Steve Flinter

I recently attended the 19th World Wide Web Conference (WWW2010), held in Raleigh, North Carolina. This is the largest academic web conference, with approximately 600 attendees, and the official conference of the World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which is responsible for the development of the web standards, such as HTML, CSS and many more. As well as many academic institutions being represented, all of the major companies in the web space, such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook and so on, were well represented.

Irish research was well represented, with DERI particularly prominent. The Clique SRC was also represented, through the presence of Anthony Brew, who presented a poster. A former SFI-funded PhD graduate, Dr. Karen Church, formerly of the Adaptive Information Cluster (AIC), now with Telefonica Research in Barcelona, also presented her paper.

The two overriding themes of the conference were that of open Government data and Linked Open Data. The open Government data refers to the recent trend by a number of national governments, in particular those of the US (data.gov) and UK (data.gov.uk), to release public data sets and to allow them to be published online. These have been a wide and eclectic range of data that has heretofore been kept internally, or not made available in a meaningful, machine readable fashion. Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt have been leading the effort in the UK to release, and publish these datasets in machine readable formats.

One interesting example, cited a number of times, was that of bicycle accident data (I told you it was wide and eclectic). Originally, this data set was released as a CSV file—essentially, a text-based spreadsheet file. Within a few hours, this data had been cleaned up, transformed, and ultimately mashed up with a Google Map, to give the definitive map of bike accidents in the UK. This is a real example of how people, citizens, can use Government data once it’s put it the public domain, and available for inspection, linking and mashup.

A second, and somewhat related concept, that was strongly in evidence during the conference was that of linked open data. The idea here is that you can and should publish data (any kind of data) in a manner that allows other people to link to your data, and you to link to theirs, thence increasing the value of both data sets. So, instead of just publishing a table of numbers, you would mark it up in appropriate semantic web ontologies, and link that data to other relevant data sources. I’m not going to launch into a full tutorial of the linked data concept, but interested readers are encouraged to check out this article, called “How to publish Linked Data on the Web“.

Suffice to say that the linked data concept is going to become an increasingly relevant and important one, and one in which all managers/owners of public datasets or databases will have to be aware of in the near future. On a related note, DERI, recognising the importance of this idea, have set up a Linked Data Research Centre.

There were three keynotes at the conference: Vint Cerf, danah boyd, and Carl Malamud. Cerf’s talk revolved around the issue of internet infrastructure, that enables the WWW, and what changes need to happen to the infrastructure, including the adoption of IPv6, to enable the continued evolution of the internet and web. boyd’s talk was centred on the issue of privacy on the web (another recurring meme), and in particular on social networks. Malamud’s talk, reprising the earlier theme, entitled 10 Rules for Radicals, discussed his work to free up US government data, and make it publicly available.

Ireland is presently very much lagging on the release of Government data—something I feel that we will need to address as a nation sooner rather than later.

Overall, WWW2010 was an excellent conference in a great location. If you’re in the web business, it’s well worth checking out (although, somewhat pricy). The conference will be in Europe again in Lyon in 2012, and following that, in 2015. Perhaps we could push to host the conference in Dublin that year.

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