Semantic Web ´óÏó´«Ã½ Workshop
( developer and evangelist) recently asked this question on the Semantic Web mailing list . So I ran a workshop last week aimed at answering the question: "What is the state of the Semantic Web in the ´óÏó´«Ã½?" Judging by the response to the event, the answer is: pretty good.
am an Information Architect in Future Media & Technology, so I sit somewhere between technology and . This balance was also represented in the choice of speakers at the workshop who came from both a technical and a design background.
Audio & Music Interactive has always been at the forefront of the drive to bring the Semantic Web project to the ´óÏó´«Ã½. Michael Smethurst and Matt Wood gave an overview of and talked about some of the things A&M are working on. They have previously blogged in more depth about how /music and /programmes relate to . It also looks like work has started on modelling food and gardening.
Michael Atherton from Search & Navigation presented a very entertaining talk about the future of ´óÏó´«Ã½ Topic Pages and navigation badges. Navigation badges will be powered by a semantic tagging service called the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Metadata Services API (the ´óÏó´«Ã½ version of , if you like, but with web-scale identifiers).
I followed with a short presentation discussing the work Chris Sizemore and I have been doing regarding and the role of .
Ant Miller talked about the variety of projects coming out of ´óÏó´«Ã½ Research & Innovation and the role the Semantic Web will play in liberating archive content.
Zac Bjelogrlic and talked about the projects coming out of the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Internet team. Zac discussed the issues around .
We were lucky enough to have two distinguished external speakers, and . Dan talked about OpenID's relationship to the Semantic Web and outlined a number of scenarios in which it could be integrated into the ´óÏó´«Ã½ website.
Finally, Alex introduced his work around making web 2.0 services more semantic in particular social networks () and user tagging ().
The Q&A session at the end raised some interesting questions. One apparent pattern was that the questions regarding the user experience of these projects - as opposed to the technologies involved - were actually harder to answer for the panel.
I think this reinforces the fact that the Semantic Web is not purely a technology-driven project but needs the help of many disciplines to ensure its success. To quote :
They will tell you it's about artificial intelligence, acronyms such as RDF, object-oriented data structures and meta this and hypertext that. The bottom line is this: the Semantic Web is about bringing information to life.
Silver Oliver is an Information Architect in FM&T. Photo of Silver by , from Flickr, used under Creative Commons licence.
Comment number 1.
At 27th Aug 2008, njslabbert wrote:Excellent point made above, ie that the semantic web is a multidisciplinary (and I would say interdisciplinary, which is not the same thing) enterprise. It is indeed about bringing information to life, which is why it is directly -- and to some no doubt surprisngly -- related to the subject of philosophy. This consideration has not yet been sufficiently explored and is filled with enormously exciting possibilities. -- Nicholas J. Slabbert
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Comment number 2.
At 3rd Jun 2009, IanDBailey wrote:I just set up a meetup group for semantic web folks in London - see
--Ian
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