- Freebase in Node.js (github) — handy library for interacting with Freebase from node code. (via Rob McKinnon)
- Formalize — CSS library to provide a standard style for form elements. (via Emma Jane Hogbin)
- Suggesting More Friends Using the Implicit Social Graph (PDF) — Google paper on the algorithm behind Friend Suggest. Related: Katango. (via Big Data)
- Dyslexia — a typeface for dyslexics. (via Richard Soderberg)
"linked data" entries
Why files need to die
Files are an anachronism in the digital age. It's time for something better.
The idea of files and folders no longer fits today's connected world. It's time for new ways of organizing our data based on what data means, what it relates to, and how we think about the world.
Four short links: 13 July 2011
Freebase in Node, Form Styling, Implicit Friendships, and Dyslexic Font
Linked data creates a new lens for examining the U.S. Civil War
Data projects are marking the Civil War's 150th anniversary.
The 150th anniversary (the "sesquicentennial") of the first hostilities of U.S. Civil War is occurring this month. Two organizers behind the Civil War Data 150 project discuss how linked data is marking the occasion and improving our knowledge.
Where the semantic web stumbled, linked data will succeed
Linked data allows for deep and serendipitous consumer experiences.
Linked data can be realized without the purity of semantic annotation, but a focus on consumers gives it a better shot at adoption. It begs the question: Why invest in difficult technologies if consumer outcomes can be realized with current tools and knowledge?
Four short links: 21 May 2010
Evilbook, Design Story, Openness Rating, Web 2.0 Sharecropping
- Infrastructures (xkcd) — absolutely spot-on.
- The Michel Thomas App: Behind the Scenes (BERG) — not interesting to me because it’s iPhone, but for the insight into the design process. The main goal here was for me to do just enough to describe the idea, so that Nick could take it and iterate it in code. He’d then show me what he’d built; I’d do drawings or further animations on top of it, and so on and so on. It’s a fantastic way of working. Before long, you start finishing each others’ sentences. Both of us were able to forget about distinguishing between design and code, and just get on with thinking through making together. It’s brilliant when that happens.
- Open Government and the World Wide Web — Tim Berners-Lee offered his “Five-Star” plan for open data. He said public information should be awarded a star rating based on the following criteria: one star for making the information public; a second is awarded if the information is machine-readable; a third star if the data is offered in a non-proprietary format; a fourth is given if it is in Linked Data format; a fifth if it has actually been linked. Not only a good rating system, but a clear example of the significantly better communication by semantic web advocates. Three years ago we’d have had a wiki specifying a ratings ontology with a union of evaluation universes reconciled through distributed trust metrics and URI-linked identity delivered through a web-services accessible RDF store, a prototype of one component of which was running on a devotee’s desktop machine at a university in Bristol, written in an old version of Python. (via scilib on Twitter)
- Data Access, Data Ownership, and Sharecropping — With Flickr you can get out, via the API, every single piece of information you put into the system. Every photo, in every size, plus the completely untouched original. (which we store for you indefinitely, whether or not you pay us) Every tag, every comment, every note, every people tag, every fave. Also your stats, view counts, and referers. Not the most recent N, not a subset of the data. All of it. It’s your data, and you’ve granted us a limited license to use it. Additionally we provide a moderately competently built API that allows you to access your data at rates roughly 500x faster then the rate that will get you banned from Twitter. Asking people to accept anything else is sharecropping. It’s a bad deal. (via Marc Hedlund)