To all my readers,

Many of you know that I’ve been working with/for OpenLink Software for a while now as a Professional Services Consultant in the realm of Linked Data and particularly in the UK and Europe. Well, I would like to announce the launch of two commercial/business orientated seminars that I will be running for OpenLink Software which will be running in late November 2011 in London (England):

• “Linked Data - Commercial Perspective for Strategic Decision Makers and Executives” is an exciting new seminar for Strategic Decision Makers, Executives, Investors, Directors, Management, CxOs etc. It will cover, in non-technical fashion, how Linked Data is simple, its rich and mature history, its business opportunities, its business challenges and its societal implications.
  • Visit https://www.eventbrite.com/event/2069248177 to register your interest in the “Linked Data - Commercial Perspective for Strategic Decision Makers and Executives” seminar. Late November 2011 in London.
• “Linked Data - Commercial Perspective for Technologists” is also an exciting seminar, which is specifically tailored for technologists of any level (Technical Directors, Senior or Junior Programmers, Analysts, Knowledge Engineers, Knowledge Managers, Information Architects, Web Developers). It will be introductory in style, and will cover the technical areas of the rich historic tapestry of Linked Data, it will cover some of the more technical issues that Linked Data solves and it also covers the simplicity of implementing Linked Data.
  • Visit https://www.eventbrite.com/event/2405888076 to register your interest in the “Linked Data - Commercial Perspective for Technologists” seminar. Late November 2011 in London.

If you are interested in attending then please do register your interest on the eventbrite pages listed above. Once you have registered interest you will receive updates about the date, time, location and the cost of the seminars. Please note that as commercially-orientated seminars, these seminars will cost - registering interest however does not cost and will not commit you to purchasing a standard ticket.

If you would like to get in touch with me directly about these seminars, or any of my work with OpenLink Software, then please do so by email: dlewis@openlinksw.com

I look forward to hearing your thoughts on the course, and I hope to see some of you at my seminars in the future.

Daniel Lewis

• Professional Services Consultant for OpenLink Software
• Email: dlewis@openlinksw.com

Facebook, the home of profiles for People, Comments, Groups, Pages, Games and Interests. It has traditionally been a very closed wall system with only the ability to link internally (i.e. Many Facebook People Profiles link to a Facebook Group Profile), or link outward (i.e. this Person gave this comment about this website).

However, this is slowly changing, we now see:

• “Facebook Like” buttons on websites around the web, allowing a Facebook user to easily say that they like a page.
• “Facebook Comments” on websites rather than being only within Facebook itself. For instance, the commenting system on Techcrunch.com is provided by the Facebook Comments system.
• The Social Graph API allowing developers to use the proprietary schema built using the JSON language. This effectively, using a few mappings, allows people to link into the Facebook system - and potentially grab the data (for data portability, or query purposes)

You see that all this Facebook data is starting to whirl around the world-wide-web in an increasingly “open” fashion. So we should start using it for our own good, and not just for the good of the Facebook Corporatation.

So how can we do this? The first way is to see what you can do with the new RDF/Turtle API interface that Facebook has developed. If you have curl installed then you’ll be able to do this:

curl -L -H ‘Accept: text/turtle’ graph.facebook.com/danieljohnlewis

Which returns the results:

@prefix rdf: <https://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#> .
@prefix rdfs: <https://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#> .
@prefix owl: <https://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#> .
@prefix xsd: <https://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#> .
@prefix api: <tag:graph.facebook.com,2011:/> .
@prefix og: <https://ogp.me/ns#> .
@prefix fb: <https://ogp.me/ns/fb#> .
@prefix : <https://graph.facebook.com/schema/~/> .
@prefix user: <https://graph.facebook.com/schema/user#> .
</277003772#>
user:id "277003772" ;
user:name "Daniel Lewis" ;
user:first_name "Daniel" ;
user:last_name "Lewis" ;
user:link <https://www.facebook.com/danieljohnlewis> ;
user:username "danieljohnlewis" ;
user:gender "male" ;
user:locale "en_GB" .

There are of course other things you can do and “grab” once you’ve used authentication etc. I should also point out that neither the RDF/Turtle format nor the RDF framework is not actually required for “Linked Data”, it is only really the use of URIs/IRIs as dereference-able object identifiers.

However, this is all very developer centric, and wouldn’t make much sense to the average user. So why not plug the Linked Data from Facebook into a Data Exploration engine such as the Virtuoso Description Page view, see my version here:
https://linkeddata.uriburner.com/about/html/http/www.facebook.com/danieljohnlewis

For more information about exploring a Facebook Person Profile using Virtuoso and OpenLink Data Explorer see the documentation: https://ode.openlinksw.com/FacebookPersonProfile.html

In conclusion Facebook, which traditionally has been a data silo is becoming a linkable data set. This is a good thing, granted Facebook does still have many rough edges (particularly regarding privacy/security issues) but hopefully we will see more of a progression into a truly Distributed/Decentralised Data-orientated Web. Facebooks progression into “opening up”, should be a call to many other data-silo/walled-garden type data services to better Facebook by becoming truly user-friendly systems, by opening up their data which is rightfully owned by their users.

[UPDATE - Highly recommend you read the following]

On 30th September my good friend Kingsley Idehen summarised “Facebook and Linked Data” in a wonderfully understandable Google+ Post (available here: https://plus.google.com/112399767740508618350/posts/6cqa1Sxk5KV (last accessed: 13th October 2011 at about 3:30pm BST)). Kingsley highlights how Facebook has given the Linked Data Web a bit of an evolutionary bump, using its Graph URIs and accessibility functions.

I would very highly recommend reading through Kingsleys post, as it seems to make a lot more sense than my own quickly made “quick post” from earlier on.

[/UPDATE]

It has been a while since I last made a useful update to my Vanir Systems Blog… so I thought that I should let you know what has been going on.

In my business life I’ve been incredibly busy working with OpenLink Software, where I am a Professional Services Consultant. I worked for OpenLink Software as a Technology Evangelist back in 2007-2008, I like the company so much that I accepted an offer to work with them again. So here I am as a PS Consultant!

Aside from OpenLink work (which takes up 100% of my full-time work time at the moment), in my spare time I’ve been doing a little bit of website design & development for the Order of The Grail, and some article writing for IBM developerWorks.

I’ve also been getting a lot more involved with my community - taking more of an active role in Church/Religion, Local Politics (North Somerset Liberal Democrats - Wraxall & Long Ashton Ward), the local Transitions Network Group (Transitions Long Ashton) and a new Local Energy Co-operative (ENECO). My “journey” as a “Journeyman of the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists” is going well, and of course I have a few other secular interests which are certainly progressing nicely. This all happens alongside me spending some lovely time with my wonderful wife (Beki) and two cats (Lucy and Ishtar).

It really is a very busy time for me at the moment, and I love it!

:-)

So thats a summary for you! Now I’ve got to get back to improving myself and helping society as best I can.

Daniel

p.s. feel free to get in touch with me:

• About OpenLink Software at my OpenLink Software email address which is: dlewis [at] openlinksw [dot] com
• About Vanir Systems work at my Vanir Systems email address: dlewis [at] vanirsystems [dot] com
• About personal stuff at my personal GMail/GTalk address: danieljohnlewis [at] gmail [dot] com