Archive for the 'NUI Galway' Category

CELT talk / WWW@15 on Morning Ireland / Ulrich Schnauss

Published
by
Cloud
on 2/5/2008
in Blogs, DERI, Education, Music, NUI Galway, Semantic Web, Social Media, Social Networks, Social Software, Web and Wikis
. 1 Comment

A mixed-up blog post, but I haven’t the energy to write three separate posts, so here’s a three-in-one:

  • On Wednesday, I gave a talk at CELT, NUI Galway about “Learning via the Social Web”, which was a slightly-revised version of the one I gave in February. Again, there was an amazing turnout, and there will be a webcast made available via the CELT website at a later date. For now, you can access the PowerPoint slides here.
  • Yesterday, Damien Mulley and I were interviewed by Richard Downes on RTÉ R1 Morning Ireland about the 15th anniversary of CERN releasing the World Wide Web code for free (podcast available here; alternatively there’s an extracted clip here). I talked a little bit about the WWW versus UMn’s Gopher, and how the Web has expanded beyond the initial target audience of academics and researchers. I gave a slightly-tangential answer to a question I was asked about the importance of the Web to Ireland’s future and economy (FYI: CSO 2007 ICT stats), saying how dependent we are on the Web to do many tasks today, and describing how our work at DERI in NUI Galway will help us to deal with the current over-abundance of websites, by adding more structure to web pages so that computers can help us in finding the right information. “Are you telling me that the future of the Web […] is being designed in Galway?”, Richard asked at one point. Yes!!! Finally, I mentioned how the problems with online video gridlock may have larger consequences as the Web is increasingly moving from the desktop to mobile devices where bandwidth is even more important, so smarter ways are needed to reduce exactly what will be sent to your phone (FYI: Opera Mini is a nice example, a tiny Java browser that works on most phones where the content is pre-filtered server-side before it gets to you).
  • Last night, I went along with friend Conrad to see Ulrich Schnauss at Stress in DeBurgo’s here in Galway. Although I missed the encore (it had been a long day, with a nine-hour session at work), I really enjoyed the night and the support acts: Beatpoet was great playing on his mono-something device, and Airiel were pretty good too :)

Really cool SIOC widget from Sindice (for WordPress)

Published
by
Cloud
on 20/4/2008
in DERI, FOAF, NUI Galway, SIOC, Semantic Web, Social Media, Social Networks, Social Software and Web 2.0
. 3 Comments Tags: , .

I’ve installed the new Sindice SIOC widget, produced by Adam, Fabio and Giovanni from the Sindice team.

As you can see, if you look at the post author or click into any comments list, each user now has a speech bubble beside the username. Clicking on this bubble will show you posts, comments and topics created by that user across the “SIOC-o-sphere”.

20080411b.png

You can also click on any arrow icon beside a link in a blog post to see where else it has been referenced, like this one.

There is a Sindice SIOC API available which serves as a gateway to SIOC data via the Sindice discovery and search services, enabling the verification of the presence of a user or a link on the SIOC-o-sphere as indexed within Sindice.

Tales from the SIOC-o-sphere #7

Published
by
Cloud
on 5/4/2008
in Blogs, DERI, Data Portability, FOAF, Internet, Ireland, NUI Galway, Podcasts, RSS, SIOC, Semantic Web, Social Software, Web 2.0 and WebCamp
. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

20080403a.png It’s been three months since my last round-up of all things SIOC-ed, so here is entry number seven in the series:

Previous SIOC-o-sphere articles:

#6 http://sioc-project.org/node/310
#5 http://sioc-project.org/node/294
#4 http://sioc-project.org/node/272
#3 http://sioc-project.org/node/271
#2 http://sioc-project.org/node/138
#1 http://sioc-project.org/node/79

Nova Spivack visits DERI, NUI Galway and talks about Twine: Radar Networks’ semantic social software product in beta

Published
by
Cloud
on 25/3/2008
in BlogTalk, DERI, FOAF, Galway, NUI Galway, SIOC, Semantic Web, Social Networks, Social Software, US and Web 2.0
. 0 Comments

20080325b.png In association with the IT Association of Galway, DERI recently invited Radar Networks‘ Nova Spivack to speak at our research institute in the National University of Ireland, Galway (Nova also gave a keynote talk at BlogTalk 2008 in Cork).

