Posts tagged with: swc

I was among the reviewers this year and really curious about who would win. My votes were a bit different from the final result, but then it was tricky to compare the 2007 submissions which all seemed to have their strengths in different aspects of the Challenge criteria (e.g. Revyu scores high with regard to "Ease of Use", Potluck just blows you away, CHIP is super smart, GroupMe is both visionary and fun, iFanzy/SenSee is already marketable, etc.). So, congratulations to all of them:

1st Prize: Revyu.com
2nd Prize: Potluck
3rd Prize: CHIP Demonstrator

Runner-ups: GroupMe and iFanzy.

From the overall submissions, I found GroupMe, mle, and SemClip very interesting. They have a focus on instant utility and are close to the practical RDF stuff I'm interested in myself.

Looking forward to next year.

Oh, and someone should give an award to Jen Golbeck, Peter Mika and the other challenge organizers as well!

Just a reminder: The call for the SemWeb Challenge 2006 ends this week (Friday, 14th). If you are working on an RDF app, consider participating. It's a lot of fun, you'll get incredibly useful feedback, and the organizers clearly deserve loads of submissions for running this community event!

Unfortunately, I'm not going to participate this year as I have to focus on coding during the next months in order to push my SPARQL CMS thingy to version 1.0. And maybe I should stop listening to StarWars tunes while I'm working on layout stuff..

I'm back at Essen where I proudly presented my heavy SemWeb Challenge plate. But even without this icing on the (layer?) cake, the conference was simply amazing. I met lots of SemWebbers I wanted to meet for quite some time now, and also several people I wouldn't have expected to meet, although I skipped most of the social events (desperately trying to get my stuff up and running for the "Posters 'n' Demos" session). I received very nice feedback for my SPARQLy UI bits, and it's been the first time that people looked at my name badge with an "Ah, that's you". 2005 was a hard year for me and my little startup, but ISWC was a true energizer and finally gave me the feeling of heading in the right direction. The year isn't over yet, but this looks like a good opportunity for some credits and thank-yous.

So, kudos to:

• @semantics (esp. Libby Miller and Zac Bjelogrlic) for life-saving jobs
• @semantics (again) for their Gargonza experiment, which helped me get started with my SPARQL protocol implementation
• Steve Harris for sharing some 3store experiences with me when I encountered what he called "combinatorial explosion" in CONFOTO. Thanks also to Libby for invaluable related pointers, and Dave Beckett for encouraging me to ask Steve directly. Without this help, I definitely wouldn't have been able to present worky apps on top of a new SPARQL store only 10 days later. #swig citizens++ (And I won't tell anyone that Steve replied to my mail even on a weekend.)
• Yura for re-plotting my destroyed posters the evening before I left for the conference
• Stefan Decker for funding my trip to Galway
• Richard Cyganiak for an inspiring dialogue about mySQL-related SPARQL implementation issues, which became incredibly helpful when I had to redesign my store,
• The w3photo project team and contributors. CONFOTO is largely based on w3photo data, the app is a direct continuation of last year's work
• Danny Ayers for also working on "bringing semantics to the end user". His blog posts are a constant source of inspiration.
• Ubbo Visser and Michel Klein for running the Semantic Web Challenge. This thing is so well-organised, with reminders, instant help, suggestions, etc, that it really deserves many many more submissions. They even managed to get our application descriptions included in the printed conference proceedings. And there *is* still a lack of end-user semweb apps, so contributing to the challenge makes a lot of sense.
• everyone who added photos to CONFOTO, used it, and/or sent feedback (or congratulations ;). App updates to follow.
• Susanne for still letting me do all this stuff!

An interesting experience when attending conferences and starting to communicate with other people in real life: TODO lists grow alarmingly fast. Some things for me chief procrastination officer:

• make ARC store available (looks like a a simple SPARQL kit could attract even some non-RDF (Web 2.0)ers to "those semantics")
• finish CONFOTO (as a start: full annotators for photos, people, events, remix tools, custom sparqlets)
• upgrade semanticweb.org to the new ARC store, add missing annotators and a (better) query cache
• provide better/more hooks for piggybank to auto-discover CONFOTO metadata
• build a downloadable SKOS authoring environment from the concept/topic editing tools I'm using at semanticweb.org
• shrink-wrap CONFOTO to a free, downloadable photo annotator
• document how the sparqlets (are supposed to) work. Ideally, publish the AJAX-y UI stuff as a re-usable, lightweight SPARQL Template Engine ("SPATE"?)

oh well, did I say "after" the storm?

/me is back at Galway, attending ISWC 2005. Murphy is again with me this time, my SPARQL store exploded last week, my posters were destroyed during shipping, the plane had a power outage, almost missed my connecting flight, plus the usual chaos ;)

But I'm here now, everything is just as expected (storm and rain) and hope is getting back to have a new version of CONFOTO up by tomorrow's Demo/SemWebChallenge session. I didn't manage to finish some of the more fancy features I had in mind (such as drag 'n' drop annotation), but I've got a nice new UI (you may notice that I'm a mac user now ;), and I'm going to introduce an RDF shopping cart which allows you to export resource descriptions collected during browsing photos and events.