The Sun BabelFish Blog
Don't panic !
Semantic Web School
Andreas Blumauer, Managing Director for the Semantic Web School, came to Sun in Zürich to give a one day course as part of a four day conference whose main topics was helping relate knowledge and people. We had people fly in from the USA, the UK (Dave Levy and Chris Gerhard), France (me: photo), Austria and Germany. (more pictures).
The very impressive SkillMap java applet opened up the conference laying the ground work for thinking about the relations between people and skills. This was followed by Andreas' one day course which flew the team up to a 50000 foot height, where we all jumped out till we could see the details of the landscape, including rdf, Dublic Core, foaf, doap, skos, sioc, and much more.
The landing was softened by a few demonstrations. I gave a quick presentation on Universal Drag and Drop using an early version of the Beatnik Address Book to demonstrate the simplicity of the concept (another Micro Killer App?). D2RQ as usual opened everyone's eyes, as I gave a demo of SPARQLing Roller. (After the conference, people kept referring to it as R2D2 though...)
Organized by Peter Reiser, sponsored by Dan Berg and Hal Stern, the conference was according to everyone present a huge success. There were quite a number of "aha!" moments and everyone went through at least one. I myself finally got a full overview of the problems large organizations like Sun need to solve in the knowledge management area. We cleared away some major Semantic Web fears, the most important being that it would require a complete retooling of the enterprise. This is perhaps again why D2RQ (and its competitors) are so important. But most of all the idea that by giving everyone in the enterprise a foaf name, one could tag them like any other resource, relate them to other people, documents, processes ... and create an open and flexible space for linking knowledge together was like discovering a new horizon.
Of course no conference goes without good restaurants (and in Switzerland this means fondue) and drinking into the evening. To top it all I went to an amazing restaurant called Clowns & Kalorien which if you ever happen to be in Zürich I highly recommend. All these calories had to be shed somehow, so as luck would have it we had some fresh snow, and I went to Engelberg, a beautiful resort close by (images).
Posted at 10:56AM Jan 30, 2007 [permalink/trackback] by Henry Story in SemWeb | Comments[3]
Note on comments:
- I know the forms below are a little small. We have asked for years for this to be changed, but I don't think it's going to happen soon. In Apple's Safari you can resize the entry box with you mouse. For people using other browsers click on this javascript link, that should allow you to resize your form.
- Comments are moderated, so they will take a little time to appear. Currently moderation means I have to read them personally. Hopefully with OpenId deployment, this will become more automated.
- HTML markup no longer works here, due to some decision made somewhere. Sorry about that.
- If you are having trouble posting, it may be that you need javascript to be enabled. I don't think javascript should be needed for submitting a form, but that's the way it is here.
- Check your comments by using the preview button...
Posted by ChrisB on January 30, 2007 at 12:07 PM CET #
Posted by iris on January 30, 2007 at 03:09 PM CET #
Most of what we have been learning is public on the w3c and available there or linked to from the above blog post.
The Semantic Web School in Vienna, Austria, gives more in depth courses to help people work their way through the material. There may be other such schools. In any case those courses are tailor made for each individual student and so you pay the teachers time. But the content of the courses is public.
The rest of the stuff we spoke about is Sun internal and not very interesting to people outside. At some point we may wrap up our experience and publish it.
Posted by Henry Story on January 31, 2007 at 11:16 AM CET #