Doctor of Philosophy
Centre for Intelligent Systems and their Applications
School of Informatics
University of Edinburgh
2017
I declare that this thesis was composed by myself, that the work contained herein is my own except where explicitly stated otherwise in the text, and that this work has not been submitted for any other degree or professional qualification except as specified.
Amy Guy
The process of assembling this thesis has been both social and decentralised, as well as distributed. I owe much to many, and can hardly begin to express my gratitude.
To PhD support groups..
Jane and Felicity, cakes and unicorns. Paolo, Sergio and Michael, and all who passed through IF2.35. KitB and Tigo, following me around Edinburgh. TomSka, Bown; London friends and YouTubers who inspire and distract. Liz Powers; a year of sunshine and hammocktime and dramatic readings of my abstracts.
Invaluable collaborations..
The BBC's Linked Data Platform team, for that 'real world' experience (and falafel). The SOCIAM research group, who took me in. Max van Kleek and Dave Murray-Rust, the fastest coauthors in the West. The IndieWebCamp community, for challenging me, teaching me, and most importantly... making me just ship it already.
The W3C Social Web Working Group; started out as procrastination, and the rest was history. The Decentralized Information Group at MIT, with whom I spent a year. Timbl is as nice as everyone says he is. Ilaria Liccardi's mentorship and unstoppable attitude is unbeatable.
Working for the W3C; a distant pipe-dream, suddenly reality. Thanks Sandro Hawke for having faith in me and being on the same wavelength when things are exasperating.
Lunatic scholarship; Sarven Capadisli takes you from stylesheet switching to revolutionising academic publishing in under a minute. #LinkedResearch, distractions of epic proportions; life will never be the same again. 💩