• Intelligent Content 2010 (Feb) – I wish I had submitted a proposal, but I didn’t. Hopefully I can go as an attendee.
• SXSW (March) – Nothing concrete yet, but I’ve got my fingers crossed that I’ll be involved with aspects of both the Interactive and Film portions of the festival.
• PAX East (March) – I plan to attend this Boston-based version of the popular West Coast gaming convention.
• Content Strategy Forum (April) – I’ll be co-leading a workshop and giving a talk at this 2-day conference in Paris, organized by STC France.
• Tribeca Film Festival (April) – Once the schedule is posted (sometime in the Spring), let me know if you need movie recommendations!
• ROFLcon II (April) – I’ll be attending this epic internet culture conference as it returns to its city of origin (Cambridge, MA).
• Semantic Technology Conference (June) – In its 6th year, the conference moves to San Francisco, and I hope to once again be a speaker.

Oh yeah, and I’m in discussions with some people to organize an exciting event of our own. More updates to come as plans get firmed up!

After the article came out, Semantic Universe posted video from a lot of the talks that I mentioned. Very interesting, if you want more detail:

• Tom Tague’s Keynote about OpenCalias’ first year
• An executive round table on Semantic Search
• The Publishers Panel
• Closing Keynote with The New York Times announcement

But the fact remains that I do go to a lot of conferences. I prefer to think of myself as a conference enthusiast, though, not an aspiring professional. Most of the conferences I go to are in the realm of tech, internet, digital culture, digital arts, or popular arts. I include film festivals too, because, well, I love them.  Some are more professionally oriented, and some are more social. In both cases, though, my goal is the same: to meet interesting people and to be inspired. 

Here are some the conferences and film festivals that I’ve been to so far in 2009: 

• Sundance (January)
• ROFLthing-NYC (January)
• IA Summit & Content Strategy Consortium (March)
• Enterprise Data World (April)
• Notacon (April)
• Tribeca Film Festival (April/May)

And here are several that I’m planning to go to, or thinking about going to later this year:

• Web 3.0 (May)
• Semantic Technology Conference (June)
• Open Video Conference (June)
• Toorcamp (July)
• Defcon (July/August)
• MIMA Summit (October)
• Web 2.0 Expo (November)

I know, you’re probably thinking, “There are whole months in there with no conference plans at all.” But it’s early, yet, and there are a lot of interesting things going on out there.

In the morning I went to a presentation on Semantic MediaWiki. Several guys from Monitor Group spoke about what they’ve learned in the year since they implemented semantic plug-ins on their internal wiki. I was particularly interested in this because at Avenue A | Razorfish we have an enterprise wiki of our own, and I’ve been trying to push to make it more semantically-enabled. The Monitor folks want to start a Semantic MediaWiki User group and and I told them to sign me up.

Then there was the closing keynote, which was about the business model of semantics and what you should tell your colleagues about the conference when you get back to the office. I really loved this panel, because there was a wide range of perspectives and backgrounds represented and they did a great job of, collectively, taking the measure of the event. Everyone has the sense that this is a discussion that’s on the brink of cracking open some major mysteries about the way we use the web, and it’s very exciting to be a part of it. And at the same time, we’re left with the feeling that next year is going to be even more interesting.

I’ll paraphrase some of the insights shared during the closing keynote:

• This stuff isn’t all at the beginning of the hype curve, some of it has made a couple cycles already. (That comment was for the folks who are new to the scene) (Jim Hendler)
• If you’re describing the value of something as being about semantic technology, you probably haven’t found the real business value yet. (Jeff Pollock)
• The key message is simplify – both in how we talk about it and how we do the work. (Jonathan Mack)
• “What vs. How” – figure out what we are trying to solve, then figure out how semantic technology can help. (Christine Connors)
• There’s a large variety of application areas, so there’s no one business model. There are different communities with different needs. (Ivan Herman)
• Semantics has no business model, but it has the potential to disrupt other business models before it creates new ones. LinkedIn would be dead in the water if everyone had a FOAF profile. (Steve Hall)
• People forget what the “I” in IT stands for. We’ve been doing a lot of technology without paying a lot of attention to the information side. (John Gilman)
• Never say “Ontology”. (John Gilman)

And what to tell your colleagues?

