Articles about Hugh Glaser

Tim Organ Steps Down

After more than six years as CEO of Seme4, Tim Organ announced at the recent Board that he was stepping down. Hugh Glaser has taken on the role of CEO.

Tim has led Seme4 through some stormy times, especially in the market, with recessions and austerity in the public sector, and leaves it in a healthy condition – in fact, Seme4 recorded its best year yet in the recent financial review. He will stay involved with Seme4 at a strategic level, and remain on the Board, but the day to day involvement will be much reduced.

In recognising Tim’s contribution to Seme4, Wendy Hall commented that “We are very grateful for everything Tim has done for Seme4 over the last few years. Over his time at the helm, Seme4 has grown significantly as a company and we couldn’t have done this without his tireless efforts on our behalf. Always a pleasure to work with, we look forward to his continued involvement in the future development of the company”.

Tim said “It has been a great pleasure and an honour to work with everyone at Seme4 these last six years.  Making the case for Linked Data and our data integration technology has not been easy, but Seme4 has survived while others have not, making consistent profits every year.  There is no doubt that our time will come, and Seme4 will go from strength to strength.”

RailGB: Using Open Accessibility Data to Help People with Disabilities

A paper by Yunjia Li, E.A. Draffan, Hugh Glaser, Ian Millard, Russell Newman, Mike
Wald, Gary Wills and Magnus White, describing RailGB, a new linked-data driven mobile web application which provides searches for underground train stations in London which are easily accessible (for disabled people or those carrying heavy loads).

Unlike most applications which use static web sites, RailGB reacts dynamically to users’ needs whilst travelling.

→ http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/345829/1/iswc2012sc.pdf

Hugh Glaser gives keynote speech at Kultivate project Linked Data workshop

The Kultivate project is part of the Kultur consortium and the talk was entitled “An Introduction to the Potential of Linked Data.”

The Kultur consortium is a collaboration between the University of Southampton, the University of the Arts London, the University for the Creative Arts and the Visual Arts Data Service. Its
aim is to create a repository model for research findings in the creative and applied arts. The repository will be available to a range of performing arts institutions and also to museums and galleries.

The Kultur consortium has a wide remit and is working at both a detailed level, for example examining software configuration, and at a high level, determining policies for information dissemination and deposit.

The consortium is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) which provides leadership and support for the use of I.T. in post-16 and Higher Education establishments in the U.K.

See UK – Compare Your Neighbourhood

In collaboration with the EnAKTing Project, Seme4 have produced See UK, a demonstrator that gives an end-user visualisation of multiple Open Datasets against a geographic background.

See UK
(http://apps.seme4.com/see-uk/)
is a simple visualisation of data that has geographic aspects
and has been published as machine-interpretable Linked Data.

See UK uses data that has been sourced from data.gov.uk and processed
into Linked Data where necessary, but is also designed to be able to use
other sources where available. All the datasets are then enriched, by
calculating area totals from point data and inferring aggregate values
for regions that do not have explicit data values, and further
enriched by establishing linkage between the datasets.
These enriched datasets are available directly from the
EnAKTing Project,
and can be accessed using the links below.

The visualisation provides a view centred on a chosen region of
specified size, and most noticeably gives a “pie-chart” that shows the
viewer how that region compares with similar regions around it. It
is thus designed to focus on the information most relevant to the
user. Colour indicates the “worst” (red) and “best” (green) areas
from those shown. This pie-chart is shown in preference to simply
colouring the map itself, as a coloured map confuses the map
features with the data being visualised.
It also gives some context of the real geography
involved, so that a full picture is seen. The user can navigate by
looking and clicking on the pie-chart, or the map, and can thus move
around using whatever view they are taking of the data presentation. A
search by postcode functionality is also supported, aiding the user in
finding specific locations.

An important aspect of the visualisation is that cross-dataset
correlation can be achieved and presented in a natural fashion, as
the data can be viewed as normalised by population or area, in
addition to the raw values. The user can therefore see how regions
compare in terms of, for example, crime density by population or
area, rather than just knowing that their county has little crime,
and guessing this is because the county has a small population or
area.

See UK has been produced as a collaborative activity between Seme4 Ltd.
and members of the EnAKTing project at the University of Southampton.
For further details please contact Hugh Glaser
or Ian Millard; feedback on this application is very
welcome.

Hugh Glaser talks at JISC conference

The talk at the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) conference was part of the session entitled “What is the Business Administrative Case for Linked Data?”

The JISC provides leadership and support for the use of I.T. in post-16 and Higher Education establishments in the U.K. The annual JISC conference is aimed at a range of people, including those responsible for I.T. policy, those responsible for I.T. resources and researchers in the area. It was held in Liverpool on the 14th – 15th of March 2011.

The session explained the concepts of Linked Data, described how it can enable data to be shared and discussed how it can increase efficiency.