– was the name I’d wanted for this blog, until I found that it was already taken by a blog and magazine put out by Talis, and so switched (back) to “Nodal”. Not that anyone would be likely to be confused, of course, since this blog is all but invisible, but just that it seemed better not to look as though I’m appropriating a much more prominent title on similar themes. Still can’t let go of that “nodal”, though.

That other blog and magazine are certainly worth checking out. Talis is an interesting ILS vendor in the UK that seems to have staked a good part of its corporate future on developments involving the “Semantic Web”. As its blog subtitle perhaps indicates, though, that somewhat nebulous or abstract notion may be evolving toward more concrete applications — such as the notion of “Linked Data”. Here’s just a hint of that development, from an article by Tom Heath (PDF) in the first issue of “Nodalities”:

Grouped under this theme [of publishing as opposed to consuming Linked Data] are a number of papers that highlight how existing data sets held within social media and photo sharing sites, library catalogues, enterprise and administrative databases, institutional repositories and even plain HTML documents can be exposed on the Web according to Linked Data principles.

On the “consumption” side of Linked Data, we have this:

The Linked Data browsers that will be presented take a range of forms, from add-in widgets for Web pages, to location-enabled applications for mobile phones, to desktop browsers that can also publish back to the Web of Data.

Hmm. Web widgets, the mobile web, the semantic web — is something happening here?