I’ve been thinking about politics quite a lot recently, primarily due to the forthcoming referendum on the UK voting system (5th May 2011).

It seems to me that the Conservatives who have promoted the idea of “Big Society” since before the election in 2010, they implemented this when they came into office in a Coalition with the Liberal Democrats (who have promoted a similar concept of “Community Politics“). Both Big Society and Community Politics promote the idea of Local Community Politics, and transferring some power from Central Government to Local Government. [1]

Our General Election currently uses the First-Past-The-Post system, meaning that the candidate with the most votes wins - but this means that less they can win with less than 50% support from their local constituency (and therefore more than 50% of the voters have not supported that candidate). This doesn’t seem right. This is why the Liberal Democrats, when they entered into the coalition, requested the referendum on a new voting system - and the Alternative Vote (Instant Runoff) system was chosen… which allows voters to rank their choices in order of preference. This means that when a candidate has received less than 50% of the vote then the voters which have their first choice as the lowest winners get their second choices counted (and this works up until a candidate has received more than 50% support). I’ve blogged about this in the past (see: “Alternative Vote Referendum UK 2011“) (also see the About My Vote page on the Referendum for the official detail).

It seems to me that if we are to have a truly “Big Society” where local work is fully supported and heard, then both Councillors in Local Government and MPs in Central Government should be elected in a system where they always receive more than 50% of the support of their local wards/constituency. [2]

Footnote

1. As an aside it seems that both Big Society (of the Tories) and Community Politics (of the LibDems and Greens) seem to support “mutualism” and “cooperatives“. It makes you wonder why the Co-operative Party is so aligned with the Labour Party which don’t seem to like the ideas within Big Society or Community Politics.
2. David Cameron and his Conservatives conceived the Big Society idea, yet they support the old ways of First Past The Post - it just doesn’t make sense. The Liberal Democrats, Labour Party, Green Party and UKIP all officially support the change to the Alternative Vote system (via the Yes Campaign). The AV system might not be perfect, but it is a step in the right direction. The Conservatives officially support the First Past the Post system (via the No Campaign), with a minority of the Labour Party MPs also supporting a “No” vote.

I decided to give an overview of the best books that you can buy to make yourself well-rounded in terms of Linked Data, the Semantic Web and the Web of Data.

Knowledge Working

Let us first start off with what I like to call “Knowledge Working”, this is essentially the realm of technical knowledge-management and knowledge acquisition/modelling. There are three books that I would promote in this respect.

The first is Information Systems Development: Methodologies, Techniques and Tools written by Avison & Fitzgerald. This book, although it gets down and dirty with some technical detail, can be incredibly useful for an overview to information systems and knowledge design in general.

The second is Knowledge Engineering and Management: The CommonKADS Methodology (A Bradford book) by Guus Schreiber et al (aka the CommonKADS team). I was taught from this book on one of my modules during my undergraduate degree, it is less “programmer-based” than the Avison & Fitzgerald book, but has very useful information about acquisition, modelling and analysis of knowledge. I highly recommend this, particularly as it is incredibly useful when coupled with Semantic Web technology.

The third book is a new book that we’re waiting to have the second edition of (at the time of writing it was estimated to be available 13th July 2011). This book is Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist: Effective Modeling in RDFS and OWL by Allemang & Hendler (first edition here). Allemang and Hendler are heavyweights in the Semantic Web world, with Allemang being chief scientist at TopQuadrant and Hendler being one of the writers of the earliest and most well known articles on “The Semantic Web” (New Scientist: 2001 with Berners-Lee and Lassila). This book is quite technical in places, but it does focus on ontologies and metadata (and metametadata?).

Web Science

Web Science is another important area of interest, particularly in the earlier stages of Linked Data and Semantic Web development and actually applying the theory into practice.

The earliest official book by the Web Science Trust team was A Framework for Web Science (Foundations and Trends in Web Science) by Berners-Lee et al. This is quite an expensive book, and quite academic in style, but useful nonetheless.

You may want to look at something a little cheaper, something a little more practical too. This is where The Web’s Awake: An Introduction to the Field of Web Science and the Concept of Web Life by Tetlow comes in. This interesting book takes a common sense approach to Web Science, I would certainly recommend it.