Nova is CEO of one of the companies that is practically applying Semantic Web technologies to social software applications. Radar have a beta product called Twine which is a “knowledge networking” application that allows users to share, organise, and find information with people they trust. People create and join “twines” (community containers) around certain topics of interest, and items (documents, bookmarks, media files, etc., that can be commented on) are posted to these twines through a variety of methods. The seminar room was full of both “DERIzens” and members of Galway’s IT community for Nova’s talk on the Semantic Web and Twine (see his slides here), and after a lengthy question-and-answers session, this was followed by some presentations to Nova of ongoing research work in DERI.

20080325c.png I personally find Twine very interesting, and as well as using it to gather information about SIOC, I intend to use it to gather and publish personal interests that I think will be of interest to the public (once it leaves beta). As well as producing semantic data (just stick “?rdf” onto the end of any twine.com URL), Twine features some cool functionality that elevates it beyond the social bookmarking sites to which it has been compared, including an extensive choice of twineable item types, twined item customisation (”add detail”) and the “e-mail to a twine” feature, all of which I believe are extremely useful. (I have a few Twine invites left for readers of my blog; drop me an e-mail if you need one.)

There is also the community aspects of twines. I forsee that these twines will act as the “social objects” (see presentation by Jyri) that will draw you back to the service, in a much stronger manner than other social bookmarking sites currently do (due to Twine’s more viral nature, its stronger social networking functionality, better commenting, and a more identifiable “home” for these objects). Of course, having more public users will help, but from experience I know that it is a good idea to build on a core group of regular users (in Twine’s case, mainly techies) before increasing the user base too much.

It’s been an exciting few months in terms of announcements relating to commercial Semantic Web applications. As I mentioned recently in an interview with Rob Cawte for the web2.0japan.com blog, this is becoming obvious with the attention being given to startup companies in this space like Powerset, Metaweb (Freebase) and Radar Networks (Twine), and also since many big companies including Reuters (Calais API), Yahoo! (semantically-enhanced search) and Google (Social Graph API) have recently announced what they are doing with semantic data. There has been a lot of talk recently about the social graph (notably from Google’s Brad Fitzpatrick), which looks at how people are connected together (friends, colleagues, neighbours, etc.), and how such connections can be leveraged across websites. On the Semantic Web with vocabularies like FOAF, SIOC, etc., it is not just people who are connected together in some meaningful way, but documents, events, places, hobbies, pictures, you name it! And it is the commercial applications that exploit these connections that are now becoming interesting…

(Edit: Nova Spivack has blogged about his visit.)

“A funny thing happened on the way to the forum”: Article in Indo about 10 years of boards.ie

Published
by
Cloud
on 15/2/2008
in BlogTalk, Blogs, Boards, Cork, DERI, Games, Internet, Ireland, NUI Galway, SIOC, Semantic Web, Social Media, Social Networks, Social Software and Web
. 1 Comment

20080214a.png Irish Independent > Business > Technology > A funny thing happened on the way to the forum
After 10 years, John Breslin’s online forum on everything from personal relationships to motors and mustard, boards.ie, is still blazing a trail

By Marie Boran
Thursday February 14 2008

Want to know where you can buy the cheapest digital camera, or how to go about claiming rent relief, or maybe if buying cowboy boots would be a fashion disaster?

The world relies on Google but the Irish have boards.ie. On this online bulletin board no question is too trivial or too bizarre and with an average 900,000 visitors to the site every month, there are plenty of answers on offer.

It is hard to believe that a decade ago, on 12 February, 1998, boards.ie founder John Breslin wrote expectantly: “The first of many messages, I hope.”

Read more…

Of course, there are four other people who have made boards.ie possible: Tom Murphy, Dan King, Gerry Shanahan, and Jerry Connolly. Without them and our amazing team of voluntary moderators, I doubt boards.ie would even exist today. Original questions and answers follow.

