Or, how I got a tasted of Linked Data and wanted more.

I've been noodling about with a variety of semantic web / open data concepts for some time. Most recently, I spoke at Drupalcon DC 2009 on Practical Semantic Web (and why you should care). There's a video of the presentation embedded in that last link, and the presentation is available on SlideShare.

I think I can explain things even more simply: we can place a simple piece of data on a web page - like an address, or marking something as a person. From those source pieces of data, we can link it to ever more pieces of information. Except, instead of just "bare links", these links carry meaning, creating a richer web of content. In my presentation, I used the phrase "RDF is food for robots" - a way to share more info about the visible, human readable information that is already there.

From my point of view, that's already cool enough. But it's still not very *practical*. Why should you care, today? That leads me to open data, in general. The Dev Seed guys in DC have a great example of this in their StumbleSafely site -- it mashes up bars in Washington DC with crime statistics, cross-referenced with time for day, night, and evening data.

We don't have anything like this in Vancouver. What we do have is some interesting data that is beginning to be gathered in Freebase, and more specifically in the Vancouver-specific corner of it, known as vanbase. Looking at the StumbleSafely application, and thinking about some data that I hate to see duplicated over and over again, I came up with the idea of restaurants, and extra information about them.

No, it's not a drug, it's the Semantic Web :P

Freebase is sort of like a structured wiki. In that, anyone can add content to the system. What's different, is that you can also add and define your own "Type" which are a collection of metadata. User generated content is quite common, and Freebase actually sucks in a ton of information from Wikipedia which gives it a huge base of content to start with, but this concept of being able to add/edit/organize higher level structures and metadata is new (tagging aside...).

I had great fun fleshing out entries for Drupal and the Drupal Association, figuring out Company, Software, and People types in the process.

OK, OK, I admit -- filling in the Beer entries for Hacker-Pschorr Weisse and the Hacker-Pschorr Brewery were actually more fun :P