I’ve invented a new Batman villain. His name is “The Modeller” and his scheme is to model Gotham city entirely accurately in a way that is of no practical value to anybody. He has an OWL which sits on his shoulder which has the power to absorb huge amounts of time and energy.

In the first issue, “Batman vs the Modeller” the modeller gets away by confusing batman as to exactly which incarnation he currently is (Frank Miller, Golden age or Batman Begins) which forces Batman into an identity crisis where he registers different URIs and FOAF profiles for Batman and Bruce Wayne.

Over the 3 issues there’s a running subplot about the modelers master weapon, the FRBR, which everyone knows is very very powerful but when the citizens of Gotham talk about it none of them can quite agree on exactly what it does. All over the city citizens are becoming trapped in the modelers logical rabbit holes and rats nest traps, which The Batman does nothing but fiddle on the Bat-computer having now decided he must require a different URI for every possible version of himself that isn’t entirely identical. So far he’s at the level of one URI for every version in every media with a specific author, artist, director and/or actor. Any slight variation demands a new URI.

While unpopular with the fans, issue two, “Batman vs the Protégé“, will later be hailed as a Kafkaesque masterpiece. Batman descends further into madness as he realises that every moment he’s the Batman of that second in time, and each requires a URI, and every time he considers a plan of action, the theoretical Batmen in his imagination also require unique distinct identifiers which he must assign before continuing. Gotham Police are unable to do anything as they have not yet finished their OWL ontology of Gotham crime, which fails to map onto the normal crime ontology. Commissioner Gorden can’t work out what rdf:type the Penguin’s last caper should be modelled as. It closes with Batman realising that time is continuous, not discrete and he needs an uncountable infinity of URIs…

The final issue, “B-nodes and Broomsticks”, is a much more light hearted affair as Batman, gains enlightenment and realises that nothing can ever be perfectly modelled and any model should serve him not he serve the model. In the final showdown Batman gives a speech about how if we try to hold knowledge too tight it slips through our grasp. He then quickly and satisfyingly captures the Modeller and delivers him the the cops who charge him with Aggravated Wasting of Police Time (they are still bitter about reading all the w3c OWL documents).

In a twist which splits the fanbase, some love it, other hate it; we never actually find out what the FRBR was capable of doing and if it really would have  lived up to the hype.

*** * ***

OK, maybe I have a chip on my shoulder about the fact that OWL appears to be the hardest part of the whole RDF thing and for the benefit of semantic web researchers only.

I’m interested to see if I get any outraged comments. I love modelling stuff and have written OWL ontologies for fun in my own time, my issue with the whole thing is that I’m not convinced it’s a useful exercise. Everyone hates 404s but making one way links was one of the things which made the web possible. I suspect that linked data will have some similar sacrifices to make on the alter of pragmatism. The picture isn’t supposed to look like anyone in particular, my 9am drawing ability is limited.

I currently think you have to accept that URIs may be sameAs or not, depending on the task you are attempting rather than an absolute truth. Semantic relativism, baby!

New York Times publishes allegations that PM's media adviser 'actively encouraged' unlawful practice while editor

The prime minister's media adviser, Andy Coulson, freely discussed the use of unlawful news-gathering techniques while editor of the News of the World and "actively encouraged" a named reporter to engage in the illegal interception of voicemail messages, according to allegations published by the New York Times.

Coulson, who resigned as editor of the News of the World in January 2007 after its royal correspondent was jailed for intercepting voicemail messages, has always insisted that he had no knowledge of illegal activity when he edited the paper or at any time as a journalist. He told a Commons select committee last year: "I have never had any involvement in it at all."

The New York Times website published a trail to a story due to appear in its Sunday magazine. It made detailed allegations likely to bring intense new pressure on Coulson and the Metropolitan police force, which stands accused of favouring Rupert Murdoch's newspaper group by cutting short its investigation, withholding crucial evidence from prosecutors and failing to inform victims of the newspaper's crimes against them. Coulson declined to comment on the allegations. The News of the World and Scotland Yard have denied all the charges.

Coulson resigned after the imprisonment of his royal reporter, Clive Goodman, and a private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, for "hacking" into the voicemail messages of eight public figures. When the Guardian revealed last year that the scandal involved other journalists at the paper and numerous other victims, Coulson said he had nothing to add to earlier denials of involvement, and the Conservative leader stood by him. David Cameron said: "I believe in giving people a second chance."

