Internet Alchemy

From this month’s Eye to Eye:

We are delighted to announce that, following our merger with VISTA International and the ensuing strengthening of our management team, we have appointed Leigh Dodds to the role of Chief Technology Officer, Ingenta. Leigh has been a great ambassador for Ingenta in his role as Engineering Manager, and his reputation in the technology industry and aptitude for research & development make him a natural choice for the CTO position.

The latest in Talis’ series of podcasts is with Nova Spivack, the CEO and founder of Radar Networks, one of the few silicon valley based semweb startups and one that operates in stealth mode at the moment. It’s a great listen.

Joost joins the list of real world applications that are eschewing blank nodes in their RDF. At Talis we’re doing the same – our RDF versioning protocol doesn’t support bnodes either and we actually replace them with URIs in many places. Over the past year I’ve spoken with several companies making practical, commercial use of RDF and none of them are using bnodes. In fact they are actively avoiding them. Two of these companies claim to have stores in the multi-GigaTriple range.

So far I haven’t found a use case for bnodes that can’t be catered for by URIs – can anyone prove me wrong?

Rob joins the likes of Dave Winer by becoming a Twitter skeptic. I wonder if we’re going to see other alignments of opinion in the future?

Is it only me that thinks Mike Arrington is focussing more and more on the negative sides of the apps he reviews? Hey Mike, tell us some of the good stuff occasionally! We need some positive vibes!

Last week, at the code4lib conference, our very own Rob Styles presented a lightning talk on open data, a topic very close to our heart at Talis. He uses a great metaphor for the state of our industry, something that I can closely identify with havinf a ten year old and a four year old in the same house! It’s only 5 minutes, so you’ve no excuse for not watching it

Here’s direct link to YouTube if the embedded video player doesn’t show up.

It looks like the hot new thing is to make a phone with both Microsoft and Google getting in on the act now.