Getting the Semantic Web to the level of the human author

Authoring tools for the Semantic Web are a problem, addressed thoughtfully here.

MLA reorganisation outlined

24 Hour Museum (looks like it's still called that) says that the MLA Board has now anounced its plans for their imminent reorganisation.
So now we can see the plan. Well, sort of. I can't really fathom too much from the management rhetoric in here, except that they're being obliged to slim down, reshaping (for what is this, the fifth time in a decade?) and things are going to be tight. However it may all work out well, at least insofar as making it more comprehensible and transparent to outsiders. I for one have found the structure of the MLA and its agencies confusing, and this goes for the Hubs too - we may be the lead member of one such, but I still find the relationship between Hub, partners and MLA(regionalagencyhere) to be, um, enigmatic.
Hopefully the stuff about "finding new ways to share information in a digital age" is a good sign. MLA has good people on board and perhaps they'll work more tightly with frontline museum folk if their own resources are more limited. Or not - they may have less time for consultation. Time will tell.

Listening Post at the Science Museum

I like the sound of this (no pun intended): a fascinating new artwork at the Science Museum, although this is not its first stop: apparently this piece was launched in 2002 and recently purchased for £120k+. It will be supported until 2010, and draws upon live internet chat, using screens and synthesised voice. I need to talk to the NMSI team about the arrangements they have for supporting this, and what will happen after 2010.

The USA's EDL? Prob'ly not

Guther Waibel writes on Hanging Together about a Mellon funded Museum Data Exchange project that shares some aims and problems with EDL. OK, they're not the same thing at all, but all the same the challenges they face in terms of consolidating data in one place may offer a useful comparison, and I'm presuming that in due course they may be offering a public interface to this aggregation. Will it flourish, will it bring in other institutions and might it one day touch edges with EDL? This is simply an experiment at the moment, of course, but an interesting one. I'd like to see how CDWALite works in this context as opposed to OAI-PMH.

Europeana demo site launched. It's cool.

Well, here we go then. The retitled EDLNet maquette is now known as Europeana and has gone live. Looks good, and plenty of functionality too. I was a bit taken aback by how cool it actually is. There's still clearly a case for distibuting the functionality, but this could become a pretty attractive destination. Congratulations to those involved!

TO'R and the dude from Reuters on OpenCalais and SW

Got no time to think or respond properly to this but it's pretty juicy:
Reuters CEO sees "semantic web" in its future

I think I get Dapper now

I hadn't really twigged what Dapper was all about, but now with Marshall Kirkpatrick's latest post it's a lot clearer, as is how they're hoping to propagate it and make money. Cunning! And yet again an example of kind of retro-fitting the semantic web to the infinite variety of content already out there.

OpenCalais

One for the top-down semantic web: Reuters' new API, OpenCalais, that uses AI, NLP and a mahoosive database of people, places, organisations and events to extract semantics from content submitted to it. You can see more about the API here and read the RWW analysis here. It spits out RDF, actually, demonstrating the overlap between the automated, AI-driven SW that is clearly going to happen, and the formal vision of RDF etc. is going to be a real force.

Nik Honeysett on planning for the "digital museum"

NH writes about a few of the challenges involved in planning here. Of interest is his observation of the recent LoC Flickr move as a way of avoiding the problem of knowledge becoming embedded in individuals who then leave. Flickr is a large, established service with the backing of mega-player Yahoo!, so the LoC's effort has been put into something that should require relatively low maintenance on their part and has a good chance of being durable.

OT: b3ta is the nazz

Oh what fun. I fear this idea could prove a great distraction for me. b3ta.com challenge: extending album art

Another vote in favour of the NLP take on the Semantic Web

ReadWriteWeb reports on Inform, which is taking a text-crunching, NLP approach to inferring semantic links between their clients' content (and potentially their content and that of other sites). No marked-up content, no RDF, no OWL, no ontologies required. As RWW comments, it would be nice if they at least took their work and used it to create some of the latter to start making some hooks that could tie together the classic vision of the SW with this brute force and NLP-based vision. They're not the only ones doing this, and clearly this vision is running away with the SW project at the moment, although it probably can't (presently) achieve lots of the things that the more formal and explicitly structured approach can. But since the latter is lagging, it would be good to see some bridges being built.

An interesting extra dimension to mapping

Brady Forrest points out some funky Flash-based maps from MySociety, integrating geographic data (house prices in London localities) with time (travel times from those locations to central london). Actually it's two sets of geo data, because apparently the times are calculated already and assigned to localities, but in any case it's a nice app. Not quite "representing time" on a map as BF suggests, but rather an example of how time and geography intersect.

MILE - Metadata Image Library Exploitation

So, do you think these guys are working with the EDL? There's no mention of the latter on the MILE website, and I've not seen MILE on the EDL WP2 list, and perhaps it will turn out that there's not as much overlap as it appears to me in my ignorance, but I do worry that we've got a scenario where two EU projects under the same initiative (i2020) aren't really working together. Perhaps someone with an overview of i2020 does co-ordinate them, but d'you really think so?

...and Yahoo! using user-created tags

TechCrunch reports that Yahoo! is starting to put delicious rankings with its search results. It's unclear if delicious tags are actually used to calculate rankings, which would be a great test of the power of the lower-case semantic web, based on UGC/social tagging. Fingers crossed. Next we'll have to push them to look at other sources of socially tagged data. Come on out, Steve

Google as science repository

From TechCrunch (and all over): Google To Become Open Source Science Repository

So the questions include: what form of access will there be; what tools online; what steps will this take towards semantic interoperability; and how might museums use the opportunity to make their data available, if at all?

More distributed services. Databases this time.

LongJump looks pretty cool for hosting databases, both for the non-developer and the techy type. I don't think an ODBC-like connection is possible but a REST or SOAP interface is available. This might be a useful tool for institutions (including museums, of course) that don't have the tech skills or perhaps the desire to develop or host DBs themselves. Sustainability implications? good and bad, as ever, I suppose.

Yahoo! and OpenID

Take back your digital ID

OK, not much to add to this, another one on board and a very big one at that. According to RWW, this triples the number of people with and OpenID (or access to one) or will when it goes live at the end of the month.

Alex Iskold on "The Danger of Free"

The Danger of Free - ReadWriteWeb

The question we've perhaps ignored rather. It's true, we're all perhaps a bit too keen on getting stuff for free. We see stuff delivered through the screen as intangible, but that doesn't always equate to us thinking it has no value or should be free, so why is this so with web-delivered services and content? Is it just a habit, and one we can back out of if we see that it's going to mean poorer quality goods, or is it just in our nature to go for the free or to feel suspicious of the value we'll get from stuff on the web? If we have confidence that it will be trustworthy and value for money are we more likely to pay?

DataPortability.org gets real muscle

ReadWriteWeb points to some potentially very significant news on the data portability front:
Bombshell: Google and Facebook Join DataPortability.org
Data portability and identity management are related to semantic web, to UGC, to interoperability and doubtless many other essential issues today, so as a user and a developer this is pretty promising news.

Museum 2.0: Setting Expectations: The Power of the Pre-Visit

Museum 2.0: Setting Expectations: The Power of the Pre-Visit
A well thought out reminder of the importance of the pre-visit role of the website in contrast to the oft-emphasised post-visit role. Timely whilst we're planning the role of the digital experience in Capital City.