The New York Times, which has had an investigative team at work on the story since March, is citing two former News of the World journalists who specifically claim that Coulson was directly aware of his reporters' use of illegal techniques.

An unnamed former editor is quoted as claiming that Coulson talked freely about illegal news-gathering techniques, including phone-hacking, and that he personally had been at "dozens, if not hundreds" of meetings with Coulson where the subject came up. "The editor added that when Coulson would ask where a story came from, editors would reply 'We've pulled the phone records' or 'I've listened to the phone messages'."

In addition, Sean Hoare, a former reporter who used to be a close friend of Coulson, is quoted as saying that when he worked with Coulson at the Sun, he personally played recordings of hacked voicemail messages for him and that later, when he worked for Coulson at the News of the World, he "continued to inform Coulson of his pursuits. Coulson 'actively encouraged me to do it', Hoare said".

Hoare, who was sacked from the paper at a time when he had drink and drug problems, says he personally listened to the voicemail messages of celebrities such as David and Victoria Beckham and that he has spoken out now because he believes it was unfair for Goodman to get all the blame.

Coulson told the Commons media committee last year that he had never even heard Mulcaire's name and that Goodman had been the only reporter involved: "I am absolutely sure that Clive's case was a very unfortunate rogue case."

The New York Times claims to have spoken to a dozen former News of the World reporters and editors who say that phone-hacking was "pervasive" in Coulson's newsroom. "Everyone knew," according to an unnamed senior reporter. "The office cat knew." Most former reporters are unnamed, but Sharon Marshall is named as having witnessed hacking when working under Coulson from 2002-04. "It was an industry-wide thing," she said.

The paper says that Coulson ran a highly competitive newsroom "with single-minded imperiousness". Former News of the World journalists claim that there was a "do whatever it takes" mentality and that reporters were told to "get the story, no matter what". "They described a frantic, sometimes degrading atmosphere in which some reporters openly pursued hacking or other improper tactics to satisfy demanding editors," according to the New York Times.

The paper gives a specific example of the involvement of an editorial executive: "Matt Driscoll, a former sports reporter, recalled chasing a story about the soccer star Rio Ferdinand. Ferdinand claimed he had inadvertently turned off his phone and missed a message alerting him to a drug test. Driscoll had hit a dead end, he said, when an editor showed up at his desk with the player's private phone records." Driscoll was later dismissed and awarded £800,000 by a tribunal, which found that he had been bullied by Coulson.

Bill Akass, managing editor of the News of the World, dismissed the New York Times claims as "unsubstantiated". He said: "We reject absolutely any suggestion or assertion that the activities of Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire, at the time of their arrest, were part of a culture of wrongdoing at the News of the World and were specifically sanctioned or accepted at a senior level in the newspaper."

The New York Times goes on to quote unnamed sources from the Met suggesting that its inquiry into the phone hacking was hampered by a desire to avoid upsetting Britain's biggest selling newspaper: "Several investigators said in interviews that Scotland Yard was reluctant to conduct a wider inquiry in part because of its close relationship with the News of the World."

After a raid on Goodman's desk in August 2006, according to the New York Times, "several detectives said they began feeling internal pressure. One senior investigator said he was approached by someone from the department's press office, who was waving his arms in the air, saying 'wait a minute, let's talk about this'."

The investigator, who has since left Scotland Yard, added that the press officer stressed the department's "long-term relationship with News International". The investigator recalled furiously responding: "There's illegality here, and we'll pursue it like we do any other case." Scotland Yard says that operational decisions are made by police, not by press officers.

Former journalists told the New York Times that when Scotland Yard raided Goodman's desk, two senior journalists "stuffed reams of documents into trash bags and hauled them away". Police did not interview any other reporter or editor apart from Goodman. The material seized from Goodman and Mulcaire included paperwork which potentially implicated three named journalists. None was interviewed and, as the Guardian disclosed last year, the police failed to pass key paperwork to the Crown Prosecution Service.

The New York Times quotes an unnamed former senior prosecutor who was "stunned to discover later that the police had not shared everything. 'I would have said we need to see how far this goes' and 'whether we have a serious problem of criminality on this news desk', said the former prosecutor."

When the case came to court, police identified eight victims of the hacking. However, the New York Times claims that the officer responsible for the inquiry, the then assistant commissioner Andy Hayman, had been shown a "target list" of names and numbers taken from Mulcaire's home which ran to eight or 10 pages and which "read like a British society directory".

