Steve Flinter’s blog

One part of the DERI technology suite is an ontology/vocabulary called SIOC, an effort led by John Breslin.

While in China earlier this year at the WWW 2008 conference, John mentioned that DERI was preparing to export all of the boards.ie data in SIOC format, and to run a competition for the most imaginative use/mashup of that data.

Well, on his blog, John has just announced that competition. If you have any interest in the semantic or programmable web, check it out.

On a related note, John has mentioned that he has been appointed to a faculty position within NUIG. Best of luck with the new job!

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Mike Butcher, of TechCrunch UK fame (who incidentally also writes a column in the Friday Irish Times), has written up a brief piece on how London needs to emulate Dublin’s Digital Hub.

To quote:

Fantastic. Totally and utterly fantastic.

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Check out this video of an excellent speech given by Malcolm Gladwell from a recent New Yorker conference.

In it he mentions his new book on the mismatch problem - the problem of matching skills with the analysis of those skills. Coming out in November, apparently. I’m there.

With thanks to Guy Kawasaki.

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Recently, SFI started a consultation process on open access for SFI funded research.

STM, the international association of scientific, technical and medical publishers, has recently published its response to this proposed policy.

I haven’t studied the open access movement too much, but will have to follow up on this some more.

With thanks to Open Access News.

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Just came across an article entitled Tangler: An API for Discussion Forums in programmableweb which talks about a new API for discussion forums.

I wonder how this relates to the SIOC ontology developed at DERI?

While diversity and multiple approaches are great, one of the real benefits of the programmable web (and indeed programming in general) has got to be standardisation and predictability.

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Joe Drumgoole’s start-up putplace got a great mention on Read/Write Web a few days ago, nicely co-inciding with their public launch.

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This is a screencast about a user’s difficulties and indeed extreme frustration with using OmniFocus.

Absolutely hilarious - check it out.

With thanks to Daring Fireball.

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Silicon Republic is reporting that the National Digital Research Centre (NDRC) has just funded its first tranche of projects.

There’s nothing on the NDRC website at the moment, but I presume that the announcement there will follow shortly. NDRC is an interesting body - it’s a private company, wholly owned by the Government, and set up to facilitate what they call “translational research” projects. Translational research is a term often reserved for translating medical research into clinical practice. In the case of NDRC, they are using the term much more broadly - namely as the process of translating academic, basic research into industry projects and to fulfil an industry need.

While not directly associated with SFI, many of the researchers involved with NDRC are also SFI Principal Investigators. It will be very interesting to watch NDRC as these projects develop and evolve.

Well done to Ben and his team in getting the first few projects out the door.

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By way of Damien and Eoin, I’ve learned that Prof. Ferdinand von Prondzynski of Dublin City University has started his own blog.

This is, as far as I know, the first Irish University president blogger, but hopefully we’ll see many (or at least six) more.

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In my last post, I mentioned that I was considering moving back to WordPress. We’ll I’ve gone ahead and done it.

Unfortunately, mephisto was getting too frustrating to use, and in particular the lack of a webservice API to allowing blogging clients to post made it untenable to continue.

To effect the port I followed the instructions in this post. In general, it all went fine, and without a problem. I have noticed a few caveats which will require a bit of manual work:

• mephisto does not have the concept of a page, in the same way that WordPress does. When you convert the one post categories in mephisto, these show up as regular posts in WP. I had to manually create WP pages, and cut and past the content in.
• I will have to manually move the assets (images) over from mephisto to WP. In fact, I’ll probably move them to a 3rd party (e.g. Flickr or Smugmug), and not have to deal with porting them again.

Other than those relatively minor niggles, everything appears to have gone just fine. Many thanks to those who wrote the relevant scripts.

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