• There’s an embarrassment of riches here. (John Gilman)
• This isn’t the breakout year for this stuff, but it’s coming soon. (Steve Hall)
• Take the right sized step for your project. Just solve one discrete problem at a time, and don’t try to go back and fix everything. (Christine Connors)
• There’s a lot of real valuable services that already work. We need to get started before our competitors. The implications for the collaboration model are big. (Jonathan Mack)
• In a downturn year, this conference is still growing. (Jeff Pollock)
• People have big ideas here. (Jim Hendler)
• There’s no reason now not to do this. (Dave McComb)
  

Then I headed over to Koo-ki Sushi, which is sort of an annual pilgrimage for me when I come to the Semantic Technology Conference. My first year here I presented with Barbara McGlamery and for our talk we made up a fake website called “Confection Connoisseur” (which I used in this year’s presentation a bit too, so it’s actually become a running theme now). In the course of finding photos for our site mockups, we discovered this place Koo-ki Sushi which makes beautiful chocolates in the form of sushi. They’re handmade, and only sold in a little office park store front in San Jose (or you can buy them online). Of course we had to go there, and I make it a point to go back there every year.

I returned in time to go to the second half of a seminar on Entity Extraction tools. This is the part where they were actually describing the tools they evaluated, which is the part I was most interested in. Mostly I’m going to bring this information back to the tech folks and see if they want to investigate further.

Coming Soon: My wrapup of the conference, including other highlights and tidbits not previously mentioned.

• Day One: Tutorials (sioc & Freebase), Garlik & Twitter
• Day Two: Twine, Zepheira, Blue Organizer, Mainstream Markets & exhibits
• Day Three: My presentation, Future Directions, Calais, Rising Stars & my panel

After that I was so relieved, I’m surprised I could do anything, but I jumped right back into some interesting presentations, including a panel on Developing Semantic Web Applications, a talk on Calais, and a keynote that included several of the Rising Stars of the Semantic Web. Then I ended the day on the speaking side of the table again.

The panel on Developing Sem Web Apps was subtitled “Current Tools, Best Practices, & Future Directions.” I have to admit, this one was immediately following mine, so I was still having some trouble focusing, even though it included several fascinating people who I really admire. Hopefully there will be an audio file of this one and I can listen to it later sometime.

The presentation on Calais was a short solution session. Thomas Tague described several ways people can use their free semantic tagging service. I’m going to have to try it out, and I’m sure I’ll write about it further here. This is the second time I’ve heard someone mention the Powerhouse Museum collection – semantically tagged and searchable online.

The Rising Stars keynote was a little odd. There are so many incredibly interesting people here, it’s a bit weird to call some of them rising stars. Maybe they mean the companies, or the products. But it still seemed somehow out-of-character for this conference. In any case, what I learned is that I need to take a closer look at Powerset and that “The Killer App for Semantic Technology is Your Life (online)”. Tom Gruber (of Stealth-company.com) was responsible for that last insight. Killer Apps are always a big buzzword at this conference, with some people wondering what and when it will be, and other people arguing that there won’t be one, but that semantics will be used to make all the things you already do that much better. I’m in the latter camp, so Gruber’s comments resonated with me. A sort of 21st century “medium is the message” – it’s not going to be a particular service or site, it’s going to be a fundamental shift in the way we interact with the web.

