We had a great time at the Semantic Technologies Business Conference in London last week. Many good conversations with people throughout the two days, and lots to follow up on.

I gave an invited seminar on linked data to the BCS Data Management Specialist Group yesterday. Mostly introductory level but, given the possible audience, went into a more of the details on the information modelling aspects than I would normally do in an introductory talk.

It seemed to go down well. Lots of questions and discussions. People could definitely see the potential for the technology and the many different ways it can be used. Discussion included topics such as metadata management, e-Commerce uses like GoodRelations, inference and information extraction / text mining.

We've been thinking about Jena quite a bit lately with the move into Apache incubation. We can tell from all the emails we handle on Jena that it is used pretty heavily but we don't always get to hear about where it is being used.

Which made it fun to discover recently that IBM Watson, winner of the Jeopardy! challenge, uses Jena. There aren't many details, other than SPARQL being one of the search technologies used by Watson, but it is fun to see the various places that Jena pops up.

I recently gave a lightning talk on the Linked Data API at the Open Government Data Camp.

It was a very high level summary (only had 10 mins in total) but a couple of people asked for a pointer to the slides so they are: here.

Looking forward to attending and speaking at Semtech 2010 next week.

Will be talking on the linked data API work we did for accessing data.gov.uk data and how that fits in with the larger opportunities for information intermediaries.

Hoping to catch up lots of old and new contacts, ping me if you'd like to meet up.

Dave

The next steps in developing our ontology involve one more set of changes (linking to OPMV) and, most importantly, publishing the ontology somewhere.

These aren't the "final" steps as far as the ontology is concerned, it will need to evolve as people gain experiences applying it and give feedback on design and naming issues. However, it does bring this series of blog postings to a good stopping point.

This is the fourth in our series of postings on the design of an organization ontology. The focus this time is on revising the ontology in the light of feedback and reflection.

This is the third in our series of posts recording the (currently ongoing) process of developing an organization ontology. Here we sketch an initial design. Taking the initial requirements we now look at each part of the domain scope and identify the core classes, properties and design patterns.

This sketch is designed to cover all of the requirements with a minimum core set of concepts. The intention is that particular applications would extend and specialize this core. The next step is to get feedback on both the structure and the naming and associated definitions.

This is the second in our series of posts recording the (currently ongoing) process of developing an organization ontology. Here we are focused on surveying the options that already exist to confirm we haven't missed anything.

Background

The data.gov.uk linked data project found itself in need on an ontology or vocabulary to support linked data publishing of government organizational information. A check for existing ontologies didn't turn up an ideal solution so we decided to develop one.