Presentations of W3C Team, Office Staff, and Working Group Participants

Query constraints:

• W3C Activity: Semantic Web
• Possible presentation dates: past few months and upcoming

April 2008

21 April

Ben Adida, Elias Torres, and Ivan Herman give a tutorial entitled "RDFa: Extensible Structured Data in HTML" and Ivan Herman gives a tutorial entitled "Introduction to the Semantic Web (through an example…)" at "The 17th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2008)" , on Monday, 21 April 2008, in Beijing, China.

23, 24 April

• Chris Bizer, Tom Heath, and Tim Berners-Lee give a talk entitled "Linking Open Data" ; Huajun Chen gives a talk entitled "Semantic Web Development in China" ; Raphaël Troncy gives a talk entitled "Managing Online Video (or Multimedia) Content with the Semantic Web" on Wednesday, 23 April 2008;
• Kai-Dietrich Scheppe gives a talk entitled "POWDER Use Cases" on Thursday, 24 April 2008;

at the "W3C Track, The 17th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2008)" , Beijing, China.

28 April

Oreste Signore gives a tutorial entitled " Origini, motivazioni e regole di evoluzione del World Wide Web (Origins, motivations and evolution rules for the World Wide Web)" at the "Storia dell' Informatica (History of informatics)" on Monday, 28 April 2008, in Pisa, Italy. (see abstract)

Abstract:

A brief history of the Web, with an insight towards the Semantic Web

May 2008

5 May

Ivan Herman gives a talk entitled "What is the Semantic Web?" and participates at a panel entitled "XBRL and the Semantic Web" at the "17th International XBRL Conference" , on Monday, 5 May 2008, in Eindhoven, The Netherlands.

7 May

Oreste Signore gives a tutorial entitled "Introduzione al Semantic Web (Introduction to Semantic Web)" at the "Web Senza Barriere '08 (No barriers in the Web '08)" on Wednesday, 7 May 2008, in Roma, Italy. (see abstract)

Abstract:

Basic principles of Semantic Web and related technologies

8 May

Steven Pemberton gives a talk entitled "Why you should have a Website" at the "XTech 2008" on Thursday, 8 May 2008, in Dublin, Ireland. (see abstract)

Abstract:

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis postulates a link between thought and language: if you haven’t got a word for a concept, you can’t think about it; if you don’t think about it, you won’t invent a word for it. The term “Web 2.0” is a case in point. It was invented by a book publisher as a term to build a series of conferences around, and conceptualises the idea of Web sites that gain value by their users adding data to them. But the concept existed before the term: Ebay was already Web 2.0 in the era of Web 1.0. But now we have the term we can talk about it, and it becomes a structure in our minds, and in this case a movement has built up around it. There are inherent dangers for users of Web 2.0. For a start, by putting a lot of work into a Web site, you commit yourself to it, and lock yourself into their data formats. This is similar to data lock-in when you use a proprietary program. You commit yourself and lock yourself in. Moving comes at great cost. This was one of the justifications for creating the eXtended Markup Language (XML): it reduces the possibility of data lock-in – having a standard representation for data helps using the same data in different ways too. As an example, if you commit to a particular photo-sharing Web site, you upload thousands of photos, tagging extensively, and then a better site comes along. What do you do? How about if the site you have chosen closes down (as has happened with some Web 2.0 music sites): all your work is lost. How do you decide which social networking site to join? Do you join several and repeat the work? How about geneology sites, and school-friend sites? These are all examples of Metcalf’s law, which postulates that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of nodes in the network. Simple maths shows that if you split a network into two, its value is halved. This is why it is good that there is a single email network, and bad that there are many instant messenger networks. It is why it is good that there is only one World Wide Web. Web 2.0 partitions the Web into a number of topical sub-Webs, and locks you in, thereby reducing the value of the network as a whole. So does this mean that user contributed content is a Bad Thing? Not at all, it is the method of delivery and storage that is wrong. The future lies in better aggregators.

18, 22 May

Ivan Herman gives a talk entitled "State of the Semantic Web" (see abstract) on Sunday, 18 May 2008 and participates at a panel entitled "Bringing SemTech Back to the Business" (see abstract) on Thursday, 22 May 2008 at the "2008 Semantic Technology Conference" , San Jose, CA, USA.

Abstract for “State of the Semantic Web”:

The history of the Semantic Web goes back several years now. It is worth looking at what has been achieved, where we are, and where we are going. Ivan Herman, Semantic Web Activity Lead for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) leads us through this as we prepare for a week of deep discussions with people from all parts of the community of semantic technologies.

Abstract for “Bringing SemTech Back to the Business”:

With a panel of leaders from the semantic technology industry, this session will give us the opportunity to reflect on the many discussions that have taken place during the week of SemTech 2008 and help us map the course as we prepare to extend those conversations back into our workplaces. We will touch on issues of ROI, making the case for semantic technologies in the enterprise, and what to expect in the coming year in the semantic tech space.

23 May

Oreste Signore gives an invited talk entitled "Il supporto delle ontologie nella ricerca dell' informazione (Ontology support in information retrieval)" at the "La strutturazione delle informazioni nella documentazione tecnica (Information structuring in technical documentation)" on Friday, 23 May 2008, in Udine, Italy.

27 May

Dan Brickley gives a talk entitled "One Big Happy Family: Practical Collaboration on Meaningful Markup " at the "Microformats vEvent" on Tuesday, 27 May 2008, in London, United Kingdom. (see abstract)

Abstract:

This talk explores some ways in which the Microformat and RDF approaches can complement each other, and some ways in which we can share data, tools and experiences between these two technologies. It will outline the often-unarticulated history of the RDF design, the techniques used for parsing and querying RDF data, and the things made easy and hard through this approach. RDF techniques can be contrasted with the different choices made for Microformats. However these differences obscure an underlying similarity that comes from shared ‘Webby’ values.

June 2008

17 June

Tim Berners-Lee gives a keynote entitled "Web of Data" at the "LinkedData Planet" on Tuesday, 17 June 2008, in New York, NYC, USA.

17 June

Tim Berners-Lee gives a talk entitled "Web of Data" at the "LinkedData Planet Conference: exploring the new web of linked data" on Tuesday, 17 June 2008, in New York, NY, USA.

19 June

Ivan Herman gives a keynote entitled "États des lieux du Web sémantique" at the "19èmes Journées Francophones d'Ingénierie des Connaissances (IC2008) (19th Francophone Knowledge Engineering Days)" on Thursday, 19 June 2008, in Nancy, France.

September 2008

16 September

Phil Archer and Matt Womer give a state of the art report entitled "Introduction to the Protocol for Web Description Resources" at the "POWDER: More of what you want, when you want it" on Tuesday, 16 September 2008, in Yahoo!'s Mission College Campus, Santa Clara, California, USA. (see abstract)

Abstract:

Members of the POWDER Working Group will gather at Yahoo's Mission College Campus to present its work, highlighting its benefits to end users, publishers and aggregators.

24 September

Ivan Herman gives a tutorial entitled "Introduction to the Semantic Web" at the "2nd European Semantic Technology Conference" on Wednesday, 24 September 2008, in Vienna, Austria.