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!

Something to say?