New Year Eve is a time for reflection… and Parties!

When reflecting back on 2011 there was one party that got every one’s attention:

The Tea Party.

Despite their sometimes silly costumes and signs, the ultraconservative Tea Party proved they were serious in 2010.

From Florida to Alaska, Tea Partiers bucked the GOP establishment by making sure their candidates were on the ballots of many of the year’s most watched electoral races.  Their new-found political clout garnered media attention all over the country.

The attention wasn’t always positive.  In Delaware, Tea-Party-favorite Christine O’Donnell was repeatedly mocked after being forced to announce she wasn’t a witch.

Kentucky Senate candidate Rand Paul received bad press of his own when he made provocative comments about civil rights. Eyebrows were raised when some of his supporters physically attacked a liberal activist.

In the end, the group had  highs and lows like any political movement.  While they might be credited with putting Republicans into the leadership of the US House of Representatives, they failed to help them take control of the Senate.

So, the question is: Who will be invited to the Party next year?

From E online

All over America, people are losing their homes, and it seems trivial media sensations are no exception, as Octomom is getting evicted.

Surfing Santas hit the Florida coast- perhaps Santa is considering relocating.

Israel’s foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman says “peace is impossible” with Palestine.

A man returns a library book- 76 years late.  Luckily, the library is waiving the late fee.

A recent study by the University of Maryland has found viewers of Fox news are more misinformed about political issues than viewers of other channels. It found that they were more likely to believe the following FALSE statements:

• Most scientists do not agree that climate change is occurring
• The stimulus legislation did not include any tax cuts
• The auto bailout only occurred under Obama
• When TARP came up for a vote most Republicans opposed it

The Senior Vice President for Fox News, Michael Clemente, responded the the study, “The latest Princeton Review ranked the University of Maryland among the top schools for having ‘Students Who Study The Least’ and being the ‘Best Party School’ – given these fine academic distinctions, we’ll regard the study with the same level of veracity it was ‘researched’ with.” Ouch.

Check out the study for yourself- does it seem legit?  Should people stop making fun of Fox News?  (Should Fox News stop making it so easy to?)

The goal and vision of the Semantic Web is to create a Web of connected and interlinked data (items) which can be shared and reused by all. Sharing and opening up “raw data” is great; but the Semantic Web isn’t just about sharing data. To create a Web of data, one needs interlinking between data. In 2006, Sir Tim Berners-Lee introduced the notion of linked data in which he outlined the best practices for creating and sharing data on the Web. To encourage people and government to share data, he recently developed the following rating system -

The highest rating is for the data that can link to other people’s data to provide context. While the Semantic Web has been growing steadily, there is lot of data that is still in raw format. A study by Google researchers shows that there are 154 million tables with high quality relational data on the world wide web. The US government along with 7 other nations have started sharing data publicly. Not all the data is RDF or confers with the best practices of publishing and sharing linked data.

Here in the Ebiquity Research Lab, we have been focusing on converting data in tables and spreadsheets into RDF; but our focus is not on generating just RDF, but rather generate high quality linked data (as now Berners-Lee calls it “5 star data”). Our goal is to build a completely automated framework for interpreting tables and generating linked data from it.

As part of our preliminary research, we have already developed a baseline framework which can link the table column headers to classes from ontologies in the linked data cloud datasets, link the table cells to entities in the linked data cloud and identify relations between table columns and map them to properties in the linked data cloud. You can read papers related to our preliminary research at [1]. We will use this blog as a medium to publish updates in our pursuit of creating “5-star” data for the Semantic Web.

If you are data publisher, go grab some Linked Data star badges at [2]. You can show your support to the open data movement by gettings t-shirts, mugs and bumper stickers from [3]  ! (all profits go to W3C)

Happy Holidays ! Let 2011 be yet another step forward in the open data movement !

[1] – http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/person/html/Varish/Mulwad/?pub=on#pub

[2] – http://lab.linkeddata.deri.ie/2010/lod-badges/

[3] – http://www.cafepress.co.uk/w3c_shop

Well, for starters it’s CHRISTMAS!!

Not so merry for those stuck at airports across Europe.

Terrorists in Mumbia, India don’t take a break, not even for the Holidays!

Michelle Obama helps children track Santa.

Step down or We’ll take you down, Ivorian leader must make a choice.