Tools and Techniques: The Evolution from the Semantic Web to Linked Data

There are the classics such as Practical RDF by Powers and A Semantic Web Primer by Antoniou and van Harmelen. There are introductory books such as Semantic Web For Dummies by Pollock. These are all good foundational books which are recommended, but they often don’t get to the essence of the Semantic Web and especially not Linked Data.

For the essential Semantic Web and Linked Data we may want to look at: Programming the Semantic Web by Segaran (who also authored the wonderful Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications) et al. Semantic Web Programming
by Hebeler (of BBN Technologies) et al. Plus there are the quite useful, although very specific, books Linking Enterprise Data and Linked Data: Evolving the Web into a Global Data Space (Synthesis Lectures on the Semantic Web, Theory and Technology) (which is also available free at “Linked Data by Heath and Bizer” ( https://linkeddatabook.com/ ) ).

Other topics of interest

There are of course other areas of interest which are very relevant to true Linked Data and Semantic Web, these include:

• Semantic Networks and Frames - from the fields of logic and artificial intelligence. This also inspired Object-Oriented theory.
• Pointers and References - yep the ones from programming (such as in C++).
• HyperText Transfer Protocol
• Graph Theory

I hope this list of interesting and useful books is handy, please do comment if you have any other books that you wish to share with us.

Thank you,

Daniel

Many moons ago I wrote a blog post detailing how RDF (one of the semantic web modelling frameworks) is format agnostic, in other words you can write RDF in various languages. These languages, or formats, may include XML (as “RDF/XML“), Turtle (as “RDF/TTL“), Notation 3 (as “RDF/N3“), RDFa (as “XHTML-RDFa“) and N-Triples (as “RDF/NT“) [1].

“Linked Data” (the modern Data Web concept) partly started life as an extension to the Semantic Web, basically increasing meaning to data in one space using outbound (and/or inbound) links to data in another space. But the important thing to grasp is that Linked Data is not format dependent, nor is it model dependent as some may believe! [2]

RDF does not have to be used to achieve “Linked Data”. RDF can obviously help in some cases, but in some cases when the data is either very simple or very domain-centric we don’t want to spend too much time trying to make our data fit into (or out of!) the RDF model. Linked Data could very easily be in some other format, such as CSV, JSON, RSS, Atom or even the Microsoft Collection XML format. Whatever data we are dealing with, we must carefully consider:

• What is the right model/framework for the knowledge?
• What is the right format for the data?
• How it fits in with the Linked Data in general?
• How to make it semantic/meaningful by using objective links and subjective lenses?
• How it is going to be used, and whether it needs to be automatically converted to other formats or frameworks (and by doing so, does it (and is it ok to) lose any data and/or semantics)?

It is very much a Knowledge Engineering task

Linked Data is as simple as:

I hope that this blog post makes some kind of sense, as I believe Linked Data is one of the ways that we can progress the web in a good direction.

Daniel

On the 5th May 2011 the United Kingdom will vote in a referendum to decide whether to change from the First-Past-The-Post (FPTP) system to the Alternative Vote (AV) system. Here is my blog post about why I truly believe that the Alternative Vote would be good for the United Kingdom.

Why I will vote “Yes” to the Alternative Vote

AV is more democratic than FPTP

Imagine that you’re living in a place where the Fictional Party MP that was elected by FPTP received less than 50% of the overall vote, that actually means that the majority voted for one of the other parties. This means that more than 50% of the people did not want the Fictional Party to get in. The AV system allows each voter to have a second and third choice, therefore if their first choice just doesn’t have enough support and no one receives the majority, then second choices will count (and then third choices). This is surely more democratic. Of course, in our example the Fictional Party could still become elected through the boost of the second choices, but it allows those people who didn’t get a real say to now have a second chance to say what they would prefer. Lets go through this step by step (I’ve made it top four parties and left out 10% of the votes, just to make things a little clearer to visualise):

1. Alpha Party receives 43% of the first-choice votes
2. Bene Party receives 40% of the first-choice votes
3. Caza Party receives 6% of the first-choice votes
4. Fictional Party receives 1% of the first-choice votes

