of today to a Web in which machine reasoning will be ubiquitous and devastatingly powerful.

Understanding the web to find short answers and “something different” One year ago today we announced Google Squared in Labs, an early attempt to find and extract structured data from across the web, such as a detailed table of [dog breeds] or [broadway shows]. Since then, our team in New York has steadily worked to improve quality and add new features, such as the ability to sort your data and export it to a file. In the past week, we’ve introduced two features that bring parts of Squared’s technology directly to regular search results. Better answers, with sourcesOften people search to find basic facts, such as [catherine zeta-jones date of birth]. If you click on the new “show sources” link, a box will slide down with websites that corroborate your answer. The sources list includes the relevant text from each page so you can quickly verify whether the webpages seem reputable and whether our algorithms correctly interpreted the context of the answer. At a pub quiz night and need help on the round about India?

Slow Connection So you have your Next-gen cool Web 2.0 application ready! You have tested it on your LAN environment and on your high speed internet connection – all seems ok and you are ready to deploy it in the ‘real world’. A few hours later, you get feedback that your application does not perform well on slower connections. Well the truth is that real world internet connections are much slower than you think. Now there are many tools that let you simulate slow network connections. Firefox Throttle is an extension that allows you to control download/upload rates and monitor current bandwidth utilization. The plug-in shows the current bandwidth utilization indicators in its Status panel as shown below and lets you quickly turn on/off throttling. You may also want to check out Sloppy Will you give this article a +1 ? About The Author

1999: The WWW Proposal and RDF Initial version: 1999-11-12, Dan Brickley danbri@w3.org Revised: March 2001 Status: This is a work in progress, and an early release of the document for feedback from the RDF Interest Group. It is intended as an informal discussion document, and is not a formal publication of any working group, or of the W3C itself. Although the HTML is valid and the RDF/XML parses successfully with SiRPAC, W3C's Java RDF parser, readers are cautioned that the Javascript demonstration referenced here will only work on some platforms. General comments on this work-in-progress should be sent to the RDF Interest Group; bug reports should be sent to the author. Information Management: Then and Now The original proposal of the WWW from 1989 included a figure showing how information about a Web of relationships amongst named objects could unify a number of information management tasks. This document describes a re-expression of this figure using W3C's Resource Description Framework datamodel in XML syntax.