The US Government efforts to create a culture of open government data is a big deal. Hopefully it signals a shift from the “pull” model of FOIA to a “push” mindset in which data is proactively returned to the public without first having to ask (and pay). Still, data.gov has a lot of room for [...]
After recovery from chairing ISWC 2009, I had always intended to blog about some of the changes my co-chair Avi Bernstien and I tried for the conference. I was prompted to do it today by a very interesting post by James Landay—it describes problems with the current CHI/UIST reviewing process, and led to some fascinating [...]
Having gotten ISWC’s Ontology Panel off my chest, I want to take the time to discuss the Best Paper Awards we gave at the conference. The papers that got these awards received uniformly high ratings from their reviewers, were recommended for awards by the program committee, impressed the program chairs, and had good presentations at [...]
Ever since returning from the 2009 International Semantic Web Conference last week I’ve been bursting to discuss a panel that took place there on the topic “Does the Semantic Web need Ontologies?”. But the WWW2010 deadline was today and we had 3 papers to write. With that deadline now 10 minutes past, I can [...]
Right now the world’s premiere semantic web conference is happening in Washington, D.C. As a graduate student of the fellow who’s chairing the conference this year, and working down the hall from Sir Linked Data himself, I’ve had my fair share of semantic web experiences. But my background is not in Semantic Web technology, so [...]
One of the most exciting aspects of the (in-progress) HTML5 specification is the number of data-centric features it contains. It’s almost as if the committee is saying a big, “OK, OK! We heard you!” to all the data-heads out there and is providing not one, not two, not three, but four different ways to [...]
A month ago Stefano Mazzocchi published an interesting article on data reconciliation (detecting when two identifiers refer to the same item, and merging them) where he advocated a more centralized “a priori” approach (trying to keep the identifiers merged at the beginning). I posted a response arguing the value of a more anarchic “a posteriori” [...]
Natasha Noy gave a talk at CSAIL with the above title. She works in with a large medical bioinformatics group at Stanford. The bioinformatics community in general couldn’t care less about cool computer science but is one of the few groups that have heavily adopted formal ontologies as a way to get their work done. [...]
Stefano Mazzochi used to work at our SIMILE project here at MIT, where we explored the use of RDF and Semantic Web tools for the sharing of knowledge. He has since gone to work at Metaweb and, it seems, become much more friendly to their “top down” approach of trying to create a centralized repository [...]
From our friends in Southhampton (correction: and Hasso-Platner), a study of how to differentiate experts (who really know how to tag stuff) from spammers (who want to tag their own stuff, but try to acquire credibility by copying tags others have used). They try to exploit the difference that the people who tag first are [...]