It’s high time I removed the dust sheets from this blog and tried to discipline myself to actually write something. To be honest I think I should try to stop thinking in sentences of 140 characters or less. Twitter has probably clouded my ability to think thoughts longer than a text box with a countdown.
So, change is afoot again. If there is one thing that Talis (my employer) isn’t, it’s static. The Talis strapline ‘Shared Innovation’ is exactly what we do on a daily basis. I am currently shifting my role from a purely library focus, dealing with library customers in the library world to dealing with anyone who wants to work with semantically formed data published on the web of data.
How is this different from libraries? Well, to some extent it is no different. We are talking about standardising the publishing of data in machine readable form, whereas Library’s deal with information published and catalogued in a fairly standard human readable way. One of the reasons that it is so easy to find things in a library (no really!) is because there are standard ways to represent, through classification, where the main topic of a book sits, and therefore which books it should be next to on the shelf.
Thus it is with Linked Data and the semantic web, except here the field is so new that we are still evolving the ways to say things about things, and ways to find what other people are saying about things. I plan to explore some of this stuff in later posts.
So, over the coming months, in my consultancy role, I will be getting the opportunity to meet other people who are getting started with the idea of linked data, and sharing with you some of the first steps experiences that I too have been through.
Now, how many of those sentences are longer than 140 characters?