Ivan's Blog

Having spend some vacations lately in Beijing, I also took photos, of course. I have finally worked through all of them and have put a selection of those on the Web (mixed with older photos that I took on previous occasions).

Actually, I also play with the Picasa Web Album site, and I have the same album on my site there. I quite like the Picasa program that I have been using to organize my photos for a while. Actually, I also quite like the Picasa Web Album, and I would love to use that site to store my photos but… there is a limitation on the amount of space that one can use for free and to buy a larger space one has to be in the US. No kidding: if you are not in the US (more exactly, if you do not have a US credit card, I guess), then you cannot buy a larger disc space. This parochialism is really offending.

Part of the Workshop was, in fact, a report on what the W3C Interest Group does. Being part of that one, it was not really new to me, but I hope that it was new to the audience… I was impressed, by the way, by the high turnout. This is really good!

But there were also “non-IG” presentations, although I was around only during the morning, so I cannot really comment on all of them. I think the one which impressed me the most came from the Center for Disease Control, in Atlanta, on how they collect data from all over the world for the purpose of global disease surveillance, ie, information on diseases that go beyond national boundaries (SARS, malaria, bird flue, etc). They collect very heterogenous data and they use RDF based technologies to combine those and present them to the user. (See an example interface of what they present.) Impressive stuff. Mashup on a giant scale.

One question did come up, actually, during question time (with them and others): it is nice to see an application pattern whereby very hetereogeneous data are integrated via RDF, and then sophisticated search interfaces are offered to the user to query the data. However, it is very important that the core RDF data should be reachable and shared as raw data. Ie, if other people want to use that data directly, it should not be “hidden” behind beautiful SPARQL engine interfaces… Moreover, the links to the RDF data should be easy to find for everyone to use. The Semantic Web is (also) about sharing data…

In the afternoon I went to the panel on Interaction Design Grand Challanges and the Semantic Web.The panelists (TimBL, Jim Hendler, Nigel Shadbolt, David Karger) had lots of interesting (and sometimes fun) things to say on the issue of interaction with Semantic Web Data (or user interaction in general), on the role (or the lack of role  of ontologies, etc. Nigel had an interesting slide which showed the graphical representation of a pretty large ontology, but it also turned out that, in practice, users use only a very small part of that ontology in practice. The whole issue of “shallow” ontologies came up several times, something definitely to follow up.

However, I must admit I was a bit disappointed, though I also realize that this was my fault. The panel being sponsored by the new WSRI, and all the panelists being somehow involved with this stuff, I was hoping to hear more about some more general, WSRI related ideas and plans (personally, I am mostly interested by the question whether and how WSRI will look at issues like the effect of the Web on societies at large, in a new type of web-illeteracy, etc). But, as I said, it was my fault because it was a false expectation; after all, this panel was indeed part of a Semantic Web User Interface Workshop… Anyway. I think I will have the opportunity to hear about those issues, too.