Paul Miller on the Web of Data

Paul visited us today (Paul Miller speaking at UCC) and gave a beautiful presentation on the Web of Data. Literally beautiful. He had worked very hard on preparing it and it flowed imperceptibly from simple beginnings to a current conclusion.
Luckily [*] one of us, Diana, couldn’t be present so I asked Nico if he would mind video-ing the presentation. He’s done this before and I think quite likes it, and I knew that Paul – with his efforts in CC and Open Data – would be supportive. So, assuming it’s been captured OK, we will be able to mount a video as well as the pictures.
In this case the words are as important as the slides, and I won’t try to summarise details. Paul started with something we all knew about and very gradually each of us – at different times – starting learning something new. The message is an attitude of mind rather than a mantra of orientation – so please watch the video.
In the bar afterwards we shared some of our successes and occasional frustrations. Both groups are trying to change parts of the world and the world doesn’t always understand the change. I was impressed to hear how Talis – a solid, worthy, traditional library company – had re-engineered itself to have a dynamic web-oriented group outlook which manages to balance excitement with reality. They’ve put a lot of effort into investing in legal effort to help design their Open Data community licence, and they’re not possessive about it.
Where’s the payoff – none of us know. But there is no doubt that “repositories” – whatever that means will become very important. The first phase of University Institutional Repositories have many of the problems of a first phase, not least that the motivation is often unclear. I’ve not seen the Talis platform, so I’m not commenting – and it may be inappropriate for our sort of area – but I’m keen to make a reverse visit to them. (What’s the currently rather unusual aspect of their website? If you understand it will be obvious).
Note added later [*]: In an awful choice of phrase I didn’t mean that it was lucky that Diana wasn’t there, but because she wasn’t we had decided to video it.