January 2018 Seminar: Making true connections in a complex world: new technologies to link facts, concepts and data

Summary

At this meeting new approaches to Linked Data and Graph Technology were presented and discussed. Dion Lindsay introduced the New Graph Technology of Information and David Clarke discussed Building Rich Search and Discovery User Experiences with Linked Open Data.

Speakers

Dion Lindsay
Introducing the New Graph Technology of Information. Graph technology is a rapidly growing method of making complex datasets visually engaging and explorable in new ways, revealing hidden patterns and creating actionable insights. Graph technology is being applied to the vast and unruly sets of unstructured data, with which traditional relational database technology has not been able to come to terms, but which enterprises own and are anxious to exploit.

David Clarke
Building Rich Search and Discovery User Experiences with Linked Open Data This presentation will demonstrate how to leverage Linked Open Data for search and discovery applications. The Linked Open Data cloud is a rapidly growing collection of publicly accessible
resources, which can be adopted and reused to enrich both internal enterprise projects and
public-facing information systems. Linked Open Data resources live in graph databases, formatted as RDF triple stores. Two use-cases will be explored.

Time and Venue

2pm on 25th January 2018, The British Dental Association, 64 Wimpole Street, London W1G 8YS

Pre Event Information

NetIKX offers KM and IM professions a chance to increase our understanding of the new technology approaches that are changing and challenging our work. Our next seminar will give you a chance to confidently discuss and assess the opportunities of new approaches to Linked Data and Graph Technology that can enhance your work and your organisational value.
In everyday language, a ‘graph’ is a visual representation of quantitative data. But in computing and information management, the word can also refer to a data structure in which entities are considered as nodes in a network diagram, with links (relationships) between some of them.
Both the entities and the relationships can also be recorded as having ‘properties’ or ‘attributes’, quantitative and qualitative.

Slides

No slides available for this presentation

Tweets

#netikx89

Blog

Blog link
See our blog report: Making True Connections

 

Study Suggestions

The Neo4j team produced a book by Ian Robinson, Jim Webber and Emil Eifrem called ‘Graph Databases’, and it is available for free (PDF, Kindle etc) from https://neo4j.com/graph-databases-book/

November 2011 Seminar: What next for the web? – a look at linked data and semantic search

Summary

This was a joint event, run with the Information for Energy Group (IFEG) and hosted at The Energy Institute.  The session addressed the issue of linked data and the semantic web.

Whereas Web 1.0 might be thought of as ‘brochure ware’, one-way communication, and Web 2.0 has come to mean interactive, two-way communication online, the future seems to be for information and knowledge management itself to move onto the web.

What is linked data?  Richard gave an excellent introduction to the topic, leading us through a logical path to understanding how information from different data sets can be shared, merged and used online.  When the web originated, it was about publishing text documents with links to other text documents, using html.  Linked data is about linking ‘things’ to other ‘things’, by giving them a label or identifier (a URI).  Things also have attributes, like a name, size, location, etc.

How about semantic search?   Victoria’s talk began from the opposite end of the spectrum – given that linked data exists on the web, how do you search for it?  Traditional online searching is based around keyword search, which uses methods such as counting words, page ranking using links, controlled form searching (eg; OPAC) or metadata.  These methods were developed for searching text.  To search structured data needs a different approach.

Linked data tools and open data publishing seems to have many potential benefits and also some risks; as with any rapid change the regulation and safeguards against the risks will probably lag behind what is taking place in practice.

Speakers

Richard Wallis is a Technology Evangelist and has been with the UK’s leading Linked Data and Semantic Web technology company, Talis, for over eleven years. This coupled with his passion for and engagement with new and emerging technology trends, gives him a unique perspective of the issues challenging Information professionals today. As Technology Evangelist he is at the forefront in promoting, explaining, and applying new and emerging Web and Semantic Web technologies in the wider information domain. Richard is an active blogger and regular podcaster in the ‘Talking with Talis’ series.

Victoria Uren supported Richard.

Time and Venue

November 2011, 2pm The British Dental Association, 64 Wimpole Street, London W1G 8YS

Slides

No slides available

Tweets

#netikx50

Blog

See our blog report: What next for the Web and information services? Linked data and semantic search

Study Suggestions

None