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Category Archives: semweb

a middle way for linked data at the bbc

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

I got the chance to attend the 2nd London Linked Data Meetup that was co-located with dev8d last week, which turned out to be a whole lot of fun. I figured if I waited long enough other people would save me from having to write a good summary/discussion of the event…and they have: thanks [...]

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data.australia.gov.au and rdfa

Friday, January 29, 2010

In my previous blog post I was trying to demonstrate the virtues of data.gov.uk making the descriptions of their datasets available as RDFa. Just this morning I learned from Mark Birbeck that the folks down under at data.australia.gov.au did this last October!
For example this page describing a dataset for public Internet locations has this RDF [...]

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data.gov.uk and rdfa

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

The recent public release of the UK Government’s data.gov.uk site got picked up by the press last week in articles at The Guardian, Prospect Magazine and elswhere. These have been supplemented by some more technical discussions at ReadWriteWeb, Open Knowledge Foundation, Talis, Jeni Tennison’s blog, and some helpful emails from Leigh Dodds (Talis) [...]

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Hacking O’Reilly RDFa

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

I recently learned from Ivan Herman’s blog that O’Reilly has begun publishing RDFa in their online catalog of books. So if you go and install the RDFa Highlight bookmarklet and then visit a page like this and click on the bookmarklet you’ll see something like:

Those red boxes you see are graphical depictions of where metadata [...]

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skos as atom

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

I’ll be the first to admit the tone and content of my last post was a bit off kilter. I guess it was pretty clear immediately from the title of the post. Chalk it up to a second night of insomnia; and also to my unrealistic and probably unnecessary goal of bringing the Atom/REST camp [...]

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New York Times Topics as SKOS

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Serves 23,376 SKOS Concepts
INGREDIENTS

Text editor: Vim, Emacs, TextMate, etc
Python
BeautifulSoup
rdflib
Internet connection

DIRECTIONS

Open a new file using your favorite text editor.
Instantiate an RDF graph with a dash of rdflib.
Use python’s urllib to extract the HTML for each of the Times Topics Index Pages, e.g. for A.
Parse HTML into a fine, queryable data structure using BeautifulSoup.
Locate topic names and [...]

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open to view

Thursday, August 13, 2009

I spent an hour checking out the HathiTrust API docs this morning; mainly to see what the similarities and differences are with the as-of-yet undocumented API for Chronicling America. There are quite a few similarities in the general RESTful approach, and the use of Atom, METS and PREMIS in the metadata that is made available. [...]

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rest, the semantic web and my feeble brain

Thursday, May 14, 2009

Imagine you were minting close to a million URIs for historic newspaper pages such as:

http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85066387/1898-01-01/ed-1/seq-1/

for pages like:

The web page allows you to zoom in quite close and see lots of detail in the page:

Now lets say I want to describe this Newspaper Page in RDF. I need to decide what subject URI to hang the [...]

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VocabularySoup (1)

Thursday, March 26, 2009

It’s been great to see RDFa being picked up by web2.0 publishers like Digg and MySpace. You can use the RDFa Distiller to extract the RDFa from a given web page u by constructing a URI like:

http://www.w3.org/2007/08/pyRdfa/extract?format=turtle&uri=u

Which translates kind of nicely into a command line utility to add to your ~/bin:

#!/bin/sh
curl “http://www.w3.org/2007/08/pyRdfa/extract?format=turtle&uri=$1″

So with that [...]

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work identifiers and the web

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Michael Smethurst’s In Search of Cultural Identifiers post over at the BBC Radio Labs got me thinking about web identifiers for works, about LibraryThing and OCLC as linked library data providers, and finally about the International Standard Text Code. Admittedly it’s kind of a hodge-podge of topics, and I’m going to taking some liberties with [...]

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