“We are amassing an unimaginable amount of data in the world. In just three years, [internet] traffic is expected to total more than half a zettabyte. That’s a trillion gigabytes – or a one followed by 21 zeroes,” he tells industry, academic and political leaders.

“Where we once inferred, we now know. Where we once interpolated and extrapolated, we can now determine. The historical is giving way to the real-time and it’s not just about volume and velocity. The nature of the data we are collecting and analysing is changing, too.

“All this data is far more real-time than ever before. Most of us today, as leaders and as individuals, make decisions based on information that is backward-looking and limited in scope. That’s the best we had, but that is quickly changing.”

This just reinforces my previous blog of June 2009: here.

And this week we had the official launch in the UK of its government linked open data site.

We’ve seen the debate – back and forth – about linked open data.  We’ve seen the debate about top down v. bottom up approaches to semantics.  We’ve seen the arguments about the merits of RDF as against other frameworks.  But the volumes of data continue to increase – as does participation in social networks.

On a daily basis we see announcement about new products.  Nova Spivack tells us that the days of ‘Search’ are running out – we need ‘Help’ not ‘Search’.  We eagerly await his Twine 2.0.  We have seen significant product advancements announced this month in products such as Open Calais and Open Amplify.  One other product which caught my eye last week is Kngine.

Products such as Amplify aim to deal with the ‘tricky’ content – e.g. the ‘opinions’ implicit in content of social networks.   And this is a key element of what we are looking for: context for the content.  I am more interested in information on a particular subject when I understand the context, the perspective of the provider of the information.  I also want the richness of analysis possible through the combination of wider sources of data – including data compiled by government agencies which should be available to me.  Linked open data initiatives are required in all countries.  For Ireland – the sooner the better, if we consider ourselves a smart economy or a knowledge society.

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The presentation addressed, inter alia, the lack of excitement about semantic web.  My key takeaway from his talk was that semantic web is about networking knowledge for the benefit of PEOPLE.  I think in getting caught up describing things in terms of computers being able to process information on sites thought use of various standards (not of interest to anyone except the technical community) etc we have lost the focus on the fact that what we really want is more collaboration, more productivity, more discoveries.  Semantic web initiatives have an end game of helping people make more use of the information.

Just looked at a nice 3 minute video from Binaryplex – promoting their beta product Hivemind.  I do not know what the underlying technologies are.  They do not even mention the worked ‘semantics’ in their three minutes.  But what it is about is helping people to find expertise and, more importantly, experts in an organisation.  Recognising that people, for any number of reasons, may not update their profiles within an organisation the product seeks to address this gap, in the background.

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The UK government is moving forward on a similar basis to the US government – in making public data available to the public.

Curious to see how far advanced we are wrt implementing something similar in Ireland – in the context of our knowledge society and smart economy.  Must make sense to make this type of information available – as argued by Tim Berners Lee in the referenced article.

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San Francisco gets smart with green technology

…in the context of Ireland and its drive for a smart economy and knowledge society.

As I stand at bus stops wondering when the next bus is due and I think about the technology which is so easily available I wonder why we are not moving forward faster e.g. integrated ticketing?

Dublin needs to be a smart city.  Press on asap.  Food for thought in this article.

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