Wiki-data development with BT/Osmosoft

It's been a while since my last post but we have been busy working on wiki-data. Some of you will know that we have been in discussions with the open source software group at British Telecom. It's a subsidiary called Osmosoft comprised of some frighteningly clever technologists with impressive credentials and serious talent.

A group of us from Avox including senior management from our Wrexham office, our sales team including Brett Hodge who came over from Australia and myself spent a day with Osmosoft last week. They affectionately refer to these as "HackDays".

Within the space of 10 hours, this team, led by Jeremy Ruston, the Osmosoft founder, put together a brand new (I mean built from scratch) version of wiki-data with some great interactive functionality. We provided the guys with a very large dataset which they used as a base. By the end of the day, we had a platform where every AVID had its own URI (uniform resource identifier) so that anyone can link to or from it, addresses of companies are now linked to Google Maps so you can visualize where firms are based (we quickly found one in Iraq!), anyone can begin a comment string on an entity and yes, we even had an online edit function (we are going to need to figure out how to govern that one before releasing it!).

If you are interested, your best bet is to have a look at Michael Mahemoff's blog where you will find detailed descriptions of the process and outcome as well as a video of me and Paul Downey of Osmosoft running you through the platform before we ran to the pub for pints. Just click on the link (embedded in the heading) at the top of this post.

Or if you prefer: http://softwareas.com/wikidata-hackathon-wikidata-a-wiki-of-companies-data.

I'll keep you posted on what will be rolling out and when. We are extremely excited.

Ken