Author Archives: Barry O'Gorman

About Barry O'Gorman

Barry O'Gorman lives in Dublin, Ireland. He is married and has three children. His key areas of business interest are: Collaboration, Knowledge Management and Change Management. He is also interested in History, Current Affairs, Sport, Music and Travel.

Explaining the semantic web

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Find myself being asked more regularly to explain ‘the semantic web’.  I think it’s a combination of a growing awareness in the business community of the semantic web and a greater focus on this topic by myself.

Read a piece this morning on the hypios web site – a web 2.0 based problem solving site.  In the first page of this essay the author offers an excellent introduction to the semantic web (and the requirement for a semantic web).

The only reservation I would have would be the ‘plea’ to business to make more data available publicly as linked open data.  I agree with the sentiment – but not sure that business on such sentiment.

Introduction to semiotics – leading to semantics

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Excellent presentation (to undergrads I presume) outlining background to semiotics and semantics.

Great start – asks the participants in 15 seconds to define ‘forward’.

Works through the basics of symbols, icons and indices.  This in turn leads on to the importance of context (more important for symbols e.g. language than for icons).

Follows on from this to explain the need for rules and agreed terminologies – leading to Ontologies.

Challenges in linked data

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I referenced recently Tim Berners Lee’s encouragement to everyone looking to publish linked open data to use the Resource Definition Framework.  I also referenced in this blog recent work completed by the New York Times in this field.  The New York Times initiative has attracted an amount of comment in the technical community identifying the teething issues/ errors in this data as published.

Stefan Mazzocchi’s recent post, Data Smoke and Mirrors, speaks to some of the issues associated with publishing lots of linked data using RDF.  Stefan has reviewed a triplification of all the data from data.gov – and has been left somewhat bemused.  The posting itself provides some examples.

The point here is that we want to see the data published, we want to see the standards used – but it’s far from simple and publishing for the sake of publishing or triplifying for the sake of triplifying may be self defeating.  As a community we need to focus on quality and the end user of the data.

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Disturbing yesterday to witness angry street protests in Central Dublin.  In fairness what was striking was the level of anger and frustration of so many people – much of it based on fear about the future.

In today’s Irish Times I read a commentary on the speech by David Guinane, at last night’s Institute of Bankers’ Dinner.  His comments included: ‘As bankers, we must recognise first and foremost that this crisis has been caused by the failure of our sector to fully understand and manage the risks inherent in our business‘.

This type of sentiment – expressed publicly – is part of the required social and economic reconciliation process.  Serious mistakes were made by bankers – for a range of commercial reasons.  Others were not innocent – those who got caught up in various ventures, those who adjusted the basis of the country’s finance, those  who failed to implement rigorous regulation.  Some may have overstepped the mark completely.

It is important that groups acknowledge their mistakes (and any wrongdoing where it took place).  There are many who could follow Mr Guinane’s line – it would greatly assist the reconciliation process.

Now we need to focus on learning the lessons, taking the corrective actions and reforming as a team.  There are some signs of this – but one should not underestimate the anger of those marching yesterday.  The reconciliation process to date has been inadequate.

Linked open data – the newspapers getting on board

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New York Times announced last week that it will provide data marked up using RDF (Resource Definition Framework).

Why is this important?

This makes the data more useful.  You can now cross reference/ correlate the NY Times information with other information available on the web e.g. DBPedia (The RDF format of Wikipedia).  You can also develop applications which can access/ process/ interpret the NY Times data – because it is provided in RDF format.

Interesting development – and makes sense of the Linked Open Data initiative.  The NY Times is embracing RDF – to some extent it is giving away its data, but on the other hand its own data is far more valuable because it can easily be combined with other (RDF’d) data.

Quite a challenge to all organisations – especially those generating significant content – who are failing to have their data leveraged properly because it sits in its own silo.

semantic web and the subprime crisis

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Nice piece by Michael Cataldo outlining potential benefits of semantic web – in terms of making it easier to access data on the web and cross reference/ correlate the data.  Michael makes the point that fuller adoption of semantic web principles at an earlier date may have assisted in preventing some of the elements of the subprime crisis.

I am very much a fan of the semantic web and indeed of the movement towards linked open data.  However it is interesting to read reports of Tim Berners Lee’s own frustrations wrt advances in linked open data e.g. the fact that data is being published on data.gov in non RDF formats (thereby limiting the ability of people to browse from this data to other RDF marked up data).

I think Michael Cataldo, in looking to demonstrate potential benefits of semantic web, may be stretching things a little far wrt the subprime crisis – were people motivated to make the data easily understood or was obfuscation not part of the intent?

Reducing your printing

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The green agenda is everyone’s agenda.  Reading in Friday’s Irish Times paper about HP’s effort to up the recycling content in its cartridges reminds me of how much I have been able to reduce my own printing output in the last number of months.

I have become completely fed up with the idea of receiving a document or a link to a document, downloading it from mail or the internet, printing it out, reading it and binning it or having to find a home for it.  Apart from the obvious waste (ink, paper) the inefficiency and delays in all of this have been annoying me.

In the last number of months I have deliberately tried to review more documents online and capture my thoughts re the documents online.  I have used products such as Posterous and Google’s side wiki to comment where I want to do so publicly, I have kept notes using products including EverNote.  I have added research links and documents to Zotero.  I also use Google Reader and this blog.

My professional training with a large accounting firm provided me with a disciplined approach for reviewing documents, marking up comments, reviewing revised drafts.  In the 80′s this was a paper based exercise.  I have found now working with various word processing packages all of this can be done more effectively online – so long as you know how to use the product and the various features designed to track and report changes.

I have often heard people comment that ‘I can’t review this without printing it out’.  I, for one, have changed my view on this.  Now I generally  prefer to review documents online.  I do think however that those creating documents for review may want to think through their approach to facilitate online review.

So while I would welcome initiatives by companies such as HP to up the green factor in their products I suspect the real way forward is to reduce the volume of printing.  Anyway, if you want to run your business in the cloud then there seems very little sense in carrying around mountains of paper.

Thinking about the scope of semantic web

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Read an excellent summary paper by Mills Davis of Project 10X.  Interesting description of the ‘notion’ of semantic web: The key notion of semantic technology is to represent meanings and knowledge (e.g., knowledge of something, knowledge about something, and knowledge how to do something, etc.) separately from content or behavior artifacts, in a digital form that both people and machines can access and interpret.

Would recommend the summary paper to anyone looking to gain an insight into the semantic web 3.0 and its potential.

Email to survive for some time

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Andrew McAfee has been blogging recently on coexistence of email and enterprise 2.0/collaboration type tools in the enterprise.  His hypothesis is: ‘Within organizations, collaboration technologies are dictated by the most powerful person involved in the collaboration’.
And following on from this, given the number of CEO’s wedded to email, would seem that email will continue to be the core communications/ collaboration tool for some time, in many organisations.

I think of the challenge differently.  The CEO operates in  a competitive environment, charged with delivering results for the shareholders.  If there’s a better way to run a company many CEO’s will be open to the change.  If there is a better way than email then it’s up to those who understand the alternatives to paint the picture.  There are plenty of CEOs out there who will switch tool sets if they believe in the benefits.

I think the idea of ‘email as the graveyard of knowledge’ would be well understood by many CEOs.  In fact many would argue that email, computers, software, in general have been the graveyard of creativity, ‘spark’, stimulating interaction.  Notwithstanding this level of frustration I think many can see the potential benefits of ‘wiki-type’ tools (incorporating social networking functionality) over some combination of email and Word/PowerPoint/ Excel.