The above would lead to a count of the second-choice votes of those who voted for the Fictional Party. If they all had the Alpha Party as their second choice then the Alpha Party would be boosted up to 44%, still not 50%. If the Caza Party then all voted for the Alpha Party with their second votes then the Alpha Party would hit the 50% mark and democracy happens. If however those who voted for the Fictional Party and the Caza Party voted for the Bene Party as their second choice then Bene would have 47% and would be a higher percentage than the Alpha Party, but it still wouldn’t hit the 50% mark. So the Alpha Party voters second choice would kick into play, and if 3% of the voters voted for Bene Party as second choice then the Bene Party would hit their 50% mark, thereby allowing the Bene Party to win that constituency as it represents what the majority would prefer. Democracy in action!

Of course the above is just describing two very particular scenarios, and although either the above may happen its actually more likely that the shift of power would not be hugely significant, however it does mean that MPs will need to fight a bit more for their constituencies in places that they’ve only just won. This is a good thing.

AV is just as simple as FPTP

AV is simple for the voters, it is just a case of marking 1, 2 and 3 on the voting slip. If you don’t want to have a 2nd or 3rd choice, then just don’t place them on there - you can simply have a first choice if you wish (a bit like FPTP-style voting). It won’t require any fancy machinery and will be paper based and will use a manual counting system (just as FPTP has got currently) [1] [2].

A chance to progress our voting system

I truly believe that if we vote yes to Alternative Vote then we are progressing. Not only that, but if we vote no in this referendum then I believe that we’re less likely to have a referendum to further refine the voting process (say to AV+ or Proportional Representation), or have direct democracy referendums in the future. Our last national (i.e. UK) direct democracy referendum was in 1975 and was related to the UKs membership of the European Community. Since the new government came into play we’ve had a rather successful welsh-localised referendum on the devolution of Welsh Assembly, this forthcoming referendum on voting, and they will have a referendum for all future EU treaties that are related to powers of EU members (specifically UK) in the EU.

Who is supporting the change to Alternative Vote

• Campaigns:
  • There is a “Yes to Fairer Votes Campaign“, which is sponsored by (just to name a few) Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, Electoral Reform Society, The Electoral Commission and Make Votes Count. It is politically supported by some members of parliament and many of the general public.
• Parties officially supporting a “yes” vote:
  • The Liberal Democrats
  • The Labour Party
  • The Green Party of England and Wales
  • The Alliance Party in Northern Ireland
  • The Social Democratic and Labour Party in Northern Ireland
• I’m not particularly interested in celebrity-ism, but for those who are. The following celebs are in favour of the Alternative Vote:
  • Eddie Izzard
  • Tony Robinson
  • John O’Farrell
  • Richard Wilson
  • Kriss Akabusi
  • Jonathan Ross
  • John Cleese
  • Chris Addison
  • Nicholas Hoult
  • David Schneider
  • Greg Dyke
  • Billy Bragg

Please do note that there are also a group of Tory MPs who are for the change to the Alternative Vote system, even though the party itself is against it.[3]

The Plea

I humbly request that those who are entitled to vote in the United Kingdom Referendum please do vote “Yes” for the Alternative Vote system. The referendum is on the 5th May 2011, polling cards will be around soon if you haven’t got them yet (contact your council if you haven’t received one in a couple of weeks), polling stations should be close by and are usually open from about 7am until about 10pm. So those who can, please do vote “Yes” for a fairer vote system as its a step in the right direction.

Footnotes

1. As indicated in the Independent Newspaper (“Voting reform will not cause more cuts, Treasury insists“) and the Yes to Fairer Votes
2. If the government eventually did go to machine-based counting systems then it would happen no matter what the voting system employed, and is certainly not related to this referendum.
3. Please see the “Conservative Action for Political Reform group” who wrote a press release welcoming the change to AV. The centre-right think tank “ResPublica” are also supporting the change to AV.

QUICK UPDATE - 19th April 2011

Many people have been saying that First Past The Post is traditional and British… well just because something is traditional doesn’t make it right (e.g. slavery), and just because something is British doesn’t mean people have to like it (e.g. jellied eels).