During the last session of day I participated in a panel called How to Internally Market Semantic Web Technologies in Large Enterprises. I don’t have nearly as much experience as the other members of the panel, but I had a very different perspective because most of the others are engineers, and although we have all had similar struggles with stakeholders, I’ve worked more closely with designers and usability experts and so the resistance I tend to meet has more to do with UI and less to do with technology. I hope that this different perspective brought some additional insights to the panel discussion. If nothing else, at one point I made most of the people in the room crack up. So, on that count at least, I consider it to have been a success.

• Day One: Tutorials (sioc & Freebase), Garlik & Twitter
• Day Two: Twine, Zepheira, Blue Organizer, Mainstream Markets & exhibits
• Day Four: MediaWiki, Closing Keynote Panel, Koo-ki Sushi & Entity Extraction seminar

Nova talked about what’s going on with Twine. In particular, he talked about some new features that will be rolling out this summer, while the site is still in invite-only beta, and what will be rolling out in the fall when the site becomes open to the public. The main features of interest to me are that the UI will become simpler, and their will be “a lot more semantics.” Admittedly, that’s a bit vague. (A new acquaintance, John Breslin, wrote about it in more detail on his blog).

Then Eric demonstrated various new open source tools, including Remix, which I found really interesting. I knew I would be interested in Remix. Months ago, when I talked to Eric about the premise of my presentation, he told me that I would be interested in Remix. The funny thing is that he always seems apologetic that the UI isn’t more sophisticated, but having recently looked at a lot of the data manipulation tools people are currently using, I can say with confidence that Remix is decades ahead of some of the things that people are muddling through. (Again, John Breslin has written a more detailed post on Eric Miller’s presentation.)

Next I went to see Eric Miller and his colleague David Wood speak about persistent identifiers. They discussed the use of URLs to “point” to real world things or concepts. See purlz.org for more info on this idea.

Alex Iskold gave a presentation of Blue Organizer, from Adaptive Blue. This is a semantically-enabled plug-in for Firefox. I had installed it a while ago, but found out from this presentation that there are a lot features that I haven’t been using. Also talked with Alex afterwards about an odd behavior and he said I should upgrade to the latest version. So, I think I need to reinstall and have a closer look at it. In general, what this tool does is provide specific, contextual actions that you can perform on a page, a link or any bit of text that you might highlight in a web page.

Later, as the exhibits were opening, Jeff Pollock (Oracle) gave a presentation on Bringing Semantics to Mainstream Markets. I thought Jeff was great ever since we met him a few years ago when he was working for Cerebra. First of all Jeff pointed out that Semantic Technology is not itself a market. But there’s a lot of talk this conference about semantics being a “blue ocean opportunity” (in other words: uncontested – get in now before the waters get bloodied!). He talked about how to make a good business case for adopting semantic technologies. This is one that I’m going to have to try to get a copy of so I can show it to the colleagues.

Then the exhibits, and my brain was so full by then that I don’t really remember what I saw. I walked around collecting information, met a couple new people, and talked with some old friends. I’ll sort through the business cards and brochures later and put all the pieces together.

• Day One: Tutorials (sioc & Freebase), Garlik & Twitter
• Day Three: My presentation, Future Directions, Calais, Rising Stars & my panel
• Day Four: MediaWiki, Closing Keynote Panel, Koo-ki Sushi & Entity Extraction seminar

So, today I went to one tutorial by some guys from DERI and one by some guys from Metaweb (makers of Freebase), and then a presentation by Tom Ilube, of Garlik. All three were just as excellant as I’d hoped.

First up, I went to a tutorial called “The Future of Social Networks: The Need for Semantics,” led by Stefan Decker, John G. Breslin and Uldis Bojars of DERI (Digital Enterprise Research Institute). They talked about the proliferation of Social Networking Services and how they developed an ontology called SIOC (pronounced “shock”) to wrap around networks, users, and content so that data about these people and items a) would be published in a semantic form and b) could be interoperable. I’ve been trying to think of a good metaphor for this. Still working on it.

