Introduction to the Semantic Web and the Web of Linked Data

Presentation given as part of the EPrints/dotAC training event on 26 Mar 2010.

Art & the Web

A introduction to how artists and designers and using the web and adapting to the web

A Brief History of the Web

The Web is now so ingrained in our lives that it is easy to forget that it is less than twenty years old. But the History of Web goes back much further, to the pioneering technologists who built the first hypertext systems and the men and women before them who imagined great libraries of interconnected information that would augment human intellect and drive civilization forward. In this lecture we will explore the pre-digital origins of the Web, look at how it developed into the mass communication system we have today, and speculate on the next stages of its evolution in the context of Web Science and Social Media.

The Web 2.0 Development Survival Guide

Building software for Web 2.0 and the Social Media world is non-trivial. It requires understanding how to create infrastructure that will survive at Web scale, meaning that it may have to deal with tens of millions of individual items of data, and cope with hits from hundreds of thousands of users every minute. It also requires you to build tools that will be part of a much larger ecosystem of software and application families. In this lecture we will look at how traditional relational database systems have tried to cope with the scale of Web 2.0, and explore the NoSQL movement that seeks to simplify data-storage and create ultra-swift data systems at the expense of immediate consistency. We will also look at the range of APIs, libraries and interoperability standards that are trying to make sense of the Social Media world, and ask what trends we might be seeing emerge.

What is the Web?

An introductory lecture on Web Science, taking a kind of devils advocate position by suggesting that the Web is a piece of runaway technology that escaped from research labs prematurely.

How The Web Devalues Creativity

By lowering the barriers to communication, the Web has not made it possible for writers to make more money; instead large corporate aggregators are taking advantage of creators to make themselves rich. MaryAnn Johanson is the creator of one of the oldest independent film review sites on the web (flickfilosopher.com). In this lecture she addresses the problems of the long tail for the long tailees. How can a creative professional make a living through the Web, when all the power is held by the aggregators? So much for radical disintermediation... This share contains the lecture slides (see slide #29-30 for the summary of her argument), the lecture audio, further reading, a link to her web site and a critique of The Longer Tail from students at another Web Science Trust Network lab.

Contemporary Social Movements and the Web

Social Movements are decentralising in the modern world. Web 2.0 has driven latency structures in social movements, and made activism more personal than ever before, but it has also introduced the concept of slacktivism. Micro-Macro relationships are becoming important theoretical frameworks for Social Movement research on the Web - has the Global Justice Movement of 1999 become Global Justice Networks in 2013?

An Animating Spark: Mundane Computing and the Web of Data

Network connectivity is reaching more and more into the physical world. This is potentially transformative – allowing every object and service in the world to talk to one other—and to their users—through any networked interface; where online services are the connective tissue of the physical world and where physical objects are avatars of online services.

WAIS seminar: Ontologies on the Web: An Alternative Model

Wednesday 2nd April 2014 Speaker(s): Stefan Decker Time: 02/04/2014 11:00-11:50 Location: B2/1083 File size: 897 Mb Abstract Ontologies have been promoted and used for knowledge sharing. Several models for representing ontologies have been developed in the Knowledge Representation field, in particular associated with the Semantic Web. In my talk I will summarise developments so far, and will argue that the currently advocated approaches miss certain basic properties of current distributed information sharing infrastructures (read: the Web and the Internet). I will sketch an alternative model aiming to support knowledge sharing and re-use on a global basis.

WAIS Seminar:Modelling the Web: Examples of modelling language, network evolution and physical-social systems

Speaker(s): Prof. Steffen Staab Organiser: Dr Tim Chown Time: 23/05/2014 10:30-11:30 Location: B53/4025 Abstract The Web is constructed based on our experiences in a multitude of modalities: text, networks, images, physical locations are some examples. Understanding the Web requires from us that we can model these modalities as they appear on the Web. In this talk I will show some examples of how we model text, hyperlink networks and physical-social systems in order to improve our understanding and our use of the Web.