The Met told prosecutors that it would approach all known victims, but failed to do so. One who was approached, the then Respect MP George Galloway, told the New York Times that police warned him that his voicemail had been intercepted but refused to tell him who was responsible.

Scotland Yard denies cutting short its inquiry or being influenced by its relationship with the News of the World. The Press Complaints Commission was criticised after two inquiries into the affair failed to find evidence of wrongdoing other than that originally presented by police.

After revelations in the Guardian, the Commons media select committee held a second inquiry into the affair last year. Its report expressed concern "at the readiness of all of those involved – News International, the police and the PCC – to leave Mr Goodman as the sole scapegoat without carrying out a full investigation".

Coulson said tonight: "I absolutely deny these allegations."

From an Editorial entitled Cite Site in Nature Genetics (Nature Genetics 42, 729 (2010) doi:10.1038/ng0910-729) comes news that Nature Preceedings is now catering to the types of documents the BioSharing community wishes to promote.

"We now have adapted our preprint archive, Nature Precedings, to host project descriptions, community standards papers and funder policies. Citable project descriptions provide a guide to the resources available and create a mechanism to give data producers citation credit.

The US National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation both now require their grantees to produce a project description document explaining their aims and the resources they hope to generate. We created an archive where these documents (often referred to as 'marker papers') can be publicly deposited and, if necessary, regularly updated. Project descriptions can function as guides to projects that are complex and that deposit disparate resources in several databases. They can also help data users keep track of differing and evolving conditions for data use (if any exist). Because the archive is citable, it can help data users and journal editors handle competing publications more fairly. Citations to project descriptions may also be tracked to ensure effective use of resources and to make recommendations for best research practice."

Read more here

The purpose of Nature Precedings:

"Nature Precedings connects thousands of researchers and provides a platform for sharing new and preliminary findings with colleagues on a global scale.

Post pre-print manuscripts, posters and presentations on Nature Precedings to claim priority and receive feedback on your findings prior to formal publication."

With the BBC now providing links to the scientific research it reports, will 2010 be the year when science journalists discover the web link?

It's funny how things can be connected. I was looking up the recipe for Worcestershire sauce last night and ended up idly clicking through Wikipedia. It turns out that the sauce is made from anchovies, which can cause amnesic shellfish poisoning, a brain-damaging illness that may have caused thousands of frantic seabirds to invade towns in Californian in 1961; events that may have provided some inspiration for Hitchcock's film The Birds. I found all this because of links.

Links are the foundation of the world wide web. They take us beyond whatever we happened to be looking for, on journeys to places we never even imagined existed. Every minute of every day, millions of curious apes click billions of links, each travelling on their own miniature voyages of discovery.

Of all the differences between science blogging and mainstream media reporting of science, one of the most profound is the use of links. Science bloggers often come from a scientific background, and as scientists we were drilled on the need for citations. Any factual statement or assertion you make in a research paper should be backed up with a reference to primary evidence supporting the claim.

It's a habit that translates well into journalism, a profession which, like science, should be concerned with studying the world and reporting its findings on behalf of the public in an open and accountable way.

By providing links to sources (or indeed posting full interview transcripts), journalists can show that they're honest, open and trustworthy and allow the reader to judge whether the interpretation they've presented of someone else's work or words is the correct one.

And links can do much more than that. By embedding links in text, journalists can turn their articles from static descriptions of the world into platforms that open up avenues for exploration and discovery to their audience, tapping into rich veins of knowledge and intrigue to provide the reader with far more value than one journalist could provide on their own.

Links are beautiful, so why are newspaper websites so utterly reluctant to use them? In particular, why do science journalists who write about scientific papers so often fail to provide a link to a copy of the paper in question?

It's an issue that Ben Goldacre raised with the BBC earlier this year, but with apparently little success. As Ben pointed out at the time:

"It's very important that the public are able to get access to information, especially since media reports – for many structural reasons – can be light on information, or even contain errors."

But now the Beeb seems to have relented. It has come to my attention, courtesy of the commenter soveda, that the BBC are – occasionally at least – now adding links to the original research in their articles, for example in the 5th paragraph here.

This is to be congratulated. It's easy to moan when journalists get things wrong, but fair play to the BBC here – they've listened, and they appear to have changed their practice. For that they should be congratulated, and if you give a crap about news outlets linking to research (and if not, why on Earth are you still reading this?) then you should go immediately to their feedback page, and leave a friendly comment.

