Posts tagged with: talk

I'm back from New York, where I was given the great opportunity to talk about two of my favorite topics: Semantic Web Development with PHP, and (not necessarily semantic) Software Development using RDF Technology. I was especially looking forward to the second one, as that perspective is not only easier to understand for people from a software engineering context, but also because it is still a much neglected marketing "back-door": If RDF simplifies working with data in general (and it does), then we should not limit its use to semantic web apps. Broader data distribution and integration may naturally follow in a second or third step once people use the technology (so much for my contribution to Michael Hausenblas' list of RDF MalBest Practices ;)

The talk on Thursday at the NY Semantic Web Meetup was great fun. But the most impressive part of the event were the people there. A lot to learn from on this side of the pond. Not only very practical and professional, but also extremely positive and open. Almost felt like being invited to a family party.

The positive attitude was even true for the workshop, which I clearly could have made more effective. I didn't expect (but should have) that many people would come w/o a LAMP stack on their laptops, so we lost a lot of time setting up MAMP/LAMP/WAMP before we started hacking ARC, Trice, and SPARQL.

Marco brought up a number of illustrating use cases. He maintains an (inofficial, sorry, can't provide a pointer) RDF wrapper for any group on meetup.com, so the workshop participants could directly work with real data. We explored overlaps between different Meetup groups, the order in which people joined selected groups, inferred new triples from combined datasets via CONSTRUCT, and played with not-yet-standard SPARQL features like COUNT and LOAD.

And having done the workshop should finally give me the last kick to launch the Trice site now. The code is out, and it's apparently not too tricky to get started even when the documentation is still incomplete. Unfortunately, I have a strict "no more non-profits" directive, but I think Trice, despite being FOSS, will help me get some paid projects, so I'll squeeze an official launch in sometime soon-ish.

Below are the slides from the meetup. I added some screenshots, but they are probably still a bit boring without the actual demos (I think a video will be put up in a couple of days, though).

The Linked Data meme is spreading and we have strong indications that web developers who understand and know how to apply practical semantic web technologies will soon be in high demand. Not only in enterprise settings but increasingly for mainstream and agency-level projects where scripting languages like PHP are traditionally very popular.

I can't really afford travelling to promote the interesting possibilities around RDF and SPARQL for PHP coders, so I'm more than happy that Meetup master Marco Neumann offered me to come over to New York and give a talk at the Meetup on May 21st. Expect a fun mixture of "Getting started" hints, demos, and lessons learned. In order to make this trip possible, Marco is organizing a half-day workshop on May 22nd, where PHP developers will get a hands-on introduction to essential SemWeb technologies. I'm really looking forward to it (and big thanks to Marco).

So, if you are a PHP developer wondering about the possibilities of RDF, Linked Data & Co, come to the Meetup, and if you also want to get your hands dirty (or just help me pay the flight ticket ;) the workshop could be something for you, too. I'll arrive a few days earlier, by the way, in case you want to add another quaff:drankBeerWith triple to your FOAF file ;)

Update (2008-05-29): I've uploaded the SVG source file and a hi-res PNG of the SemWeb Menu Slide Not that many attendees really, but talk went fine. Kept things simpler and more practical this year with a live mashup/hack of data from webinale, IPC, and DLW websites via *cough* regexp-injected microformats and RDFa, pulled out and integrated with ARC and SPARQL. Fun stuff, but most of the slides are a bit boring w/o the actual demos.

Ha, I haven't even fully made the move to my new (self-)employer yet, and Web Monday is already coming to Düsseldorf (joining about 20 other cities in Germany). The first event was yesterday and happened in the cool (style-wise) and hot (summer is back!) Lounge of the Mediadesign University.

I took the opportunity to introduce semsol to the local Web crowd, but also put on my SWEO hat and signed up for a short presentation. For better marketing, I've been thinking a bit about distributing a set of single-page tech flyers recently (called "SemWeb on a Slide", inspired by the classical "Semantic Web Illustrated" series, although I'm not there yet). So, I tried a first version , and given the feedback I think this sort of scoped material has a lot of potential. Someone already asked for a version covering semantic markup. Anyway, the other talks were way cooler than mine (at least for me ;), I especially liked Siggi Becker's "Utopia is not a Trend", and the presentation of MIXXT, which seems to be People Aggregator done right.

I'm kindly invited to give a talk on "Semantic Web and Web 2.0" at tomorrow's webinale in Ludwigsburg, Germany. Leo will be there, too.

Sounds like a nice SWEO infiltration opportunity. And I'm looking forward to some new drankBeerWith triples, there is a networking party on Tuesday, possibly joined by the International PHP Conference and the AJAX in Action sub-event which are colocated with the webinale.

I'll make the slides available when I'm back, but the more interesting news is that I just finished a working little implementation based on TimBL's Semantic Clipboard idea and the "Polymorphic Drag&Drop" functionality I experimented with during the last months (yes, that's DnD instead of CnP now). Now I just hope I'll get swiftly through the theoretical part of my presentation and save enough time for the demo at the end..