Day 3

This morning’s hangover was brought to you by Smithwicks.

A short day today, with the conference finishing at around 1pm. Before the end, though, a couple of talks to go to before the final keynote.

Firstly, was a session on ‘Data portability with SIOC and FOAF‘ from Uldis Bojãrs of DERI, Galway. This talk described the need and requirements for data portability, and continued with a demonstration of SIOC applications which allow SIOC and FOAF data to be produced from existing online community sites (blogs, forums, etc.). Uldis also described how this information can be ported to other sites with tools such as the WordPress SIOC Import plugin. He also demonstrated the Semantic Radar Firefox plugin which detects the presence of SIOC, FOAF and DOAP data in a web page.

Next up, was Andrew Walkingshaw of the University of Cambridge, who was presenting his work on ‘Representing, indexing and mining scientific data using XML and RDF: Golem and CrystalEye’. I’d met Andrew over lunch the day before, and we had a good chat about many things, and I was really looking forward to this talk. The essence of the presentation was discussing the creation of tools to enable scientists to filter, mine and search both their own data and that produced by other researchers, aggregating supplementary data, and adding value to this data. Andrew described the CrystalEye repository and his Golem ontology language and associated tools, which provides the ability to extract the data from the repository, and then build new interfaces to it - making the data easier to find, analyse and reuse. A cracking talk, delivered in a very engaging way, and I will read his paper as I admit some of the talk did pass over my head!

Finally, after some much needed coffee, was the final keynote. Sean McGrath of Propylon gave a highly entertaining, and engaging talk on the nature of the web as we know it, taking us on a “Celtic-tinted safari of the Web featuring mythical creatures, tenuous analogies and curious interconnections.” No, really, he did. Via a lot of digression (and indeed, orangutans) Sean concluded that today’s Web is: “The Web is URIs + HTTP (and nothing else – no ‘pure’ content)”. And I tend to agree. Definitely recommend scanning through the slides for this talk - it might not make sense without the words, but there’s enough to go on to get a flavour of this great end to XTech 2008.

Conclusions

So we’d made it to day 3 of this excellent conference. As usual, much of the really interesting discussion was held in the restaurants and pubs around Dublin after the main day’s events were over, going on well in to the small hours in some cases.

My general conclusions and reflections, are:

  • Much of the really cool and exciting stuff covered in this conference will never see the light of day in the projects I work on (with the possible exception of RDFa, but convincing clients they should do this will be hard, as will coming up with any kind of useful ontology). This may be a defeatist attitude, and perhaps there will be opportunities to embed Fire Eagle functionality into some sites in the future, or make more of FOAF and SIOC to make our sites more amenable to community building - who knows? But at least now I know these things exist, and we can start to look at OAuth for CMS integration with, say, Flickr or other such technical liaisons.
  • I don’t know anywhere enough about this stuff, both technically or indeed that it exists, and despite it not being of immediate use to me in my day-to-day work, I should spend more time finding out about it and playing - maybe in my own time if work commitments don’t allow the time.
  • What I really liked about this conference was the mix of attendees and presenters, both from academia, and the commercial world both large and small. It made it feel much more valid, and it really felt like everyone was there for the right reasons - not trying to sell anything, but out of a genuinely altruistic wish to make the web better.
  • I definitely would want to go to XTech again, and would encourage others to go too.
  • Dublin pubs sell some great beer.