Back from ESWC 2008

The European Semantic Web Conference is over and I’m back in Galway. It was a lot of fun, two hundred smart and interesting people in a sea-side tourist resort, and the thought “I can’t believe I’m getting paid for this” crossed my mind a few times.

It was good to see that some of the topics close to my interest — SPARQL, Linked Data, the LOD project, Semantic Search — were well-represented in the conference program and in the attention of the crowd.

I gave four talks:

1. A five-minute lightning talk on Sindice.com in Sunday’s spontaneous and surprisingly well-attended LOD gathering. Slides (PDF)

2. Neologism: Easy Vocabulary Publishing, together with Sergio Fernández, in the SFSW workshop, about our soon-to-be-released RDFS vocabulary editor and publishing system. Slides (PDF)

3. Semantic Sitemaps about DERI’s proposed Semantic Sitemaps standard for improved discovery of RDF data published on the Web. Slides (PDF)

4. There’s more than US-ASCII, a two-minute lightning talk in which I complain bitterly about the inability of Semantic Web developers to properly handle characters outside of the usual US-ASCII charset in their apps. The single slide is reproduced below.

There's more than US-ASCII (presentation slide)

The best part was meeting in person for the first time some of the people I’m working with on a regular basis, including Michael Hausenblas, Keith Alexander, Hugh Glaser, Andreas Langegger, and Olaf Hartig, and making some exciting new connections. Email is great, but sitting down face to face still beats it by an order of magnitude in effectivity, and also in fun if drinks are involved.

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2 Responses to Back from ESWC 2008

  1. Ora Lassila says:

    Your “There’s more than US-ASCII” -slide is excellent!

  2. I’m wondering whether it is intentional that, throughout your blog, there are funny characters like ” ” “. ” Fernández ” is a funny name.

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