The following two links won’t do much if you click them now, but if you drag them to your bookmarks toolbar, clicking the first one there while viewing a Wikipedia page will take you to the corresponding DBpedia page, and clicking the second while viewing the Freebase page for a particular topic will take you to the page full of RDF for that topic.

When my TopQuadrant colleague Dean Allemang referred to the use of DBpedia as a controlled vocabulary, I said “Huh?” He helped me to realize that if you and I want to refer to the same person, place, or thing, but there’s a chance that we might use different names for it, DBpedia’s URI for it might make the best identifier for us to both use. For example, if you refer to the nineteenth-century American president and Civil War general Ulysses S. Grant and I refer to him as…

In my first few glances at SKOS eXtension for Labels, I didn’t quite get it. Recently, though, while looking at a client’s requirements document at TopQuadrant, when I saw that they wanted to attach metadata to individual terms, I started modeling this in my head and then I realized I didn’t need to: SKOS-XL already had.

In an ITConversations podcast interview with Tim O’Reilly and John Batelle, Mark Zuckerberg describes a recent conversation with a teenage relative of his girlfriend. Those of us with teenage kids know that they consider email a bit old-fashioned, and this girl explained to Zuckerberg why: because it’s so slow. He was puzzled, thinking that email is practically instantaneous; why was it slow? Because, the girl replied, it’s slow to create a message. You look up someone’s…