Tag Archives: semantic web

VIDEO: Big data, open data, linked data and other big ideas that data journalists need to know about

Three key terms you might hear used in data journalism circles are “open data“, “linked data” and “big data“. This video, made for students on the MA in Data Journalism at Birmingham City University, explores definitions of the three terms, explains some of the jargon used in relation to them, and the critical and ethical issues to consider in relation to open and big data in particular.

Three other video clips are mentioned in the video, and these are embedded below. First of all, Tim Berners-Lee‘s 2009 call for “raw data now”, where he outlined the potential of open and linked data…

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FAQ: Big data and journalism

The latest in the series of Frequently Asked Questions comes from a UK student, who has questions about big data.

How can data journalists make sense of such quantities of data and filter out what’s meaningful?

In the same way they always have. Journalists’ role has always been to make choices about which information to prioritise, what extra information they need, and what information to include in the story they communicate. Continue reading

Investigations tool DocumentCloud goes public (PS: documents drive traffic)

The rather lovely DocumentCloud – a tool that allows journalists to share, annotate, connect and organise documents – has finally emerged from its closet and made itself available to public searches.

This means that anyone can now search the powerful database (some tips here) of newsworthy documents. If you want to add your own, however, you still need approval.

If you do end up on this list you’ll find it’s quite a powerful tool, with quick conversion of PDFs into text files, analytic tools and semantic tagging (so you can connect all documents with a particular person, or organisation) among its best features. The site is open source and has an API too.

I asked Program Director Amanda B Hickman what she’s learned on the project so far. Her response suggests that documents have a particular appeal for online readers:

“If we’ve learned anything, it is that people really love documents. It is pretty clear that when there’s something interesting going on in the news, plenty of people want to dig a little deeper. When Arizona Republic posted an annotated version of that state’s new immigration law, it got more traffic than their weekly entertainment round up. WNYC told us that the page listing the indictments in last week’s mob roundup was still getting more traffic than any other single news story even a week later.

“These were big news documents, to be sure, but it still seems pretty clear that people do want to dig deeper and explore the documents behind the news, which is great for us and great for news.”

Games, systems and context in journalism at News Rewired

I went to News Rewired on Thursday, along with dozens of other journalists and folk concerned in various ways with news production. Some threads that ran through the day for me were discussions of how we publish our data (and allow others to do the same), how we link our stories together with each other and the rest of the web, and how we can help our readers to explore context around our stories.

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Extractiv: crawl webpages and make semantic connections

Extractiv screenshot

Here’s another data analysis tool which is worth keeping an eye on. Extractiv “lets you transform unstructured web content into highly-structured semantic data.” Eyes glazing over? Okay, over to ReadWriteWeb:

“To test Extractive, I gave the company a collection of more than 500 web domains for the top geolocation blogs online and asked its technology to sort for all appearances of the word “ESRI.” (The name of the leading vendor in the geolocation market.)

“The resulting output included structured cells describing some person, place or thing, some type of relationship it had with the word ESRI and the URL where the words appeared together. It was thus sortable and ready for my analysis.

“The task was partially completed before being rate limited due to my submitting so many links from the same domain. More than 125,000 pages were analyzed, 762 documents were found that included my keyword ESRI and about 400 relations were discovered (including duplicates). What kinds of patterns of relations will I discover by sorting all this data in a spreadsheet or otherwise? I can’t wait to find out.”

What that means in even plainer language is that Extractiv will crawl thousands of webpages to identify relationships and attributes for a particular subject.

This has obvious applications for investigative journalists: give the software a name (of a person or company, for example) and a set of base domains (such as news websites, specialist publications and blogs, industry sites, etc.) and set it going. At the end you’ll have a broad picture of what other organisations and people have been connected with that person or company. Relationships you can ask it to identify include relationships, ownership, former names, telephone numbers, companies worked for, worked with, and job positions.

It won’t answer your questions, but it will suggest some avenues of enquiry, and potential sources of information. And all within an hour.

Time and cost

ReadWriteWeb reports that the process above took around an hour “and would have cost me less than $1, after a $99 monthly subscription fee. The next level of subscription would have been performed faster and with more simultaneous processes running at a base rate of $250 per month.”

As they say, the tool represents “commodity level, DIY analysis of bulk data produced by user generated or other content, sortable for pattern detection and soon, Extractiv says, sentiment analysis.”

Which is nice.

Data and the future of journalism panel discussion: Linked Data London

Tonight I had the pleasure of chairing an extremely informative panel discussion on data and the future of journalism at the first London Linked Data Meetup. On the panel were:

What follows is a series of notes from the discussion, which I hope are of some use.

For a primer on Linked Data there is A Skim-Read Introduction to Linked DataLinked Data: The Story So Far PDF) by Tom Heath, Christian Bizer and Berners-Lee; and this TED video by Sir Tim Berners-Lee (who was on the panel before this one).

To set some brief context, I talked about how 2009 was, for me, a key year in data and journalism – largely because it has been a year of crisis in both publishing and government. The seminal point in all of this has been the MPs’ expenses story, which both demonstrated the power of data in journalism, and the need for transparency from government – for example, the government appointment of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, seeking developers to suggest things to do with public data, and the imminent launch of Data.gov.uk around the same issue.

Even before then the New York Times and Guardian both launched APIs at the beginning of the year, MSN Local and the BBC have both been working with Wikipedia and we’ve seen the launch of a number of startups and mashups around data including Timetric, Verifiable, BeVocal, OpenlyLocal, MashTheState, the open source release of Everyblock, and Mapumental.

Q: What are the implications of paywalls for Linked Data?

The general view was that Linked Data – specifically standards like RDF – would allow users and organisations to access information about content even if they couldn’t access the content itself. To give a concrete example, rather than linking to a ‘wall’ that simply requires payment, it would be clearer what the content beyond that wall related to (e.g. key people, organisations, author, etc.)

Leigh Dodds felt that using standards like RDF would allow organisations to more effectively package content in commercially attractive ways, e.g. ‘everything about this organisation’.

Q: What can bloggers do to tap into the potential of Linked Data?

This drew some blank responses, but Leigh Dodds was most forthright, arguing that the onus lay with developers to do things that would make it easier for bloggers to, for example, visualise data. He also pointed out that currently if someone does something with data it is not possible to track that back to the source and that better tools would allow, effectively, an equivalent of pingback for data included in charts (e.g. the person who created the data would know that it had been used, as could others).

Q: Given that the problem for publishing lies in advertising rather than content, how can Linked Data help solve that?

Dan Brickley suggested that OAuth technologies (where you use a single login identity for multiple sites that contains information about your social connections, rather than creating a new ‘identity’ for each) would allow users to specify more specifically how they experience content, for instance: ‘I only want to see article comments by users who are also my Facebook and Twitter friends.’

The same technology would allow for more personalised, and therefore more lucrative, advertising.

John O’Donovan felt the same could be said about content itself – more accurate data about content would allow for more specific selling of advertising.

Martin Belam quoted James Cridland on radio: “[The different operators] agree on technology but compete on content”. The same was true of advertising but the advertising and news industries needed to be more active in defining common standards.

Leigh Dodds pointed out that semantic data was already being used by companies serving advertising.

Other notes

I asked members of the audience who they felt were the heroes and villains of Linked Data in the news industry. The Guardian and BBC came out well – The Daily Mail were named as repeat offenders who would simply refer to “a study” and not say which, nor link to it.

Martin Belam pointed out that The Guardian is increasingly asking itself ‘How will that look through an API’ when producing content, representing a key shift in editorial thinking. If users of the platform are swallowing up significant bandwidth or driving significant traffic then that would probably warrant talking to them about more formal relationships (either customer-provider or partners).

A number of references were made to the problem of provenance – being able to identify where a statement came from. Dan Brickley specifically spoke of the problem with identifying the source of Twitter retweets.

Dan also felt that the problem of journalists not linking would be solved by technology. In conversation previously, he also talked of “subject-based linking” and the impact of SKOS and linked data style identifiers. He saw a problem in that, while new articles might link to older reports on the same issue, older reports were not updated with links to the new updates. Tagging individual articles was problematic in that you then had the equivalent of an overflowing inbox.

(I’ve invited all 4 participants to correct any errors and add anything I’ve missed)

Finally, here’s a bit of video from the very last question addressed in the discussion (filmed with thanks by @countculture):

Linked Data London 090909 from Paul Bradshaw on Vimeo.

Elsevier’s ‘Article of the Future’ resembles websites of the past

Elsevier, the Dutch scientific publisher, has announced details of their grandly titled Article of the Future project.  Their prototypes, published at http://beta.cell.com, are the result of what Emilie Marcus, Editor in Chief, Cell Press called,

“…a challenge to redesign from scratch how to most effectively structure and present the content of a traditional scientific article in an online environment.”

Prototypes
Several things strike me about the prototypes — and let’s bear in mind that these are prototypes, and so are likely to change based on feedback from users in the scientific community and elsewhere; but also that they are published prototypes, and so by definition are completely open for comment — the most obvious being their remarkable lack of futuristic qualities.  Instead, the prototypes resemble an enthusiastic bash at a multimedia-infused online encyclopaedia circa 1997, when multimedia was still a buzzword, or such as you might have found on a CD-ROM magazine cover mounted giveaway around the same time. Continue reading

The services of the ‘semantic web’

Many of the services that are being developed as part of the ‘semantic web’ are necessarily works in progress, but they all contribute to extending the success of this burgeoning area of technology. There are plenty more popping up all the time, but for the purposes of this post I have loosely grouped some prominent sites into specialities – social networking, search and browsing – before briefly explaining their uses.

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The next step to the ‘semantic web’

There are billions of pages of unsorted and unclassified information online, which make up millions of terabytes of data with almost no organisation.  It is not necessarily true that some of this information is valuable whilst some is worthless, that’s just a judgement for who desires it.  At the moment, the most common way to access any information is through the hegemonic search engines which act as an entry point.

Yet, despite Google’s dominace of the market and culture, the methodology of search still isn’t satisfactory.  Leading technologists see the next stage of development coming, where computers will become capable of effectively analysing and understanding data rather than just presenting it to us.  Search engine optimisation will eventually be replaced by the ‘semantic web’.

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Kitemarks to save the news industry? Q&A with Andrew Currah

Reuters recently published a report entitled: ‘What’s Happening to Our News: An investigation into the likely impact of the digital revolution on the economics of news publishing in the UK‘. In it author Andrew Currah provides an overview of the situation facing UK publishers, and 3 broad suggestions as to ways forward – namely, kitemarks, public support, and digital literacy education.

The kitemark idea seems to have stirred up the most fuss. In the first of a series of email exchanges I asked Currah how he saw this making any difference to consumption of newspapers, and how it could work in practice. This is his response:

Yes, the kitemark idea has triggered quite a response… Unfortunately, as the discussion online suggests, the term has implied to many a top-down, centralised system of certification which would lead to some form of
‘apartheid’ between bloggers and journalists. Continue reading
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