Last week I defied snow and Eurostar delays to visit the London Online Conference. The conference exists already a couple of years. It brings together publishers, technology provides, content aggregators, … I did what I name “a reverse conference”. This means that I try to “sell” something to some of the booths. I approached some governmental organizations to explain them briefly that their world is changing, again. Instead of having a web of documents we will be faced with a web of data. I explained them that the LOD2 project had a FREE service through which they could come to a better understanding of this web of data.
Below are some of the organizations that were interested.
The good news was that people in the booth were interested in this new format for publishing. Most of the time they understood what I was talking about and they wanted to take the matter further. I also explained them the LOD2 PUBLINK service. This service helps them to understand the value of Linked Open Data for their organization.
Of course I visited the booth of the European Commission. There I found the Publications Office and DG EMPLOYMENT. Let me tell you that both these organization within the EC understand the value and opportunities of Linked Open Data as way to make their data more reusable and machine readable. For the vision on semantic technology of the Publications Office have a look at the recent Eurovoc Conference, Mind the Lexical Gap.
