Module 07 - TEDTalks

Tim Berners-Lee

I’ve seen this before and I still have the same question:

What – SPECIFICALLY – do I do to make my data available?

In a later video, Berners-Lee gives some examples of mashups created from linked data (one was bicycle crashes in the London area) and he said, “Here's more data… put out by the U.K. government, and because they put it up using the Linked Data standards, then a user could just make a map, just by clicking.”

That sounds great but I need a tutorial for how to offer data using “Linked Data standards”. I’m not sure I have any data that people want but I’m happy to share a lot of data if I knew how and where to put it.

I’m sure the answers are available and W3C’s page on the semantic web and linked data is probably a good place to start. I’ll be sure to check it out and try to learn from it but I wonder if any of my colleagues in this course have some specific information for me that would help me get moving on this?

I have the same question about FRBR as I asked above about making my raw data available. What do I do? Do I catalog differently? Do I download FRBR records from somewhere? Do I have to create the links myself? Do they go in a MARC record?

With RAW DATA NOW and with FRBR, I’m ready to participate… except that I don’t know how…

Pattie Maes

This was wonderful and I was glad to see the audience responding so positively. It is important to remember that this was from early 2009. We now have Google Glass – well, I don’t have it but I wish I did! – but some of the things shown in Maes’ demo are beyond what I’ve seen Glass do. I like that she calls this “sixth sense” technology because that’s how I’ve always thought about this kind of technology. I certainly want to make myself available for any wearable computing devices and I’m even willing to have devices implanted in my brain once they become available. Humans have poor vision compared to eagles and a poor sense of smell compared to dogs and perhaps someday we will have the capability to improve these senses quickly through technology instead of slowly (if at all) through evolution.

I appreciated that Maes recognized (as did the audience) that there were some privacy issues with having information about people so readily available. I’m curious, though, if a device like this were to only gather other publicly available information, couldn’t people protect themselves by just not sharing private information? Does anyone else have a Facebook friend that posts about their colonoscopy in one post and about Facebook’s lack of privacy in the next one? I do want to be sensitive to all privacy issues, but I would like to see devices like these force the issue so people can gain more insight into what they are already making available.