I call this a diary rather than a blog. It's the page where I add or link to new stuff with content arranged in date order, rather than where I regularly write short pieces on what I'm doing… although some of this does read rather like a blog.
As is so often the ase, I'm working on an EU project proposal at the moment and I want to be able to show the countries covered by the project. To do that I needed a map that I could just click the relevant countries and they'd be filled in, then I could copy and paste that into the proposal. My guess is such tools already exist on the Web but I wanted to make my own.
It needs writing up but it's all working now so I may as well publish it and add the commentary later.
Hmm … rights expression languages, how to attach metadata to lots of online resources at once, machine readable metadata … those themes have a familiar ring to them. The IPTC - the membership organisation for news agencies that does a lot of technical standards work including rNews - has invited me* to speak at their event in Amsterdam, something I'm looking forward to. For good reason, licences on the Web are almost synonymous with Creative Commons but how can licences be included in a modern, high capacity workflow? I need to talk to various colleagues and get a full picture of the space but I can't help but think that POWDER just might have a role to play here.
* Actually the invitation first went to Ivan Herman but he passed it to me.
My role at W3C means I spend a lot of time thinking and talking about open data (and I wish I had more time to actually do something practical about it/with it to). The role played by geospatial data is critical in this. Obviously there are the base maps, but so many data sets refer to specific locations, regions, postcodes etc. Applications that use open data very often depend on geospatial data. Things like the UK Crime Map are the post-children of the open data movement.
So I'm pleased to have been invited to contribute to the imaGIne conference - an event that provides the first of several trips to Dublin this half year as Ireland is the current holder of the EU Presidency. I'll be reviewing how GI data is currently used on the Web and what we need to do to make it easier.
Today is my oldest friend's birthday.
I've just finished a very throught provoking book: C J Sansom's Dominion. By coincidence, this week saw the UK Independence Party gain its highest poll rating in a Westmister byelection. Scarily the two go together.
2013-02-19 — a date of staggering unimportance except that it happens to be the day on which I have a zero at the end of my age.
I've used the same picture as my online image/avatar since it was taken, I think in 2003. Hmm … maybe it's time to update it. This new one was taken on Saturday at a reunion for staff of Radio Orwell. Photo credit is due to Wendy Bailey.
I suppose I ought to update relevant pages now in different corners of the Web. Gah! But hey … I kept the same URI and the images are identical in size so where the old was was referred to rather than copied, it's just been updated automatically.
And be honest — you don't look the same as you did 10 years ago either.
It's hardly surprising that someone who makes a living as a techie enjoys reading science fiction novels — but I've got a thing about not just the novels but their first editions … and having complete sets of them.
Just what would happen if Dan Brickley fell under a bus? It's a question that comes up a lot.
At the end of last year I worked with the team at PwC to study how different public authorities were tackling the creation and publication of URI sets designed to be persistent over the long term. This is a crucial part of the open data infrastructure and different countries have gone about it in slightly different ways although there is a lot of commonality - which is reassuring. The original document is published as a PDF on the EC's Joinup Platform. I wanted a Web version …
The EC quietly made the beta version of its data portal public on the night before Christmas. I took a quick look.