Reviews

Having shipped over a 120,000 boards since their inception in Italy in 2005, Arduino microprocessors are becoming increasingly popular beyond the usual circle of tech heads and dedicated do-it-yourselfers. To help me find out why this may be I talked to Darren Tighe, who is currently working on his own Arduino projects.

The first significant aspect of the Arduino is its accessibility. Darren explains, “ Well it’s a microprocessor and traditionally they come in a little package with a couple of pins on them. To program them, play around with them and learn how to use them you would have to plug it into a programmer... and then unplug it and put it on to whatever project you were working with.
Whereas the arduino uses an Atmel chip which is a fairly common micro-controller but it’s set up for proto-typing. So it gives you a USB port so you can just program directly from the PC and it has lots of in and out ports for the electronics to be attached."

“With the Semantic Web, there’s been a lot of effort in building different technologies, the best ones possible. But it isn’t always the best one possible that is the most useful. You might be very happy with a small subset of things that are easier for developers to pick up and to do something useful for you.”

That was John Breslin, commenting recently on the adoption of Open Graph Protocol by Facebook in April 2010.

There has indeed been a great deal of work and effort in building the Semantic Web - a smorgasbord of technologies such as FOAF, RDFa, OWL, SPARQL, and SIOC, to name just a few. The idea was to step beyond the original Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) that was developed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee in the late eighties.

SIOC is a Social Semantic Web project that originated at DERI, NUI Galway (funded by SFI) and which aims to interlink online communities with semantic technologies. You can read more about SIOC on the Wikipedia page for SIOC or in this paper. But in brief, SIOC provides a set of terms that describe the main concepts in social websites: posts, user accounts, thread structures, reply counts, blogs and microblogs, forums, etc. It can be used for interoperability between social websites, for augmenting search results, for data exchange, for enhanced feed readers, and more. It's also one of the metadata formats used in the forthcoming Drupal 7 content management system, and has been deployed on hundreds of websites including Newsweek.com.

As part of our dissemination activities, I've tried to regularly summarise recent developments in the project so as to give an overview of what's going on and also to help in connecting interested parties. It's been much too long (over a year) since my last report, so this will be a long one! In reverse chronological order, here's a list of recent applications and websites that are using SIOC:

Generated using Wordle.

The Irish Innovation Taskforce's report was launched by Taoiseach Brian Cowen on 11th March, and has been broadly welcomed thus far.

I thought it would be interesting to create a tag cloud based on the report, and also to look at how the report references digital business in Ireland and other linkages to digital technologies.

Metrics/Targets

I attended my first Future of Web Apps conference yesterday when Carsonified's FOWA troupe came to Dublin for a one-day event in Liberty Hall.

I was really looking forward to this event and the talks certainly fulfilled expectations. Blog reports on all presentations (apart from Ryan Carson's whom I missed) will be published next week after some editing.