opendata RDF
jwilbanks | July 11, 2010Dorothea has written a typically good post challenging the role of RDF in the linked data web, and in particular, its necessity as a common data format.
I was struck by how many of her analyses were spot on, though my conclusions are different from hers. But she nails it when she says:
First, HTML was hardly the only part of the web stack necessary to its explosion. TCP/IP, anyone?
I'm on about this all the time. The idea that we are in web-1995-land for data astounds me. I'd be happy if I were to be proven wrong - trust me, thrilled - but I don't see the core base of infrastructure for a…
sb admin | July 7, 2010I've gotten a few emails about the Pepsi-ScienceBlogs tempest. It's clearly taken a toll on ScienceBlogs' credibility. Some of my SciBlings have resigned in protest, and others are taking shots on the topic.
Sponsorship is part of scientific publishing, even in the peer reviewed world. Remember how Merck published an entire fake journal to promote Vioxx? How much money gets spent on reprints that support a company's position, on articles paid for with corporate research funds?
Today's hullaballoo is more honest than either of those. My gut reaction is: calm down, world. This was a miserable…
sb admin | June 2, 2010As part of the series of posts reflecting on the move of Science Commons to Creative Commons HQ, I'm writing today on Open Data.
I was inspired to start the series with open data by the remarkable contribution, by GSK, to the public domain of more than 13,000 compounds known to be active against malaria. They were the first large corporation to implement the CC0 tool for making data into open data. CC0 is the culmination of years of work at Creative Commons, and the story's going to require at least two posts to tell...
Opening up data was a founding aspect of the Science Commons project at…
sb admin | March 22, 2010Creative Commons was fortunate enough to be involved in a fascinating workshop last week in New York on Open Hardware. Video is at the link, photos below.
The background is that I met Ayah Bdeir at the Global Entrepreneurship Week festivities in Beirut, and we started talking about her LittleBits project (which is, crudely, like Legos for electrics assembly - even someone as spatially impaired as me could build a microphone or pressure sensor in minutes).
Ayah introduced me to the whole open hardware (OH) world and asked a lot of very good, hard to answer questions about how to use CC in…