2nd Linked Data Meetup London

This meetup is for people interested in Linked & Open Data on the Web.

Following up on our last meetup in September, we will host our next meetup in February as a full day event, co-located with dev8D.

In the morning there will be a presentation session on the latest developments in the Linked & Open Data world, and a panel discussion covering future research & development in this area.

In the afternoon we will host workshops on how to publish and use Linked Data, with "SPARQL 101", an introduction to Linked Data software, and a workshop on using Drupal and RDFa. The afternoon workshop room accommodates 70 people, so that every attendee has the chance to attend at least one of three workshops.

We want to encourage you to get together in working groups and discuss all kinds of questions around the use of data or to do some hands-on programming. So in the afternoon, in parallel to the workshops there will be three rooms (a 40 people) available, and we’d like to invite you to organize working groups and programming sessions. Please get in touch with us.

Free lunch will be provided for all attendees. If you have special dietary requirements, please send an email to events@ukoln.ac.uk before Wed 17 February.

Please see below the detailed programme for the day.

Many thanks to our sponsors: JISC, BBC, Talis, Garlik, and Cabinet Office.

Very looking forward to seeing you in London!

Georgi Kobilarov (Uberblic Labs)
Silver Oliver (BBC)

Linked Data Meetup programme:

8:30 – 9:30 : Registration & Coffee (Floor 3, Upper Hall)

9:30 – 11:00 : First presentation session (Ground Floor, The Venue)

Welcome and introduction

Tom Heath (Talis) – Linked Data: Implications for Applications
What are the metaphors that shape the applications we develop? Computers have desktops, files live in folders, we add pages to our Web sites. These metaphors reveal a document-centric paradigm in most computing applications, and we're all heavily entrenched in this perspective. Linked Data provides a new set of metaphors to inspire the applications we build, giving centre stage not to documents, but to the things described in the data. Applications we develop based on the Linked Data paradigm should not be shaped or constrained by the actions we can perform on documents, but by the full range of actions we can perform on things. Any things. In this talk I will explore these issues and discuss whether a framework exists that can guide the direction of future Linked Data applications.

Tom Scott (BBC) - Apis and APIs - a Wildlife Ontology
BBC Wildlife Finder (https://www.bbc.co.uk/... (https://www.bbc.co.uk/wildlifefinder/) ) allows people to to explore the natural world through the BBC's TV, radio and news archive by providing URLs for animals, plants and their habitats and adaptations. As part of this work we have also developed a vocabulary to describe the resources and their relationship; this talk discusses our work to date.

John Sheridan & Jeni Tennison (data.gov.uk) - How the Web of Data Will Be Won
What does it take to create a web of government Linked Data? The UK government is finding out. Our story is one of pioneers. You will hear how we are moving out of existing settlements to the wide plains of government data. How we are starting to build the first railroads across this vast territory to open a new lands of opportunity. All the time, of course, having to avoid both outlaws and the Civil War back east.

11:00 - 11:20 break

11:20 - 1:00 second presentation session (Ground Floor, The Venue)

Lin Clark (DERI Galway) – RDF(a) in Drupal
With 250,000 downloads per month and an estimated 400,000 live and active sites built with it, Drupal has become one of the most widely deployed content management systems. The upcoming release of Drupal 7—which includes RDF on all Drupal sites by default—marks the largest decentralized deployment of RDF to date. This talk will give an overview of the RDF capabilities that are currently available in Drupal 7 and some that are on the horizon.

Georgi Kobilarov (Uberblic Labs) & Silver Oliver (BBC) - Web-scale data integration
Linked Data enables more lightweight integration of data on the web and within organizations. While the work in the early beginnings of the Linked Data community has focused on publishing data on the Web, we now face the challenges of putting the possibilities linked data offers into practice. This talk will give an overview of data consolidation techniques for RDF data at the example of uberblic.org, and discuss our work of using integrated web data at BBC News.

