2009

Growth of the linked data cloud

Or at least, the growth of Richard Cyganiak's famous diagram.

While preparing slides for the Semantic Web Overview talk I’ll be giving at the beginning of the Semantic Technologies course of the Oxford XML Summer School, I was adding a few slides on Linked Data. (Leigh Dodds is presenting a more detailed class on Linked Data later in the day.) Of course I had to include a slide of Richard Cyganiak’s interactive diagram of the Linked Data cloud, and as with many of my slides, I was tempted to re-use a slide from a presentation I’d given…

Getting started with the TopQuadrant product line

A lot of great technology to learn about.

Last week was my first week working at TopQuadrant, and I spent three days in a class given by one of my new co-workers, Scott Henninger. I only had a skeletal idea of what the components of TopBraid Suite did before, and now that I have a better idea, I’m very impressed. (I may be wrong on one or two details below, but I’m still the new guy.)

When I wrote my last two blog entries (not counting the announcement about my new developerWorks article), Modeling your data with DBpedia vocabularies and Big legal publishers and semantic web technology, I had no idea that I would soon stumble across a nice collection of US Supreme Court case metadata in DBpedia. After writing about modeling with DBpedia vocabularies, it occurred to me that if Wikipedia has pages with infoboxes for individual professional wrestlers and Battlestar Galactica…

Modeling your data with DBpedia vocabularies

Broad, useful, vocabularies with plenty of sample data.

I’ve known for a while about ways to dig into the vocabularies used in DBpedia’s massive collection of triples, and I’ve used terms from these vocabularies to query for information such as Bart Simpson blackboard messages and US presidents’ ages at inauguration. I saw these terms as “field” names to use when querying this body of data.