Afterwards, while Eric Hoffer and I were talking to John about the cool logo he designed for SIOC, Uldis wrapped up his conversation and turned to me and asked “Did you go to Hack Day London?” I figured he had seen the “Hack London” sticker on the back of my laptop while he was speaking. I wonder if social networks will ever be as good at facilitating secondary social connections as a sticker on a laptop. No reason why they couldn’t, right?

In the afternoon I went to a tutorial called “Creating Semantic Mashups: Bridging Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web” presented by Jamie Taylor, Colin Evans and Toby Segaran of Metaweb. I love that they’re here doing this because Freebase is not really using semantic web standards, but I always felt that in spirit it is a semantic application. Now I see why that’s the case.

For one thing, their attitude towards Semantic Technology is, essentially, just use what you need. They don’t use semantic technology for the sake of using it, they mix in the unique elements that support what they want to do. They operate on the principal of collaborative semantics: ontology as a social contract. And finally, they believe that data wants to be free. So, of course, I loved it.

Finally, I went to Tom Ilube’s presentation called “The Semantic Web, Social Graphs and Social Verification“. He’s a very engaging speaker, and the topic is one that really needs to be addressed – how to people create, maintain and protect their online identity.

Towards the end, we had a spontaneous Twitter convergence when Uldis, who was sitting behind me, received a tweet from Pete Thomas, who commented on a recent blog post I wrote about this conference. Neither of us had met him before. Awesome coincidence!

• Day Two: Twine, Zepheira, Blue Organizer, Mainstream Markets & exhibits
• Day Three: My presentation, Future Directions, Calais, Rising Stars & my panel
• Day Four: MediaWiki, Closing Keynote Panel, Koo-ki Sushi & Entity Extraction seminar

Vendors are getting savvier about providing options that allow businesses to adopt semantic technologies incrementally, as needed, instead of having to buy into it completely and invest large amounts of time, resources and data before seeing a return on their investment. Last year vendors also tended to offer single elements (a data store, a natural language processor, a semantic content management system) that clients had to stitch together into a DIY solution. But this year they’re focusing more on providing complete end-to-end solutions, or at least packaged solutions that contain multiple key products and services.

So, what’s next? To facilitate the move towards “early majority” adoption, I think semantic technology providers need to partner with consultants (like the company I work for, Avenue A | Razorfish), who can help evaluate the solutions, match them, up with clients’ needs, develop business strategies and design elegant, innovative, user-centered solutions.

Here’s a diagram I created to show how taxonomy building tasks should be integrated with the phases of a web development process. Communication with the stakeholders should be taking place throughout the project lifecycle. What’s the goal? Getting the following things from the stakeholders:

• Approval for data
• Expert input
• Partnership in the effort
• Distributed communication to other contributors

The approach I recommend, as indicated in the diagram, includes:

1. Groundwork – Gather background information that your stakeholders will need to make good taxonomy decisions. This may include some basic education about the concepts involved.
2. High Level – Start thinking about the general ways in which you will need to organize the data of the site. These may emerge naturally, based on the concept behind the site.
3. Dimensions & Relationships – Use diagrams, lists, tables, or spreadsheets to further express how the content will be organized. Use real data to inform the Information Architecture of the site.
4. Detailed Taxonomy – Apply the concepts in the taxonomy to all of the content, products, etc. on the site. Consider prototyping your data to make it come to life.
5. Usage Guidelines – Communicate to the content creators how to apply the taxonomy to the content once the site is live.
6. Taxonomy Maintenance - Document the things that your stakeholders need to consider in order to keep the taxonomy up-to-date.

It’s pretty straightforward, and may not seem all that earth-shattering compared to all the excitement around semantic technologies these days. But sometimes the simplest things are the hardest to put into words.

After the presentation, one person told me that he’s an engineer and he has always had trouble communicating about these things with the domain experts, and this helped him see how he could approach it more systematically. That’s exactly the effect I was trying to achieve.

Have a look at a low-res version of my complete presentation (B&W, PDF, 2-up)