news:rewired - Video from the linked data and semantic web session

 by Martin Belam, 22 December 2010

The BBC College of Journalism were filming all of news:rewired last week, and they've now put up all the clips from the linked data and semantic web session.

Martin Moore, Media Standards Trust

"I think it was Voltaire who was talking about the Holy Roman Empire, and said it was neither Holy, Roman nor an Empire. I think the first thing that struck me about linked data is that it is not really linked in terms of hyperlinks etc, nor is it actually data in the sense of numbers or databases. Data in linked data terms is really about 'things'"

Martin gave a good overview and introduction to the topic, doing his very, very, very best to make it jargon-free.

Simon Rogers, The Guardian

My colleague Simon Rogers talked about some of the issues the Data Store faces with data quality, and how far too much of their time is spent not uncovering stories, but getting published data into a state fit to interpret. He went on to show some of the interactives that were built off the structured data in the Afghan and Iraq WikiLeaks releases.

Martin Belam, The Guardian

My talk looked at the work we have done with the Guardian's Open Platform to make it possible to query our content using ISBNs and MusicBrianz IDs. I also talked about some of the difficulties we have cross-referencing data when it isn't all linked and open, and spoke about how I found the URL structures of legislation.gov.uk a fascinating approach to versioning which may have implications for the way we do timelines of news topics.

Silver Oliver, BBC

Silver gave an overview of how the BBC used semantic web technologies to cover the 2010 World Cup, and also some information on the Wildlife Finder project. He also talked a little bit about some of their current work looking at how individual news stories might have a single 'linked data ID'.

Next...

I think I can just about squeeze out one more news:rewired blogpost before I put currybetdotnet into hibernation for the holidays, so expect to see me writing about the 'building an online community from scratch' session soon...

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