I enjoyed this (my third) conference experience most of all. Over the course of three years I’ve come to know more folks in the community and that makes a big difference. Another big win this year was bringing alo ng a colleague to help deliver the talk. One small but significant treat is visiting a talk and getting more out of than you expected. Paul Gearon and James Leigh gave a talk called “merging RDF stores” which was really a summary of layout methodologies for triple stores. They covered the common techniques and pointed to the trade offs and advantages of each, depeding on the characteristics of your dataset. Paul gave me an interesting explanation of how he solves the minimum spanning tree problem, which is a very useful query to make which cannot be handled with basic SPARQL.
I happened to run into Harold Carr. We were sitting next to each other and I asked if anyone had been to Jazoon, and he chimed in “I’ll be there next week”…then after reading his badge I remembered I had read his blog at java.net. Seems as though Harold is the only other semweb enthusiast as Sun besides Henry Story (who was conspicuously absent). The conference keynotes were better, however, they were mostly very “NLP” based. Tools like WolframAlpha, bing.com, and Siri were highlighted. Seems like the idea of a “task oriented” user interface is gaining traction and that seems to necessarily include understanding “sentences”. There was also another aspect to the conference that stood out, RDFa. RDFa is now being indexed by Yahoo’s search Monkey and Google as well. Mark Birbeck demo’d how he helped integrate UK ministry job openings into one index by having each individual website use common RDFa markup within their job posting pages. Talis was also in the house, among them, Leigh Dodds who I recognized from his blog photo. I also got to meet Paul “lucky charms” Miller who blogs at ZDNet.
During my “jena community of practice” talk I presented on jenabean, geosparql, and our work at Travelocity on Asydeo. Thankfully we had Dave Renolds from HP labs to give some update on Jena. Feels like the semantic web is beginning to take shape. best buy is emitting RDFa, New York Times announced a linked data service, and the BBC is using RDFa as well (BackstageBBC).