Planet Semantico

Last week I was at the Semantic tech conference in San Jose. It was an exciting event that exceeded my expectations in many ways. First of all, the conference had a really great vibe. People from different parts of the planet converged to talk about their work and passion - Semantic Web.

From the conversations during lunch to keynotes there was a fluid exchange of intelligent ideas; people genuinely interested in the space and focusing on understanding how semantic technologies benefit us today and where they are headed. There was a consensus that many technologies are nearly ready or ready for prime time and that 2008 is the first year when semantic web is coming out of the stealth mode.

To get a flavor of the conversations and topics covered during this conference, I suggest that you review the 4 posts that I’ve written on ReadWriteWeb:

• Taking Semantic Technology to the Masses
• Investor Opportunities and Pitfalls
• The Story of SearchMonkey
• Freebase: An overview

In addition to these 4 posts, I’ve also written a post on Semantic Search. I highly recommend this post to you as well, it is a result of a lot struggle to crystallize in my mind what is going on in that space.

Finally, as with any great conference, it was a pleasure to meet up people that you work with remotely. I had a great pleasure of talking to Paul Miller, Tom Tague and Greg Boutin from Semantic Web Gang. We’ve done several podcasts together and it was great to see people behind voices and avatars :)

I also had an opportunity to speak on the Rising Stars of Semantic Web panel along with Barney Pell, CEO/CTO Powerset, Nova Spivack CEO of Radar Networks, Ian David CTO of Talis and Tom Grueber from stealth company. Both during the panel and the press conference that followed up, I kept on thinking about incredible amount of energy and brain power and enthusiasm that these folks bring to the space. In my book passion is the #1 recipe for success, so I was excited about the prospects of the space at large and what each of these individual companies is going to contribute.

For additional coverage of the conference, please see excellent round up by Daniela Barbosa.

English Barney Pell, Daniela Barbosa, energy, Greg Boutin, how semantic technologies, Ian David, Nova Spivack, Paul Miller, Radar Networks, San Jose, semantic technologies, Semantic Web, Taking Semantic Technology, Talis, Tom Grueber, Tom Tague, Web Gang, Web Panel

I had a nice productive week in San Jose / San Francisco last week, where I attended the Semantic Technologies Conference 2008 (SemTech 2008) and some other nearby events. SemTech 2008 had a record attendance of over 1000 people, and it was great to meet up with old friends and new (some of whom I had often conversed with online but not in real life).

• Arriving on Sunday afternoon, Uldis, Stefan and I prepared for our SemTech 2008 tutorial. On Monday, we gave the tutorial entitled “The Future of Social Networks on the Internet: The Need for Semantics“, inspired by our IEEE Internet Computing article from last year. You can get the slides here. We talked about how a combination of FOAF and SIOC could be used to represent and interlink people and social objects within and across social websites. The tutorial was well received and we had some interesting questions afterwards…
• On Tuesday morning, I chaired a late-breaking DataPortability interest group session, where I quizzed Chris Saad on the initiative and we had a good discussion with Daniela Barbosa, Danny Ayers, Ian Davis, Henry Story, Uldis and others. Afterwards, I attended the keynote talks by Nova Spivack and Eric Miller. You may already have seen my reports here and here respectively.
• On Tuesday afternoon, I met with Sanjay Sabnani, CEO of CrowdGather and friend Chris. CrowdGather is a big network of medium to large message board sites that includes the huge General Mayhem community. (Disclaimer: I am on the CrowdGather Inc. board of advisors.) That evening, we met Ashely and went along to the SF Beta event (”The San Francisco Web 2.0 Mixer”), where I saw some interesting demos including Hitchsters (share taxi trips to the airport). After dinner, we had drinks with TouristR’s Conor Wade, LeFora co-founder Vinnie Lauria and friend David. Unfortunately, I was pretty much “wiped” with jet lag by then.
• On Wednesday, I took it easy. From the lovely Hotel Kabuki in Japantown, I wandered up Fillmore to see what old breakfast haunt Galette had become (it’s now La Boulange). I skipped on to another breakfast favourite, Ella’s, and had something of a mammoth breakfast (yes, those three plates of food in the picture!) that kept me going for the day. After a spot in Kinokuniya, where I picked up the latest in the Alita: Last Order manga series, I walked on and drove over the Golden Gate Bridge, and then headed back south again for an evening spent with family in the locality.
• On Thursday, I attended some more SemTech 2008 talks in the morning including Steven Forth et al. from Monitor presenting about Team Learning on Semantic Mediawiki and also part of the FISHBOWL SemTech Reflections discussion session. In the afternoon, a team of us DERI researchers headed up to Radar Networks in San Francisco where we presented some of our work and brainstormed on things we could do together.

