Here are some quick notes i have taken at the panel called Building a Semantic Web in Which Our Data Can Participate moderated by Paul Miller, who is also involved with the Talking with Talis podcast:

Peter Murray-Rust (U of Cambridge): campaign for Open Data
- his links and notes
- Open Access really demands Open Data
- publisher: “Open Access equals socialized science”

Steve Coast (Open Street Map)
- GPS traces of couriers can be used to create maps
- not quite much data as Google Maps, but e.g. Bagdad
- opening up maps for participation - it is fun
- comparison: as Linux improves, Windows gets cheaper

Rob Styles (Talis): Licensing and Open Data
- licensing to secure OD and encourage use of it
- content, data, metadata (see my former post)
- Talis Community License (TCL), a GPL or CC for databases

Jamie Taylor (Metaweb): freebase
- you can’t have OD if you don’t have data
- Geoffrey A Moore: Core vs Context
- freebase data as an open repository

Discussion questions and remarks
- who pays for OD? Market or state?
- impact factor of Open Access journals lower
- but OA papers get cited more often
- OA journal in biology has highest impact factor in the field
- architecture designs are political statements
- trust of community additions, e.g. map data in Bagdad
- too positive mindset about the honesty of people?
- but also state authorities/agencies are not always trustworthy
- attribution and versioning is key for participation and trust
- questioning validity should be done with every source
- how effective would CC or OD licenses be?
- how to go from here? evangelize!
- CC copyright owners have to enforce the license

Beyond clay, people, and drawings stop motion also works in a street art setting employing wheatpasting. In fact, in a really cool way. See for your self:

via Uwe: via Wooster Collective: “Flâneur” by Gould, Berlin 2007

As i am a volunteer here at the World Wide Web conference i also get to see some presentations. The conference is just starting up and there are quite a few (read: too many) interesting talks, papers, and panels coming up. I will jot down my highlights here, as i might not make it to all of them. If you are here you can also subscribe to my partially overlapping WWW2007 schedule (ICAL). Also, if you are not here, most papers are available as PDFs.

• Social and Collaborative Construction of Structured Knowledge (Workshop)
• Tagging and Metadata for Social Information Organization (Workshop)
• Tim Berners-Lee: The Two Magics of Web Science (Plenary talk)
• Communication in Developing Regions (Paper track)
• Semantic Digital Libraries (Tutorial)
• The Future of the Web Page (W3C Track)
• Prabhakar Raghavan: Web N.0: What sciences will it take? (Plenary talk)
• Open Data - Building a Semantic Web in Which Our Data Can Participate (Panel)
• Model Driven Semantic Web Engineering (Tutorial)
• The Role of Multimedia Metadata Standards in a (Semantic) Web 3.0 (Panel)
• Bill Buxton: Design for the World Narrow Web (Plenary talk)
• Linked Data (Developer track)
• Dick Hardt: An Identity Story (Plenary talk)
• Web Data (Developer track)
• The Two Cultures: Mashing Up Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web (Paper)

The makers of the DRM mechanism for HD-DVDs really had a sense for how colors work in combination. The hexadecimal string of numbers that is used to decrypt a copy-protected HD-DVD can be turned into a very appealing set of colors. So if you are wondering what kind of colors you want to apply to your next website project, t-shirt design, or stencil you can turn to this code.

Note also the recent revolt at Digg.com some days ago around the issue of publishing the code or not.

via information aesthetics: HD-DVD hex color themes

During my flight to Calgary i listened to some episodes of Talking with Talis about open data in the realm of libraries. The general idea – how i understand it – is that data is often collected in locked-up repositories without really being able to unleash its full potential, but instead data should be made accessible employing open APIs and free licenses. Consider bibliographic entries of library catalogs that could be accessed and mashed-up in ways librarians (or readers) might not have imagined before. It could open up a world of new applications beyond the boundaries of the traditional library setting.

During the WWW2007 conference i am about to take part in as a volunteer there is a special panel devoted to open data and its potential implication for the Semantic Web. Rob Styles who will talk on that panel writes on his blog about the differentiation between the concepts of data, metadata, and content in terms of copyright law. Since most metadata would lead to the actual content, content providers are usually less interested in making money of just the metadata than of the actual content. In this sense metadata is less restricted in terms of copyright opening up interesting possibilities. Rob mentions several initiatives, e.g. Open Street Map, where metadata is made available by a community of people.

I’m about to be on my way to Banff and Calgary to attend the World Wide Web conference and to transmit birthday wishes to the duck. On the Atomique blog you can read why i am quite happy to be able to attend this conference.