kantenwerk » vocamp http://kantenwerk.org Just another WordPress weblog Mon, 25 Jan 2010 19:07:38 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9-rare en hourly 1 VoCamp Galway 2008 http://kantenwerk.org/2008/12/03/vocamp-galway-2008/ http://kantenwerk.org/2008/12/03/vocamp-galway-2008/#comments Tue, 02 Dec 2008 23:31:56 +0000 Knud http://kantenwerk.org/2008/12/03/vocamp-galway-2008/ Last week we organised a second VoCamp – a grass roots, BarCamp-style workshop for creating Semantic Web vocabularies – in Galway. The setup was much like the first one in Oxford: we as the organisers provided the room and coffee breaks, but otherwise only set a very basic schedule (start-coffee-lunch-coffee-wrapup). The real action was provided by the delegates, who divided up into groups according to interests and worked away. On several occasions throughout the two days we all came together again and every group had the chance to report on their progress, discuss problems with all VoCamp delegates, etc. It was all very relaxed and productive, and with an interesting mix of people. Apart from a good crowd from DERI, there were people from Talis, Yahoo (Peter Mika was luckily able to make it) and Edinburgh. Some people even came from as far as Germany and Florida!

Vocabulary Hacking

All the different groups and their results can be found on this wiki page, so I’ll just mention a few things here, such as vocabularies for meeting minutes, calls for papers or real estate (not forgetting the very important Ear Worm vocabulary), more work on a SW starter pack, discussions and work on Microformat-RDF mappings and RDFa in Drupal.

Luckily Galway was on its best behaviour – I think it didn’t rain at all during the two days. Looking forward to more VoCamps in other places soon!

]]> http://kantenwerk.org/2008/12/03/vocamp-galway-2008/feed/ 0 VoCamp Oxford 2008 http://kantenwerk.org/2008/09/30/vocamp-oxford-2008/ http://kantenwerk.org/2008/09/30/vocamp-oxford-2008/#comments Tue, 30 Sep 2008 09:20:20 +0000 admin http://kantenwerk.org/2008/09/30/vocamp-oxford-2008/ I just came back from the first VoCamp, held at Wolfson College in Oxford. It was the first in what will hopefully become a series of small, hands-on, community-driven events where people get together to build and work on vocabularies and ontologies for the Semantic Web. Peter Mika had a nice blog post recently on why such activity is badly needed.

VoCamp2008 Oxford

The whole event was pretty organic and loosely organised. Compared to big, official events with lots of pretty boring talks (not saying that _all_ talks are always boring), VoCamp was refreshingly fun and engaging. I actually had the feeling that I was doing something useful. Ad-hoc groups formed on the spot, working on varied topics such as an IRC vocabulary, a whiskey ontology, something which could be called a “vocabulary starter pack for SemWeb newbies”, an evidence ontology, bio-med vocabularies, etc. The idea is that we will have a number of VoCamps in rapid succession (the next one will be in November here in Galway), and so, even though probably none of the individual topics will have enourmous impact just now, I think VoCamp can definitely create a lot of momentum over time.

On Thursday, we planned to take the opportunity to join the Oxford SWIG meeting, but unfortunately there didn’t seem to be a lot of Semantic Web interest just that evening in Oxford. However, I did manage to say hello to Kal Ahmed of TM4J (Topic Maps) fame!

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