So will other organs follow the BBC's lead? Unfortunately, the scientific journals themselves are putting barriers in the way of journalists who want to link to the original research, as the science editor of the Times Mark Henderson told me earlier:

"I think it's good practice to provide direct hyperlinks to journal articles where practical, but this isn't always easy to achieve. The main problem is that while some journals (eg Nature) provide such links on their embargoed press releases (or tell you how to work them out using DOI numbers), others do not. It can thus take time you don't have to establish the correct link.

Worse still is that some journals (PNAS is a particular offender) don't have papers available online when an embargo lifts. It is thus impossible to link even to an abstract."

Embargoes themselves are a difficult and controversial subject best left to the likes of Ivan Oransky, but clearly there's a problem with the way that PR officers at some major journals are operating – by failing to support busy journalists, they're failing the public. One simple solution would fix this problem, as Mark suggests:

"I would encourage all press officers dealing with journal articles to include a hyperlink to the paper, that will go live when an embargo lifts, on their press releases as a matter of course."

Let's hope that the BBC's decision will start putting pressure on journals to do just this. But let's not forget the wider problem here. As blogs and mainstream media draw ever closer together – a long-term shift epitomised by my own move to the Guardian – there are opportunities for each to learn from the other. One of the most obvious things that bloggers can teach mainstream media journalists is the proper use of the link. It's not enough for journalists to simply report on the world, they need to let people see it for themselves.

Webmaster Level: All

You can now use Google search to find SVG documents. SVG is an open, XML-based format for vector graphics with support for interactive elements. We’re big fans of open standards, and our mission is to organize the world’s information, so indexing SVG is a natural step.

We index SVG content whether it is in a standalone file or embedded directly in HTML. The web is big, so it may take some time before we crawl and index most SVG files, but as of today you may start seeing them in your search results. If you want to see it yourself, try searching for [sitemap site:fastsvg.com] or [HideShow site:svg-whiz.com]

If you host SVG files and you wish to exclude them from Google’s search results, you can use the “X-Robots-Tag: noindex” directive in the HTTP header.

Check out Webmaster Central for a full list of file types we support.

Posted by Bogdan Stanescu and John Sarapata, Software Engineers

In this month's packed issue: World Champs, photo special, Cancellara, Van Garderen, Bettini, Breschel, McEwen, Lagos de Covadonga, Teklehaimanot

The newest technology has revived old habits of reading. Just switch the lights off late at night and turn the virtual pages of a spooky gothic tale for an illuminating experience

The experience of reading books on an iPad is disconcertingly beautiful. It has rapidly become the favourite use of this dazzling gadget in our house. We are entering a new age of the book, and it may turn out to be a bright one.

Every book on the iBooks reader becomes, literally, illuminated. In the history of the book, illumination refers to the decoration of hand-copied manuscripts by medieval monks. No angels or devils appear, no gothic letters sprout curls of foliage, when you open an iBook: the illumination rather consists of a backlit white screen on which type looks singularly seductive. You want to turn the page and see more – so you do just that, physically flicking over a virtual sheet of paper with the tactile technology that makes the iPad so easy to use. Fans of the rival digital book reader, Amazon's Kindle, which is controlled with buttons, deny that Apple's touch-sensitive science makes a difference.

But for me it makes all the difference in the world. Reading a book in this way feels right.

I am naturally suspicious of the coming of the digital book. It sounds like the apocalypse: the final irony, to be a professional writer in the last days of publishing ... but the thrill of reading books – and buying books, which is the critical thing – on this gadget changes the look and feel of the age. The future suddenly seems more literate. It's not just that you can read a book on this machine: it is that you want to. Old, innocent, childish memories of reading are awakened by its glowing screen for it has one very obvious advantage: you can read in the dark. That's what I've been doing, late at night, and the first books I bought for the iPad were therefore spooky Victorian tales. The newest technology seems in this case to revive old habits of reading, old – even cosy – pleasures of the book. Gothic tales late at night, to be read on a screen that glows reassuringly in the dark, even as the words unleash spectres from the corners of the room.

Perhaps reading in the dark is an image of where it's at. Who knows where all this leads? One thing is sure, to read is to enter worlds of the unknown. And nothing makes you so aware of that as the uncanny sensation of reading The Monkey's Paw on the iPad, one magic letting in the other.