This Twine, or interest topic, was recommended to me by the platform based on my others interests, an example of the kind of semantic feature that Twine is promising to build towards.

Data Visualization | Twine

What’s in Data.gov?

A recent article by Tim Berners-Lee, “Putting Government Data online“, has attracted significant interest to the datasets published at the US data.gov website. As Berners-Lee discusses the Semantic Web techniques that can be used to get those data into RDF space (something we are now working on), we would like to share our initial investigation of the contents of these government datasets.

Editor’s note: This guest post comes from Jim Hendler, a professor, web researcher, and Semantic Web evangelist working at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. You can see more of his teams’ ongoing research at Tetherless World.

IBM and The Internet of Things

IBM is involved in some very interesting projects at the intersection of two big trends we’ve been tracking in 2009: The Real-time Web and Internet of Things. They have a website devoted to this topic, called A Smarter Planet. As the name implies, it focuses on environmental matters such as energy and food systems. Sensors, RFID tags and real-time messaging software are major parts of IBM’s smarter planet strategy. The catchcry for the site - Instrumented, Interconnected, and Intelligent - is about outfitting the world with sensors and hooking them to the Internet to apply the ‘smarts.’

ReadWriteWeb Interview With Tim Berners-Lee, Part 2: Search Engines, User Interfaces for Data, Wolfram Alpha, And More…

In part 2 of my one-on-one interview with Tim Berners-Lee, we explore a variety of topics relating to Linked Data and the Semantic Web. If you missed it, in Part 1 of the interview we covered the emergence of Linked Data and how it is being used now even by governments.

The federal government’s Data.gov site launched last month with a measly 47 data sets, but it’s on track to make 100,000 data feeds available to the public in programmable form by the middle of June. With the site scaling quickly, the government is already working on “Data.gov version 2.0,” federal CIO Vivek Kundra said in a meeting with journalists Thursday. (via Federal CIO Kundra Looks Forward To Data.Gov 2.0 — Goverment IT — InformationWeek)

Remember not so very long ago how amazed you were that Google could return so many useful search results in just a split-second? Today, that kind of speed isn’t enough for many people. The real-time communications inside social networks and microblogging services such as Facebook, FriendFeed, and most of all Twitter have introduced a new immediacy to online interaction and news. Even Google concedes it’s not yet providing an adequate search experience for such real-time streams of information. (via Collecta Launches *Really* Real-Time Search Engine - BusinessWeek)

IBM® Mashup Center is designed to provide an easy to use business mashup solution, supporting line of business assembly of dynamic situational applications - with the security and governance capabilities IT requires. (via IBM Mashup Center)

At first glance, the site resembles a souped-up RSS feed. Threads, or “twines,” are centered around specific ideas (“social media”), people (“Barack Obama”), and events (“SXSW 2009”), and users fill them with content found around the Web. The site then tracks the articles they add and the topics they follow, and assembles an interest-based personality profile. (via Digg This | Fast Company)