- S4 — S4 is a general-purpose, distributed, scalable, partially fault-tolerant, pluggable platform that allows programmers to easily develop applications for processing continuous unbounded streams of data. Open-sourced (Apache license) by Yahoo!.
- RDF and Semantic Web: Can We Reach Escape Velocity? (PDF) — spot-on presentation from the data.gov.uk linked data advisor. It nails, clearly and in only 12 slides, why there’s still resistance to linked data uptake and what should happen to change this. Amen! (via Simon St Laurent)
- Pew Internet Report on Location-based Services — 10% of online Hispanics use these services – significantly more than online whites (3%) or online blacks (5%).
- Slate — Python library for extracting text from PDFs easily.
"Semantic Web" entries

Graph tools forge path to new solutions
Find emergent properties and solutions to new computing problems with graphs
Graph databases haven’t made the news much because, I think, they don’t fit in convenient categories. They certainly aren’t the relational databases we’re all familiar with, nor are they the arbitrary keys and values provided by many NoSQL stores. But in a highly connected world–where it’s not what you know but whom you know–it makes intuitive sense to arrange our knowledge as nodes and edges.
Ted Nelson, inventor of the hyperlink, recognized the power of viewing life in graphs. After the implosion of his historic Xanadu project, he embarked on a graph database tool called ZigZag. The most modern instantiations of graphs–the Neo4j store and the Alchemy.js tool for interactively visualizing graphs–were well represented this year at O’Reilly’s Open Source convention.

Strata Week: Google unveils its Knowledge Graph
Google shows off its Knowledge, Yahoo stumbles, and a bill cuts some census funding.
In this week's data news, Google updates its search features with a Knowledge Graph, while the U.S. House of Representatives de-funds surveys that helped businesses construct theirs.

Big data and the semantic web
At war, indifferent, or intimately connected?
The big data and semantic web worlds seem to be disjunct. Yet big data is poised to light the fire beneath the long-held dreams of the semantic web, and the semantic web will enable data scientists to describe, organize and reason about their results.

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: 5 November 2010
Stream Processing, Semantic Web, Location Services, and PDF Extraction

Linked data is opening 800 years of UK legal info
The new legislation.gov.uk site brings the semantic web into government.
This podcast with John Sheridan offers insight into why the new legislation.gov.uk, a site that uses open and linked data to make centuries of legal information publicly available, is the next generation of e-government.


Four short links: 4 August 2010
Python Reasoning, Learning the Right Way, Curated Folksonomy, Arduino Image Correction
- FuXi — Python-based, bi-directional logical reasoning system for the semantic web from the folks at the Open Knowledge Foundation. (via About Inferencing)
- Harness the Power of Being an Idiot — I learn by trying to build something, there’s no other way I can discover the devils-in-the-details. Unfortunately that’s an incredibly inefficient way to gain knowledge. I basically wander around stepping on every rake in the grass, while the A Students memorize someone else’s route and carefully pick their way across the lawn without incident. My only saving graces are that every now and again I discover a better path, and faced with a completely new lawn I have an instinct for where the rakes are.
- Stack Overflow’s Curated Folksonomy — community-driven tag synonym system to reduce the chaos of different names for the same thing. (via Skud)
- Image Deblurring using Inertial Measurement Sensors (Microsoft Research) — using Arduino to correct motion blur. (via Jon Oxer)