Semantic Desktop Workshop wrapup

Yesterday I returned from the Semantic Desktop Workshop.

My intention was to live blog. I didn’t find the time. Days started early and ended late. In between was way too much high-information goodness to let any of it pass.

The two previous workshops were centered around Leo Sauermann‘s gnowsis. This time we had a wider focus, with Giovanni Tummarello and Christian Morbidoni from DBin present, as well as Max Völkel from Semantic MediaWiki and a couple of Leo’s DFKI colleagues and some of his project partners in the Nepomuk project.

I did a short presentation on user interface issues of Semantic Web applications (weird photo here). Executive summary: Semantic Web developers should decide if they target RDF enthusiasts, power users, or casual users, because UI design requirements for each group are quite different. I may write up the talk in the next days if I can find the time.

We did a lot of hacking – the hands-on part is an important component of this workshop series. Giovanni, Chrisitan and I added a simple RSS export facility to DBin. This was the first time I worked on an Eclipse plugin.

The best part of every workshop and conference is meeting people and chatting about this pretty exotic stuff we care about. I spent quite a bit of time talking web architecture, wikis, SPARQL and personal knowledge management with Max Völkel. If you read any interesting ideas on this blog over the next few weeks, you can assume it’s me fleshing out something that Max mentioned off-handedly over beer.

Anyway, hanging out with fellow geeks is always fun, and I’m seriously looking forward to the next installment of this workshop series.

The photos are by Anja, who provided photographic coverage.

This entry was posted in General, Semantic Web. Bookmark the permalink.