#www2008

I'm currently in Beijing, enjoying WWW2008.

Sunday, Uldis, John and myself gave a tutorial about "Interlinking Online Communities and Enriching Social Software with the Semantic Web", in which we detailed current state of the art regarding SIOC and related works, like how Enterprise 2.0 or data portability can be enhanced thanks to the Semantic Web, as well as describing various tools that produce or consume Social Semantic Web data. The slides can be browsed online here.

Today, I gave two talks at the LDOW workshop, the first one about the flickrdf exporter, the second one about MOAT, while Uldis talked about SIOC and Linked Data. Slides of both of my presentations are online. It was a great workshop, lots of interesting papers and concrete applications demo. That's really interesting and encouraging to see so much people deploying Semantic Web technologies in various contexts and for various purposes, from biology to enterprise data integration, and also facing new research issues as URI identification and mappings.

I'll present a paper co-written with Uldis Bojars, John Breslin and Stefan Decker - and with Dan Brickely's valuable feedback - titled "Social Networks and Data Portability using Semantic Web technologies" on the 2nd Social Aspects on the Web workshop (SAW2008) next tuesday in Innsbruck. As you can guess, the talk will show how FOAF and SIOC can provide efficient and normalized ways to model social networks and user contributions on the Web and thus achieve (some of) the data portability goals. Uldis will also give a related talk on Friday at XTech in Dublin.

Some Semantic-Web related talks also occur in the main BIS conference, with some keynotes on this topic and various talks related to ontologies on monday afternoon, some of them also linking to Web 2.0 aspects as tagging and wikis. It should be interesting to see how the social semantic web (call it web n.0) is spread in organizations. I'll also present here the use of a form-based Semantic Wiki in corporate environment. Think of it as "hidden semantics" or how to let people manage ontology instances and re-use it without any knowledge of RDF. BTW, the great talk by Denny Vrandečić about Semantic MediaWiki in the WWW2008 Dev-Track also showed how SMW could be used that way, with a nice example :-). Once again, I really enjoyed the experience of being there, meeting some of the people I knew only on the Web, listening to great talks (I especially liked Google's keynote about cloud computing, querying and fuzzy-logic, Web 2.0 and learning , W3C SW track, Dev-track and SW panel, and of course the LDOW workshop) and presenting some of my works in front of such an audience.