Posts tagged with: webinale

I gave another talk at webinale2008, this one was about how SemWeb technology (XFN, RDF, FOAF, SPARQL, Inference) can help with the aggregation, integration, and consolidation of online social graph fragments spread across Web 2.0 services. Again, I tried to keep things demo-ish (using grawiki for Linked Data editing, and knowee for the integration and consolidation), so the slides themselves (available on slideshare) aren't too spectacular (and in german).

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.

Still a few hours left to finish my presentations, then I'll join Germany's WebDev crowd at the webinale 2008 in Karlsruhe (It's taking place at the same location as this year's ISWC). My talks are about "Semantic Web Tech 'n' Use" (mostly microformats, RDFa, SPARQL), and RDF-based "Online Social Graph Consolidation" (FOAF, XFN, SPARQLy inference, knowee etc.), and there will be more SemWeb-related talks:

• Semantic Rich Internet Applications (Raju Bitter)
• The Semantic Web: What the Heck are we Doing? (Duane Nickull)

A (personally) interesting thing about the webinale is its co-location with the International PHP Conference, and the (new) Dynamic Languages World Europe, and that registering for one conference includes free access to any of the others. It's the perfect audience to talk about practical SemWeb Scripting with ARC and PHP.

Update: Kingsley provides a number of Web references for most of the buzzwords below.

I just had an interesting twitter dispute with Ian, triggered by his invention of another alias for the Semantic Web. For last year's webinale I created a slide with which I tried to "de-confuse" people a little bit, I guess I'll need several slides this year. This is mostly just for future reference, not many of those are going to stick anyway:

A list of terms people use to name (a subset/aspect/whatever of) the "Semantic Web":

• Semantic Web (by timbl)
• SemWeb (by the developer community)
• Web of Data (by timbl)
• Data Web (by timbl)
• The Web as a Database (by timbl)
• Web of Knowledge (by stefandecker)
• lowercase semantic [wW]eb (by tantek)
• Knowledge Web (by ?)
• Semantic Web 2.0 (by stefandecker)
• Web 3.0 (by nova)
• Semantic Graph (by nova)
• Hyperdata (by danja)
• Linked Data (by timbl)
• Linked Data Web (by kidehen)
• Structured Web (by the structured blogging community and mkbergman)
• Semantic Data Web (by kidehen)
• GGG - The Giant Global Graph (by timbl)
• Web 3G (by iand)

See also: Interblag

And I fear there are more (even w/o considering "Pipe Dream", "Ivory Towers Inc." and similar ones). I like "Structured Web" and "Hyperdata" very much. But at the end of the day (yes, I know silly jargon as well), I think we'll just call it the [sS]emantic [wW]eb ;-)

The visual-x mag just published a webinale report that contains a nice summary of my talk (and even a link to paggr). Phew, this means that at least some people were not scared off, which is great personally, but also (and more importantly) from a SWEO perspective.

The webinale slides are online now. The session went OK, I'd say. I always make the mistake to look at the high conference prices and then end up trying to squeeze too much information into my talks to give the people some value for their money. It also was a bit hard to predict what the audience of the newly introduced webinale would be like. I did receive some great feedback from PHP coders (sneaking in from co-located IPC) who already had specific questions and asked about RAP and ARC. But I could see from many faces right after the session, that a very basic talk may have been better. Leo suggested to skip the ontology stuff entirely, the amount of different flavours (SKOS, RDF Schema, OWL Lite/DL/Full/+/-/1.1) is surely a whole mess marketing-wise. Next time I'll try to stick to the more intuitive stuff. At least I had a convincing demo about how (low-level) ontologies can be useful to greatly reduce custom application code.

I had a short chat with pageflakes' CEO Christoph Janz. Semantic Web technologies are not on their radar yet (maybe they are now ;), but we talked a bit about the possibility to add some RDF functionality to their widgets (which they call "flakes"). They may let us try some things in the context of the knowee project, e.g. a flake that could store contact data retrieved via GRDDL or a SPARQL endpoint. Might be worth checking out their SDK.

So, next time: less OWL, more wild colours:

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..