Continue reading ‘“A funny thing happened on the way to the forum”: Article in Indo about 10 years of boards.ie’

An interesting talk by Mike Brodie…

Published
by
Cloud
on 23/1/2008
in DERI, NUI Galway and Semantic Web
. 0 Comments

…was given at VLDB 2007 recently. Mike (chief scientist with Verizon Services Operations, and chair of the DERI advisory board) also gave this talk internally during his visit to DERI on Monday.

You can view the slides and the introductory video in high or low quality. There are some interesting figures on database growth, web usage and user-generated content in the slides / videos.

Interviewed for SemanticWeb.com

Published
by
Cloud
on 21/1/2008
in DERI, General, NUI Galway, SIOC, Semantic Web, Social Media, Social Networks and Social Software
. 0 Comments

You can read an interview I did recently with Jupiter Media’s Jennifer Zaino for SemanticWeb.com about SIOC.

The title of the article is SIOC-ing the Semantic Web.

Interviewed on Morning Ireland last week

Published
by
Cloud
on 3/1/2008
in Boards, DERI, NUI Galway, Radio and Social Networks
. 1 Comment

Along with Joe Zefran of rté.ie, John Waters from the Irish Times, former DCU student Deirdre Reynolds, Gráinne Barry of anotherfriend.com, and Dr. Siobhan Barry from Cluan Mhuire, I took part in a panel hosted by Richard Downes on RTÉ Radio 1’s “Morning Ireland” show last week to discuss the phenomenon of online social networking.

You can listen to the show using the RTÉ site’s real audio archive or via my MP3 recording from digital satellite (I’m on at 17m30s and 26m30s).

It was a very good year…

Published
by
Cloud
on 3/1/2008
in Boards, DERI and NUI Galway
. 0 Comments

…during which I created and taught a new course on Emerging Web Media (twice!); spoke on Today FM’s “The Last Word” about cyberstalking; hosted the first Drupal Ireland meetup; gave a short opening presentation at the first ExpertFinder workshop; guest blogged on the IIA blog; was nominated in the blog category of the Digital Media Awards; sold the Boards Group of sites; launched the UK boards site; spoke at MIT and met Tim Berners-Lee; organised the first WebCamp event on social networks; made the first SIOC exporter for phpBB; took part in the TalkTourism.ie launch; participated in a documentary about Bebo made by the Multime group; got a comment from Patrick Tilley on my blog; met Enya; went to BarCamp Belfast; co-edited the SIOC W3C Member Submission; spoke at the Digital Hub about social networks and gaming; was interviewed by Silicon Republic; launched SocialMedia.net; organised BarCamp Galway; was nominated for a Net Visionary award; gave a presentation on social networking for enterprise at a Fidelity / ITAG conference; wrote an article about the future of social networks with Stefan for Internet Computing; recorded some muppet extra voices for an Irish-language Sesame Street spinoff; went to ISWC 2007 and chaired the second ExpertFinder workshop there; attended Web 2.0 Expo Tokyo and met Tim O’Reilly; went to the blognation Japan launch; had a SIOC tutorial accepted for WWW2008; and spoke on RTÉ Radio 1’s “Morning Ireland” about social networks.

I am looking forward to the year ahead - between organising BlogTalk 2008 / WebCamp SNP, and giving tutorials and invited presentations at the World Wide Web Conference, the Semantic Technologies Conference and the Reasoning Web Summer School - it’s going to be an exciting 2008!

Congrats to Eyal on his PhD defense

Published
by
Cloud
on 4/12/2007
in DERI and NUI Galway
. 0 Comments

20071204a.png Eyal Oren successfully defended his PhD at DERI, NUI Galway last week. I’d again like to say well done to Eyal, and since he was such a great person to work with, I know his new colleagues at VU Amsterdam will benefit greatly from his expertise and love of learning.

I first met Eyal when I arrived in DERI in early 2004 and I was talking at lunch about local access to IEEE papers that we’d secured. He had some tips on how to access related resources, and continued to be a source of knowledge that we will now miss in the Institute. The best of luck to you Dr. Oren.