And I flew back on Friday, arriving back in Galway on Saturday. San Francisco is still a very special place to me, and I look forward to a proper family holiday there in the next year or three. Funnily enough, on Sunday I was driving behind a car with a California license plate on a Galway road - it was a long way from home!

Now, it’s catch-up time again. We’ve had a busy few weeks here in DERI what with our major funding review (which was held on-site a fortnight ago), so a lot of stuff went by the wayside (if I haven’t replied to you yet, please accept my apologies as I have a backlog of e-mail to get through and also my phone SIM card died this morning).

So what else is happening? I had an interview with Maryrose Lyons yesterday for the latest Brightspark Consulting newsletter, and today I’m correcting some exam papers that were put on a very long finger. I also got a copy of Jonathan Zittrain’s “The Future of the Internet - And How to Stop It” in the post which I’m looking forward to reading soon…

English Brightspark Consulting, California, Chris Saad, Conor Wade, CrowdGather Inc, Daniela Barbosa, Danny Ayers, David, Eric Miller, food, Galway road, Golden Gate Bridge, Henry Story, Hotel Kabuki, Ian Davis, Internet Computing article, Japantown, Jonathan Zittrain, Mayhem, Nova Spivack, San Francisco, San Jose, Sanjay Sabnani, Steven Forth

It’s been a busy few weeks for DataPortability.org with announcements from many sides including Google (Friend Connect), Facebook (Connect) and MySpace (Data Availability). Next week, the Semantic Technologies Conference will be held in San Jose, California, and you can bet that discussions around the need for portable data will be scattered throughout.

• On Monday, Stefan, Uldis and I will present a tutorial (which will also cover data portability aspects of ontologies such as SIOC and FOAF) entitled “The Future of Social Networks: The Need for Semantics“.
• On Monday evening at 8 PM, there will be an informal meetup of some DataPortability.org people in the Fairmont Hotel’s Lobby Lounge, so if you have an interest in data portability, feel free to join us.
• On Tuesday at 7:15 AM, I will chair a “Data Portability Interest Group” meeting. Attendees will include Chris Saad, Daniela Barbosa, Henry Story, and yours truly.
• Then on Tuesday afternoon at 2:00 PM, Jim Benedetto, Senior Vice President of Technology with MySpace will talk about “Data Availability at MySpace“.

Last month, IEEE Computing published an article by Karen Heyman entitled “The Move to Make Social Data Portable“. I was interviewed for the piece along with Michael Pick (social media expert), Duncan Riley (b5media), John McCrea (Plaxo), Craig Knoblock (ISI), Chris Saad (DataPortability.org), Dave Treadwell (Microsoft), Kevin Marks (Google), Chris Kelly (Facebook), Marc Canter (Broadband Mechanics), and Bill Washburn (OpenID). Technology solutions mentioned included RSS, OpenID, OAuth, microformats, RDF, APML, SIOC and FOAF. Here are my original answers to Karen’s questions.

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English Bill Washburn, broadband, California, Chris Kelly (Facebook), Chris Saad, Craig Knoblock, Daniela Barbosa, Dave Treadwell, Duncan Riley, Fairmont Hotel, Google, Henry Story, Jim Benedetto, John McCrea (Plaxo), Karen Heyman, Kevin Marks, Lobby Lounge, Marc Canter, Michael Pick, Microsoft, MySpace, Portability Interest Group, San Jose, social media expert, Technology solutions