I spent all of last week in Basel, becoming a (hold your breath) "Certified Knowledge Manager". More about that most interesting experience later on, now I just want to tell you about how pleasant a stay at good old Basel that was.
Now that ART is starting (remember last year?) there's really quite some stuff going on (some say too much). I had the pleasure to hang around with Barbara Strebel, I really did enjoy go see the Gare Du Nord, hear the organizer of the ART Conversations, and stop by at the UBERMORGEN vernissage at plug.in, things like that. I liked it.

The first image above I took at some kind of performance called "Staatsempfang - Das rotokoll" (Anna Geering, Jo Dunkel and 25 performers), a parody mock-up of a Swiss state reception, with all the bells and whistles that took place at the Kunstmuseum, the second one is a shot taken from the UBERMORGEN BANKSTATEMENTGENERATOR,

Jep, that was somewhat funny.

My girlfriend had just left me (and is with some student of political science called Paul now, and I felt -pathetically- felt like wounded deer at dusk), so that Basel program was a good one indeed.

As I didn't manage to do any conference blogging at the 'Second European Semantic Web Conference', here are a few (late) impressions, memories, and dodgy conclusions:

• First a conclusion: The Semantic Web is sexy. Right, we knew that before, but looking at the sharp increase in the number of attendees it clearly must be pretty attractive. Stars like the most-unusual, all-pink dressed Jeremy Carroll or the astounding Lederhosen-Dieter prove the point. No doubt, that thang's hot.
  
• Then: There were a couple of conference papers with Swiss contributions. In fact I didn't expect the UniSG MCM to be involved twice ( "A POP-based Replanning Agent for Automatic Web Service Composition", "Towards an Ontology-Based Distributed Architecture for Paid Content"), seeing some EPFL folks over there was no surprise at all (paper: "Optimally Distributing Interactions between Composed Semantic Web Services"). There must have been many, many more Austrians than Swiss, though. From a mentality point of view I'd say the Semantic Web is more Swiss than Austrian, but let's better not this discuss this :-)
  
• Besides attending the main conference presentations, I afforded to attend one tutorial and one workshop - as said, that trip wasn't about holidays. The tutorial, "MDA Standards for Ontology Development" wanted to align theory and practice by connecting UML via its ultimate meta-meta-model(!), the self-describing MOF with all that Semantic Web trumpery. Very, very interesting, but after the meta-meta-level it started to feel a bit esoteric, so I doubt this will help a lot reconciling the UML engineers with the OWL and RDF zealots. Cool stuff, anyway.
  
• The Best Paper Award ironically went to the a non-European group, for a paper on Temporal RDF -and deservedly so.
  
• Then there was THE WORKSHOP (on "Scripting for the Semantic Web", see pictures), my first personal appearance on the academic stage with a peer-reviewed paper. I was underprepared and nervous, but it was fun indeed. This scripting workshop mainly was a PHP workshop, which is pretty cool and certainly promising.
• Finally: Thanks a lot to PAI for sponsoring me a bit, as well as to the mediagonal crew for being so flexible and understanding for all my adventures in those research things.
  

That's more or less it, I should have posted this earlier. Anyway, if you want to see some additional pictures, go see the DERI Gallery.