I recently discovered this very cool project here in Galway called murmur. “Linking People to Places”? Sounds a lot like some Semantic Web or Linked Data thing. In a way it is, only it’s live and doesn’t (directly) involve the internet or URI. Instead, the people behind murmur have put up metal signs in different locations all over Galway. Each sign has a freefone number on it, which, if called, will get you to a recording of a story about the place where the sign was set up. The stories are all told by Galway locals, and were also recorded at the sign’s location.

I think this is a nice example of using technology to provide a better experience and understanding of a city. Conceptually it’s located somewhere in the vicinity of topics such as the internet of things, ubiquitous computing – only it doesn’t involve computing. :) It reminds me of a story where someone demonstrated the principle of topic maps with strings and other physical artifacts, thereby moving from the digital over to the physical domain.

Murmur has also been set up in other cities, such as Toronto, Edinburgh, Dublin, San José, Montreal, Calgary and São Paolo.

internet of things, mobile computing | 1 Comment »

So, ISWC2008 is over and I’m back in Galway. What did I learn this year?

• There are more and more Semantic Web applications out there, and they are getting slicker and more user-friendly every year. The demo and poster session and the Semantic Web challenges clearly showed that. Some highlights were probably paggr (semantic widgets) by Benjamin Nowack and several different apps that make use of mobile technologies (on the iPhone, no less). Incidentally, those two also won the first and second prize in the challenge (Benjamin won this for the second time already, after having won with CONFOTO (seems to be offline at the moment) at ISWC2005.
• Interestingly for me, a lot of people are working on solutions to make SPARQL-querying more accessible to end users. There is our own work on a SPARQL builder component for Konduit, there is the web-based graphical interface NITELIGHT, and some cool SPARQL extensions by Benjamin Nowack (again!). While those were all presented during the poster session, I also talked to some other people in the coffee breaks who told me about their work in this area – this clearly seems to be an area where a lot of developments and improvements are going to surface soon!
• OpenCyc – this is of course not really a new development, but after having attended the tutorial of using OpenCyc for the Semantic Web, I’m starting to think that their ontology and knowledge base are, at the very least, a very interesting point of reference for linked open data. Those guys have worked on their ontologies for a long time, and a lot of reasoning technology is already in place. Therefore, if we hook up our linked data to (Open)Cyc terms, the hope is that we can finally have the inferencing magic that people are dreaming of for the Web.
• And finally, to come to the title of this post. I learned the hard way this year that one cannot put enough effort into advertising one’s work and also oneself. I think Richard and I did a pretty good job with the conference metadata this year, and set up a very nice site with a lot of interesting functionality for developers and conference attendees. Unfortunately, we didn’t spend an equal amount of work on making the people at the conference aware of that, with the result that e.g. way too few knew that there was an option to discuss papers online and make those discussion become part of the metadata about the paper. Also, to my surprise, some people even didn’t seem to know that I had been acting as metadata co-chair at all. Note to self: be more proactive next year.

conference, deriblog, semanticweb, travel | No Comments »