The last months have been quite different from the previous ones.
A few data points:
Makes me wonder what’s ahead…
It’s now been more than a week since reboot 7.0, and I’m once again able to think somewhat straight.
‘Twas a great couple of days, with a lot of inspirational talks, chatter, and laughs, and even a beer thrown in here and there. Marc Canter wasn’t there this time, so nobody sang — at least as far as I know.
The Semantic Web didn’t get that much mention, but at least David Weinberger (depicted above) pointed out that knowledge isn’t tree-structured — hopefully that’ll take root (hah) with some XML folks!
It’s a good thing I’m too busy these days with projects at work and house-hunting the rest of the time, otherwise I wouldn’t know where to begin sorting out what to do next…
The first day of reboot 7.0 had a surprise up its sleeve for those of us that stayed throughout the day: Not only did we get to see the planned showing of Doug Engelbart‘s 1968 demonstration of the NLS system featuring among other novelties a mouse, hypertext, and a keyword-ranking search engine — he joined us via a/v link, and stayed for a conversation after the show:
A very enlightening experience, even if those of us born after the demonstration took place might not fully appreciate its significance. Engelbart later emphasized paradigms, and how the process towards fullfilment of the goals of his research will be evolutionary rather than revolutionary, a view I’m sure Tim Berners-Lee agrees on with regard to the SemWeb aspect (even if some might say that linking to individual objects sounds more like XLink).
Earlier in the day we heard about blogging, Wikipedia, 37signals’ development process, and Ruby on Rails (must… make… time… for… check…) — Jesper Balslev has notes and pointers.
All in all a day above average that started out slow, but picked up at the end — I’m looking forward to day 2, featuring always enjoyable Ben Hammersley.
I’m at reboot 7.0, and even though it hasn’t officially started yet, it looks promising.
Last night it all began with free beer and peanuts (on request) at Admiral Gjeddes Gaard — a very nice place in the center of Copenhagen:
(Details in Preboot.)
Only a few weeks after SPARQLing Days I’m now finally ready to report some progress…
2005-05-07: Updated to version 0.3, see changelog below.
As is now common knowledge, one outcome of the great gathering in Tuscany is The Gargonza Experiment, which attempts to create a set of showcases for the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the SPARQL Query Language for RDF
. Already the “community theatre” has gained a bit of steam and an increasing number of followers, and I’m sure there’ll be more to come as people get the stuff they started working on completed. To keep up-to-date, I suggest y’all subscribe to Planet RDF or at least to the Gargonza Experiment category that Danny Ayers — my gracious host for a few days following the main event — is maintaining.
To assist in that goal, I’ve made a subset of my photo description database available for SPARQL queries via Sparqlette — A SPARQL demo query service. The subset currently contains only descriptions of the photos taken during SPARQLing Days, and not all photos have been through my annotation process, there are still some foaf:depicts triples to be made…