Panel discussion hosted by Paul Miller (cloudofdata.com) - Putting Linked Data to work
(Panelists to be announced)
From early beginnings in the research community, Linked Data implementation has spread to public services and Governments. Corporations without a public service mandate are also beginning to recognise the opportunities, and this panel discussion will explore the diverse issues facing those who wish to contribute or consume Linked Data in these very different contexts.

1:00 – 2:00 Lunch break (Floor 1, "The Gallery" and "The Duck and Dive")
Free lunch. If you have special dietary requirements, please email events@ukoln.ac.uk before 17 Feb.

2:00 – 5:00 Workshops and working groups session

Main Workshop Room, Floor 3, Room 3D (70 people):

2:00 - 2:45 Leigh Dodds & Andy Seaborne (Talis) – SPARQL 101 workshop

3:00 – 3:45 Mischa Tuffield (Garlik) & Patrick Sinclair (BBC) – Building Linked Data applications workshop

4:00 - 4:45 Lin Clark (DERI) – Drupal RDFa workshop

Working Group Rooms (Floor 2, "Bloomsbury Suite", 2C, and 2D): three rooms (40 people each) for smaller workshops and working groups (get in touch if you want to organize a workshop or discussion group)

2:00-2:45 Henry Story - Securing Access using Linked Data with FOAF+SSL

Linked Data is usually thought of as open and available to all. But this does not mean that the resources are not protected: at the very least write access is restricted to a set of trusted parties. But when one looks at how these parties are identified and authenticated, most deployed solutions do not use linked data for what clearly should be a key use case: describing people and their social web.

FOAF+SSL enables a linked data solution to access control. We will explain how it works, show working implementations, and help workgroup members get their own WebID. It is easy: one just had to think of it!

2:00 - 2:45 Georgi Kobilarov - Linked Data & the Enterprise: Discussion Round

What can Linked Data offer for enterprises? How can we bring Linked Data into the enterprise? Which problems are we facing, and what to do about it?

This is not a workshop, but a discussion round and opportunity to raise and discuss questions.

3:00 - 3:45 Ian Davis (Talis) - Data Incubator
Data Incubator is focussed on creating and publishing Linked Data, particularly where that data is converted from pre-existing sources. Its approach is to organise people around popular datasets to create mappings to RDF, write conversion code and publish the resulting data. The goal of each of these projects is to use the skill and experience of the community to develop the conversions so the original data provider can very simply adapt the work and emit the linked data themselves. Join this workshop to learn how to get involved - we need help on organising activities, targetting datasets, evangelising linked data, coding, modelling and building a thriving community.

Target audience: developers interested in evangelising and converting linked data

3:00 - 3:45 Adam Cooper - Campaign Strategies - persuading people to release their stuff as Linked Open Data
This session will be about sharing ideas and success/failure stories about convincing data holders to put more LOD out there, ideally as high quality and persistent RDF. It is about accelerating growth. We will not be talking about the technical challenges but about how to work on the “executives and decision-makers” who don’t “get it” yet and who may not really “get the web” at all. Questions we might discuss are: what kinds of organisations are likely to be easier to deal with; what kind of person in these organisations is the best “way in”; how to make a convincing case (in their terms); what will make them commit; what kinds of data is it easiest to make a case over; etc… We will wrap the session up with an attempt to define some next-steps, e.g. recruiting visible backing from (more) high profile organisations or individuals, collaborating on creating campaign materials, …

4:00 - 4:45 Dave Reynold (Epimorphics), Leigh Dodds (Talis), Jeni Tennison (data.gov.uk) - A web-developer API for (Government) linked data
As part of the Government data initiative we have a pressing need for simpler ways to access linked datasets; to enable non-semantic web developers to get started. A group of us are developing a web API approach that enables programmatic access to Government data. The aims are for minimal configuration to set up and minimal/no knowledge of SPARQL or RDF to consume. The work includes both an API specification and a simplified JSON serialization.
In this workshop we'd like to informally sketch our current thinking and early prototyping in this area and seek feedback.
Target audience: developers interested in using or providing such an API.

Final Session (Floor 3, Upper Hall)
5:00 – 5:40 Lightning talks & closing

You may want to meet up in "The Duck and Dive" afterwards for drinks, we'll be there...