Category Archives: Open Knowledge

BBC’s use of Semantic Web technology in World Cup

Just caught this story on ReadWrite Web about the BBC website’s use of semantic web technology during the World Cup.  Jem Rayfield explains more on the BBC Internet blog about the use of technology. I’ve still got a fair amount of reading to do but this is the sort of project that makes me rethink […]

Weeknotes: documentation, prototyping and cats

I’ve spent most of the week either trying to persuade colleagues that rewrites are needed to existing services. I’ve also finally managed to get the initial promise of working from home so hopefully I’ll be able to get the rewrite started on the “quiet” days away from the office. (Although the cat can drive me […]

Weeknotes: Pylons, Python and printing

I’ve been doing some more work to the Open Correspondence website (which is now functional  thanks to Rufus Pollock’s help). In part I’ve been cleaning up the urls for the data controller (which is still coming along) and trying to tie the views in together. Being happier with Apache and PHP I spent some time […]

Weeknotes: Data mining, XML and bibliographies

It seems to be have been a week of frantic completion and refactoring. The first half was spent frantically converting html pages into PDFs using Verypdf’s HTMLtools server product. All in all the manual is very helpful and the test server could be set up quickly. It might have helped the other end if I’d […]

Weeknotes: Redis, RDF, rdflib and openletters

I’ve been trying to play catch up this week at work. One of the projects that I’ve been working on is the temporary storage of information. For one reason or another, one of the workers has decided to occasionally throw a fit and not do its job properly (on top of a connection that appears […]

Date set for Textcamp

The provisional date for Textcamp has been set for August 21st on the twitter feed.

A change to the Letters project

During the previously blogged dinner with Ben and Rufus, we talked about the nascent work on the letters project. Both have “encouraged” me (it didn’t take too much persuasion, it must be said) to move the project to the Open Knowledge Foundation and to port it to Python with a Redis backend rather than the […]

Textcamp announced

Had dinner with Rufus Pollock and Ben O’Steen on Monday in Oxford. As part of the dicussions, the notion of Textcamp was raised and Ben has created the Textcamp website with an associated blog. It is a slightly bigger concept than I had had but the approach, I think, will allow the creation of a […]

Creating the text ontology

I’ve been working quietly on ideas for an ontology to describe relationships in  a letter from the correspondent to people referred in the text. It is intended to complement and extend the Dublin Core and Foaf (Friend of a Friend) namespaces. Anyhow I’ve decided to publish a first set of thoughts on it having sat […]

Mining data driving the web?

Just seen an article on Techcrunch by Bradford Cross of Flightcaster regarding the growth of data on the Web. He appears to argue that data and its uses will drive the Web soon, writing: the data age is less about the raw size of your data, and more about the cool stuff you can do […]