Sindice downtime, new staff and a cool use case

Dear all, apologies for the downtime this past 2 days. Basically 2 AC went down in the DERI data-center which caused excessive moisture which caused the UPS to blow smoke (a UPS way to say “go on without me”), which brought the data-center down.

Systems are now restored and we’re back in operations. In an unrelated news i’d like to welcome our 2 new full time engineers at the DERI Data Intensive Infrastructure group (http://di2.deri.org) Robert Fuller and Stephen Mulcahy. They’ll be multiplexing between several projects at DI2 but the effects will be visible on Sindice soon, e.g. with the new Sindice release (Beta 2) possibly in a couple of months.

Ah i was happy to find this in the wild: Sindice used to search Twine pages having certain topics. That’s the idea folks: putting RDF into web pages is now so simple and direct with RDFa and more and more sites are doing it (e.g. also to beat microformat accessibility issues). Producing RDFa from your own application is straightforward and thanks to Sindice all your instances can be connected in a snap (and for free) with each others and with others that are using the same markup.