Tag Archives: Marco Neumann

Andreas Blumauer

Semantic Web Meetup Berlin is alive

by , Category: Conferences & Events

Inspired by one of the most successful Semantic Web Meetups in the States, the NYC Semantic Web Meetup, just recently the Berlin Semantic Web Meetup started.

Meetups aren´t that popular in Europe as they are in the US, but the format of the event is quite suitable for bringing together academic staff and people from the industry. It is quite similar to barcamps but maybe not as informal.

Organizers are Adrian Paschke and Markus Luczak-Rösch from the Corporate Semantic Web project in Berlin. I´ve introduced them with Marco Neumann who has strongly encouraged me to start a semweb meetup in Europe.

Berlin is now the first European member of the Semantic Web Meetup Alliance which currently consists of 8 groups worldwide and over 3.600 members. The first meeting in Berlin will be held on March 20th, 2009 – details will be outlined soon.

In New York just recently a meetup was organised together with the New York Times which presented their NYT Annotated Corpus. