Captions to the above screenshots:

1. OpenRecord, a Dojo project and « an open source wiki engine geared toward semi-structured database content » - SCREENCAST
   
   
2. Quoting David François Huynh: « Sneak peek of Piggy Bank + Solvent 3.x... work in early progress...
   (Look ma, no angle bracket and no URI! No bnode. No xpath. No custom javascript scraper. It's just the ol' Web. With semantics.) » - SCREENCAST
   

Looks like the semantic web is becoming visible, touchable, screencastable - usable?

Although I'm not the most talkative one (usually), sometimes people want me to talk about subjects they (all mistakenly, usually) have the impression I should be capable of talking about. These days it happens that they ask me to tell them about the "Semantic Web" - whatever that may be.

So here are the next two scheduled talks related to that dodgy topic:

• In the Internet Efficiency Club TechTalks series: «A Semantic Web Reconnaissance Flight» , March 7 at the Zunfthaus zur Schmiden, Zürich (in German).
• In the "Library Science Talks series (programme), a talk on some work started while at DERI, the «Ontologizing Wikipedia» stuff. September 11 in Geneva at CERN (in English), and on September 12 in Berne at the Swiss National Library (in German).

Both of these are semi-public, AFAIK, so if you ask the organizers kindly enough there shouldn't be any problem getting in.

Restarting my blog like nothing happened:

Our article "WikiOnt: An Ontology for Describing and Exchanging Wiki Articles" got published recently, I was involved in quite a bit. Intent: bringing the abundant richness of Wikipedia into a Semantic Web that needs, above all, a lot of (good) data. Same situation as with all similar stuff: We hope this might become useful someday somehow.

If you have too much time and a burning desire to play around with *tons* of RDF: Go fetch the PHP code for the RDFizer and make it process an entire Wikipedia dump - it sure takes a while. However, would be cool to make Wikipedia (which gives URIs to everything anyway..) itself return an RDF description on request.. Anybody?

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.

Just saying hi from ESWC'05, just wanted to show you guys the view from the Royal Mare in Hersonissos, the hotel I'm staying at.

I'll try to do some easy conference blogging, the first interesting event (assuming you're not interested about stories on unfriendly taxi drivers or in yesterday night out with Stefan Decker, Dieter Fensel and the HP Galway folks) is the "MDA Standards for Ontology Development" tutorial this afternoon. I'll try to take some pictures and wright (I meant: write - must be their rakı!) a short report (which I'll have to anyway, I'm not on holiday after all ;-)).

1.) I'm rather excited, because I'm indeed going to Greece!
2.) Stefano is really excited, because they released Piggy Bank 2!

Lot's of other stuff going on, too much to blog about, sorry. But at least I gave those guys something to blog about. Anyway, if you want to follow my endeavour you'd better read my bookmarks than my blog, because blogging frequency is unlikely to increase in the weeks to come - despite all the excitement.

Grimy, streetwise and absolutely fearless, 50 Cent has released what very much sounds like the first Semantic Web rap album. Want proof? Here we go.

First, there's a track, causing lyrical warfare already, called "Piggy Bank" (lyrics). Alright, you might argue that this can't be about that Piggy bank. Well, then there's another song, "Hate it or love it". It clearly has the following line:

« .. put 'em in my FOAF file!»

Wanna hear it? ♫ put 'em in my foaf file.

Yeah ;-)

(Spotter: Andreas)

If you haven't yet, you should read Eric Miller's recent presentation titled "The Semantic Web is Here", citing real-world examples by Nokia, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Adobe and Oracle.
Oracle as an RDF DB? OMG!

I particularly liked the slide "Observations and Lessons Learned":

• (Smart) Data is (increasingly) King
• Planing for evolution (data, services, partners, etc.) is cost effective
• Applying "open" solutions to "closed" problems is cost effective
• Quicker time / services / products to market

I hear there also was a /very/ exciting VC panel at that conference..