Trends and Transients 2016

 

Overview

Each year there are more new technologies to keep track of, more ways to organise
your life and your company’s information, more ways to communicate. This session
will introduce you to new and potentially over-hyped technologies, discuss
older, overlooked technologies, and entertain you at the same time. Our expert
speakers will debate the current issues, giving you the benefit of their wide
experience and differing points of view, so you can decide for yourself which
technologies will meet your needs and which are a waste of your time.

This course is chaired by Lauren Wood and taught by Jeni Tennison, Jo Rabin, Martin Poulter, and Paul Downey.

Classes for 2016

The Trends and Transients course runs on
.

The challenges of building a strong data infrastructure

Taught by Jeni Tennison.

In the 21st century, data is infrastructure for our economy, just like roads. In
this session, Jeni will talk about the big challenges of building a strong data
infrastructure: challenges of equality of access, challenges of privacy and
trust, and the technical challenges of discovery and interoperability.

Registers: authoritative data you can trust

Taught by Paul Downey.

This talk will introduce work led by the Government Digital Service to establish
an ecosystem of linked, canonical registers across government, and demonstrate
how they are being used to improve digital services and increase the trust
citizens may place in data kept and maintained by government organisations,
through referential integrity and by providing digital proofs of integrity and
authenticity.

GDS article
written by Paul on linking registers.

Human civilisation in a subroutine

Taught by Martin Poulter.

Wikimedia is the project to make the sum of human knowledge freely accessible and
remixable by everyone on the planet. This includes the highly popular Wikipedia,
but as well there are many other, less well-known, communities and tools. All
our work is driven by principles of openness and by the effort to make knowledge
accessible to machines (in the form of searchable Linked Data) as well as to
humans.

We are collecting digital images of artworks from galleries and museums around
the world, and text from out-of-copyright books, and anyone can retrieve these
and interact with them in XML. What’s particularly exciting is the rapid
development of Wikidata, which aims to make as much knowledge as possible
available in machine-readable form. Because Wikidata has so many kinds of data,
about many millions of things, we can do unusual queries (using SPARQL) and get
the results in a machine-readable way via a RESTful API.

The impact of this is that you can incorporate routines in your software which
retrieve text, images, or facts in any topic, from the sum of human knowledge
and culture.

Adblocking, Block Chain, Copyright … a new ABC for the Internet

Taught by Jo Rabin.

The Web is a wonderful thing whose success was arguably a result of its
simplicity and focus on the free exchange of information.

Of course it’s now used for quite a few things where free exchange of content is
not what’s wanted. Security and payment are both “must have”. Subscription
models work to some degree, but only for a limited number of top tier content
brands. For everyone else there is a Faustian agreement between publishers, who
rarely make significant amounts of money; advertisers, who pay significant
amounts of money but do not necessarily get good value from the money they spend
and content consumers who get increasingly fed up with the irrelevance and
intrusiveness of advertising, driven by publishers’ need to increase their
revenue.

Recognising that there isn’t enough advertising value to pay content providers
and there’s already much too much advertising for content consumers to stomach
is an economic imbalance that is very problematic. The arrival of adblocking
technology looks set to make this imbalance even worse, with an arms race
starting between publishers and blockers.

Thinking this though leads to a interesting journey that takes in a wide range
of ideas, including copyright (what is it for and is it still relevant),
document identification (Handles, DOIs and more) and even the block chain (mind
you, there’s hardly anything that doesn’t feature as a candidate application for
block chain).

In this session we’ll take a semi-structured ramble through parts of this
journey, skipping through some and lingering over others.