There’s a wonderful new book available that provides a useful overview of linked data principles and concepts that will help you understand and apply the knowledge you’ve been gathering over the past couple of years.

Seth van Hooland (Associate Professor in the Information and Communication Science Department at the Université Libre de Bruxelles) and Ruben Verborgh (Postdoctoral Researcher in Semantic Hypermedia at Ghent University) have written “Linked Data for Libraries, Archives and Museums: How to Clean, Link and Publish your Metadata.”

This entertaining little video sums up the content nicely.

And here’s the publisher’s blurb:

“This

Today I’m daydreaming of Italy …

“The district of Ravenna lies in the north east of Italy, some 80 km (50 miles) from Bologna, the regional capital of Emilia Romagna. Ravenna is the second largest commune as per land area in Italy.”

If you need a good excuse to travel to Italy this may be the perfect opportunity.

The Summer School LEX programme is taking place in Ravena the first week of September. This is “an intensive 6-day, 8-hour-a-day program, that requires participants’ total dedication and intellectual commitment.”

• September 1-2: Basic Module (an introduction to XML web technologies

It has always been a challenge in suing someone for defamation that the lawsuit may draw more attention to the defamation than it had previously obtained. A fortiori in cyberspace… This seems to have happened (again) recently in France, where a restaurant’s suit against a critic whose negative review featured high in Google’s search results about the restaurant has now replaced the review in the rankings… “In typical Internet style, Google searches for the restaurant now prominently feature articles about it suing [the author].“

The exercise of a right to be forgotten in Europe under the CJEU’s ruling on the . . . [more]

One of the more opaque aspects of learning about linked data can be understanding and using SPARQL to query RDF triple stores. In a recent post to the LODLAM Google group (which originated on the CODE4LIB list) Arwen Hutt (Geisel Library, University of California, San Diego) asked a question about any SPARQL workshops that might be available. He received references to a number of good resources that I thought I’d highlight for anyone interested in learning to SPARQL.

UK Library and IT consultant Owen Stephens suggests his presentation from November, 2013, called, “Selecting with SPARQL: Searching . . . [more]

Occasionally I like to crowd-source an answer to a question here at Slaw as I appreciate the insight and experience that Slaw-yers bring to the table. Today is one of those times when I have such a question that I have been turning over in my mind. Before I pose my question I want to state that I ask it in all earnestness; I also want to preface my question by stating that I am a huge fan and user of Twitter, it is currently one of my top current awareness tools. That being said one thing bothers me a . . . [more]

Years before Edward Snowden obliterated digital innocence, showed us what the “Five Eyes” are really up to, and pulled stakes for the unlikely safe harbour of Moscow’s airport transit zone, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger released his 2009 book Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. In it he urged caution for the “Digital Panopticon”, and warned against the growing trend towards mass surveillance. The Internet, as we now know, never forgets. He made the case for why it should.

Throughout human history, forgetting has been the norm and remembering the exception. Technology, as Mayer-Schönberger, a . . . [more]

Eric Franzon, over on semanticweb.com, has a nice post about a series of videos on semantic web and linked data technologies.

The series is called Build a Small Knowledge Graph and there are three videos:

• Creating and Processing Linked Data

  Jarek Wilkiewicz introduces the reference architecture for support of Schema.org Actions in the context of a specific use case (a music store). The video then focuses on exposing entities using Schema.org markup with JSON-LD.

• Managing Graph Data With Cayley

  Barak Michener introduces graph processing using Cayley, an open source graph database written in Go. Cayley is fast,

On the heels of the European Court of Justice’s decision, discussed on Slaw here and here, to require Google to suppress links to particular web sites that had ‘irrelevant and outdated’ personal information about a complainant, and US courts’ refusal to do the same, the British Columbia Supreme Court has now gone a step further: it has ordered Google to ensure that searches for particular topics or a particular company do not find the company defendant in the action before it.

The principals of the defendant company were accused of stealing trade secrets of the plaintiff and of . . . [more]

Sub Nomine the Sub Nom rule is one of those delightful pieces of legal Latin that I quite enjoy. I like that two words in Latin can effectively sum up a legal thought that takes at least a sentence or two in English. Sub Nom is Latin for “under the name of” or in everyday parlance, “also known as”. The most recent case from the SCC that has caused a stir in legal circles, R v Spencer, 2014 SCC 43 in which the SCC rules that police organizations cannot simply ask ISPs for the IP information of subscribers and . . . [more]

The Canadian Association of Law Libraries List (CALL-L) is an e-mail discussion list fostering an interest in and discussion on law librarianship in Canada. A message went out today from CALL-L list owner/manager Susan Jones at the University of New Brunswick to all subscribers asking us to “opt in” to being on the list.

This measure is being taken to comply with Canada’s new anti-spam legislation coming into force on July 1st. While the list itself is not a commercial vehicle, some of the messages posted may be interpreted as such. From the message to subscribers:

CALL-L is used by

The Supreme Court of Canada has released its judgment in the Spencer case. It held that the police had no legal right to ask an ISP for subscriber information, as that would violate the subscriber’s reasonable expectation of privacy. The type of information that could be gleaned from the information went beyond the mere name and address into browsing practices, i.e. sensitive information in which the subscriber might reasonably expect anonymity.

The section of PIPEDA that allows custodians of data to disclose the data to law enforcement officials without telling the data subject, did not apply where the search . . . [more]

From the start, I’ve wondered how we will navigate in a linked data environment. How will we explore an information space where every data element is linked to every other data element? How will we keep track of where we are and where we’ve been? We won’t have physical cues anymore and the navigation systems we are familiar with grew out of our interaction with those physical cues (e.g. think card catalogue to online catalogue).

I happened on a rather obscurely named blog this week called, “The SemVis Blog.” The subtitle, or catch phrase, is much more telling: . . . [more]