Mark Birbeck

CHECK OUT THE FULL AGENDA HERE

Mark also devised the consultations ontology and wrote the instructions on how to use it in RDFa — you may have seen that it is now mandatory for government departments to mark up their consultations using RDFa.

He has also spoken at Google, Yahoo! and eBay on RDFa, and at various conferences on RDFa, RDF, the semantic web, and such-like.  He even gave a talk to government types in Canberra last year, on RDFa.

RDFa is increasingly becoming relevant for government and, in particular, helps when implementing linked data solutions.  Therefore Mark’s contribution to our conference on April 22nd will be very valuable.

Hugh has more than 30 years experience in Computer Science. He has created two of the most significant practical activities in the Web of Data, sameas.org and rkbexplorer.

As the leading provider of information management and publishing solutions to the public sector, TSO’s experts help to create, structure, capture, enrich and deliver some of the most important government information.

TSO has been at the forefront of working with public sector clients to open up published data.

“TSO is very excited about the drive to greater Government transparency through the open data initiative” commented Richard Dell, CEO of TSO. “Building on TSO’s unrivalled experience in managing public sector websites we are able to provide the tools and services to help our clients make their public data public in line with Government objectives.”

Find out more about TSO…

Christian Heilmann is rather well known in developer circles and travels the world spreading the word about the merits of Web 2.0.  When the UK government launched data.gov.uk Chris was one of the first on the apps case.

Chris will be taking part in our morning open data apps session and will provide an overview of just what’s possible using open government data – and more. 

Just get a load of his background…

“I am a developer evangelist at the Yahoo Developer Network in London, UK. I’ve been web developing professionally for about 13 years and consider it high time we used the web as a data resource and concentrate on usable interfaces rather than making it work like print.

“I write for several blogs (Ajaxian, Smashing Magazine, Think Vitamin) and have published 5 books on Web Development.”

Url (Blog / Homepage):  http://icant.co.uk

Twitter Username:  codepo8

LinkedIn URL:  http://uk.linkedin.com/in/christianheilmann

As heavily trailed, our April event builds upon our inaugural event in October last year and probes, in a lot more detail, what’s happening in terms of open data, and open data based applications.  We’ll also touch on the debate re. open source software in government in our afternoon session. 

At our last event apps developers made clear that opening up Ordnance Survey data was critical.  So we’re delighted that the Ordance Survey will be taking part in our April event.  We’ll also have the perspective of the Hansard Society – and Emma Mulqueeny of the transformational government team will be talking about data.gov.uk and the apps that are beginning to emerge.

Having talked about the platforms, the vision and the government agenda – we’ll then have a look at what the app community is developing.  This will feature companies such as Timetric, itoworld, Ocastalabs, and Yahoo Developer Network. Plus we’re delighted, also, to have Mark Birbeck, an Invited Expert on the W3C’s newly formed RDFa Working Group. 

However, we want to go even further.  So we’re having a panel discussion that focuses on how open data based apps might evolve and meld into social apps: Open Data Meets Social Data Meets Generation Y (OK not a very elegant title but it’ll be a fascinating debate).  In a slight change of plan, that session will be moderated by Matt Warman, Consumer Technology Correspondent for the Telegraph – and will feature speakers such as Andrew Walker from Tweetminster and Gemma Cocker from Tweetie and the Brain. 

We’re also looking at the technologies that might drive  future apps and we’ll touch on open source software and how it might fit into the wider transformational agenda.  So William Heath will be chairing an afternoon session that discusses what’s next after open data and we’ll also have a series of presentations focused on open source software – with speakers from Learning Pool, Dextrous Web, BT and Puffbox – among others. 

So it’ll be a challenging day with some of the keenest brains in open data, government, geekdom, social media and open source.  We’ll have provocative discussions, arguments and presentations. 

Please consider treating yourself and attending the event - plus we have kept the cost absolutely miniscule for an event of this nature.  Watching our broadcast online will be free but you must register (if you haven’t already registered for our previous events). 

We can’t fit many people in to attend the broadcast but we’d like an audience that challenges our speakers on the day.  Also if you attend you stand a very good chance of featuring in our broadcast because, as before, we’ll be having vox pop interviews during the breaks.  Plus you’ll get to network and have a great lunch in a wonderful venue.

Gemma Cocker and her business partners have gone one stage further and founded a consultancy that focuses on Twitter strategy and management – they call it Tweetie and the Brain.

The team lists companies such as the FT within their client list.  Few outfits have a deeper understanding of the impact Twitter is having on the Generation Y connected generation and how we might see the emergence of new hybrid socialised apps in the government sphere. 

We have invited Gemma to participate in our panel on Open Data Meets Social Data Meets Generation Y.  This will discuss what we might see emerging when consultation, social media and open data based apps merge together. 

This session will be chaired by Matt Warman of the Telegraph.  See our agenda for more details.

RSC Publishing Releases Online Publications Platform Powered by Mark Logic

SAN CARLOS, Calif. — March 9, 2010 — Mark Logic Corporation, a leading provider of information infrastructure software, today announced that RSC Publishing, one of the world’s largest publishers of chemical science information, has launched a new beta publications platform built on MarkLogic Server.  For the first time, more than 165 years of Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) content is discoverable and accessible to the chemical science research community through a single search interface.

RSC Publishing^beta is now available online at www.rsc.org/publishingbeta.  This new integrated platform allows RSC authors, readers, and customers to search across approximately 20,000 book chapters, 300,000 journal articles, and nearly 500,000 database records.  The site has faceted browsing that allows for rapid filtering of results and the ability to simultaneously discover related content.  Furthermore, RSC Publishing’s unique design allows users to intuitively navigate the site and find relevant journal, book, and database content quickly.   

Read more at :  http://www.marklogic.com/news-and-events/press-releases/2010/rsc-publishing-releases-online-publications-platform.html

By Andy Mulholland, Global Chief Technology Officer Cap Gemini

We talk a lot about new technologies but less about some of the implications. Take the software provisioning model, yes it’s all about ‘as a service’, but go a little further into this. Yes, we are changing the provisioning of software, but that is because the purposes people want to use software for are also changing. It then follows that the development of software itself will also change.

Little more than three years ago open-source software (OSS) was being positioned as something not suitable for the mainstream IT market with a series of implied risk statements about its fitness for use at an enterprise level. The use of Linux as a low cost operating system was acceptable, as was the increasing use of the so called LAMP stack, standing for Linux OS, Apache web server, MySQL database and PHP, Perl or Python scripting languages, to support web-based activities. Today many of the major proprietary software vendors who were vehemently attacking OSS have moved to embrace it as part of their product portfolio and can be found making contributions.

In the USA the White House website has been shifted to OSS, in the UK the London Stock Exchange has adopted it for its high profile ultra reliable environment, and in Norway using proprietary software has become the exception with OSS the de facto approach.

Read the Full Story

If you would like to watch the stream just click here or on the image on the right.  Registration is required.

William Heath with Martha Lane Fox

We’re delighted to announce that William Heath - who played such an important part in our last G2010 event – will be chairing a panel discussion focused on Beyond Open Data on April 22nd. 

William is well known in government computing circles – having founded Kable, now part of the Guardian.  He speaks widely on government data issues – with a particular focus on shifting control of personal data from the state to the individual.

We will announce the rest of William’s panel participants shortly.