I got the chance to attend the 2nd London Linked Data Meetup that was co-located with dev8d last week, which turned out to be a whole lot of fun. I figured if I waited long enough other people would save me from having to write a good summary/discussion of the event…and they have: thanks Pete Johnston, Ben Summers, Sheila Macneill, Martin Belam and Frankie Roberto.

A few months ago I took part in a discussion on the pedantic-web list, which started out as a relatively simple question about FOAF usage, and quickly evolved into a conversation about terms people use when talking about Linked Data, and more generally the Web.

I ended up having a very helpful off-list email exchange with Richard Cyganiak (one of the architects of the Linked Data pattern) about some trouble I’ve had understanding what Information Resources and Documents are in the context of Web Architecture. The trouble I had was in determining whether or not a collection of physical newspaper pages I was helping put on the web were Information Resources or not. I needed to know because I wanted to identify the newspaper pages with URIs, and describe them as Linked Data…and the resolvability of these URIs was largely dependent on how I chose to answer the question.

In my previous blog post I was trying to demonstrate the virtues of data.gov.uk making the descriptions of their datasets available as RDFa. Just this morning I learned from Mark Birbeck that the folks down under at data.australia.gov.au did this last October!

For example this page describing a dataset for public Internet locations has this RDF metadata inside it: