Michael Hausenblashttp://webofdata.wordpress.com/ & Chris Bizer

ESWC 2009 is not over yet – but I am happy to announce: The Semantic Web Community is more alive than ever before! We had four days of brilliant talks, vibrant meetings, and great atmosphere so far. Some highlights:

• Chris Bizer presentation of Berlin SPARQL Benchmark (BSBM) or Enrico Minacks´s talk about benchmarking RDF stores showed that base technologies of the semantic web are mature enough for real-world applications.
• Use cases from many domains like biodiversity, astronomy or multi-media showed clearly the trend that the semantic web becomes “ubiquitous” and has left the labs.
• The idea of Linking (Open) Data became pre-dominant in the community, many projects are built around this infrastructure already. But there is a clear demand for improved ontology, an ontology is a formal representation of knowledge as a set of concepts within a domain, and the relationships between those concepts. It is used to reason about the entities within that domain, and may be used to describe the domain. In theory, an ontology is a "formal, explicit ... matching or brokering services like the recently released <sameAs>
• Martin Hepp´s lightning talk about “What makes for a good ontology?” and emotional reactions from the audience on that showed, that grass-root approaches and top-down approaches for ontology building still haven´t grown together, but they are getting closer
• Weather and food here in CreteCrete is the largest of the Greek islands and the fifth largest island in the Mediterranean Sea at 8,336 km² (3,219 square miles). Crete is one of the 13 peripheries of Greece and covers the same area as the Greek region of Crete from before the 1987 administrative reform. It forms a ... is great!