Let’s talk about Linked Data and LODLAM

We’ve (Conal Tuohy, Anna Gerber, Anne Cregan and Ingrid Mason) just run an Introduction to Linked Data workshop at eResearch Australasia 2012 conference (see wiki for presentations).  I won’t be bringing these fabulous computer scientists with me to NZ sadly to get their dose of great coffee, paua fritters and nice locally made tipples but I will be bringing a growing obsession with linked data with me and I’m looking for the similarly obsessed at the Wellington THATCamp.

A kindly participant in the Linked Data workshop we ran said we faced the challenge of working with a wide range of skill sets: made it hard to workshop but boy we had a good session nonetheless.  Discussions and interest in linked data seems to reflect the domain of eResearch and the conversation goes from the technical to the philosophical, to the very pragmatic and back.

Guess it all boils down to whether linked data as an approach is going to solve problems and help to deliver services that researchers need or want to use.  We are certainly working on that premise in the HuNI virtual lab project.  So that seems like a good topic to work on and possibly we could crowd-source more topics to talk about on the day or via comments here.

btw Conal has managed to expose the Australian Women’s Register (“a growing source of information about Australian women and their organisations”) as a graph.  Yeah – even that word had me flustered.  Think of a network of nodes not bar chart like I did!  The cluster at the top is politicians, the cluster at the bottom are sports-people and the interesting complex set of constellations in the middle are a mix of caring professions and more… lots to be discovered by “distant reading” helped massively by connecting that to “close reading” of the data too.

Australian Women’s Register as a graph | Conal Tuohy | From HuNI virtual laboratory project @HuNIVL

If you’re interested in joining a group working on demonstrators of linked open data, try looking at the lodlam Google group discussions (even join) or follow #linkeddata or #lodlam on Twitter, the LODLAM website or subscribe and keep in touch with the @HuNIVL Humanities Networked Infrastructure virtual lab project (underway in Australia, funded by NeCTAR).

CC-BY 2.0 | 20120108-NodeXL-Twitter-SciFri network graph | Marc_Smith