I am very pleased to announce that for the first time my name will be appearing as a co-author of an academic paper! Consuming Linked Data within a Large Educational Organization was written by Fouad Zablith, Mathieu d'Aquin, Stuart Brown and myself and is a full research paper which has been accepted for the Second International Workshop on Consuming Linked Data (COLD 2011) which will be held in Bonn, Germany on October 23rd. The paper discusses the findings of the Lucero project which investigated the uses of Linked Data in educational institutions. My contribution was mainly the use case seen in an earlier post on this site: An HTML5 Leanback TV webapp that brings SPARQL to your living room but the paper is a much wider in scope than my blog post discussing not only use cases but the role of Linked Data principles to avoid the problems of data "silos" often found in large organisations. The paper can be obtained free-of-charge.
open university
Thanks to a rather clever feature of justin.tv, I've been able to pick out a couple of clips from the recent Boxee App Challenge event in San Francisco. In the first clip judge Cali Lewis has some very kind words for our entry and in the second clip Boxee CEO Avner Ronen talks about the OpenCourseWare and Open University apps making some quite interesting points about what sort of content Boxee users are after. OpenCourseWare went on to win the Judges' award signaling a potentially very bright future for education services on interactive TV.
Today is a big day, we find out tonight how well the Open University entry has done in the Boxee App Development challenge. A small team of us had been thinking about big screen (web experiences designed for interactive television to be viewed at about ten feet away) web sites and what an OU experience might be like in such a setting. When the challenge was announced it was a fantastic opportunity to quickly develop something to get ourselves started in this exciting area, so we decided to go for it and in about four weeks went from having nothing to having a fully working application, complete with full user interface and graphic design by Dave Winter, client and server side code by me and communications, testing and creative input by Stuart Brown and Matt Rawlinson. It was hard work which gobbled up a few evenings and weekends but it was worth it.
Back in January I wrote about a piece of software that I think has a very bright future in Boxee makes your TV social. One of the great features of Boxee is that it will take standard podcast feeds and then allow you to enjoy these podcasts through the software and potentially on your TV.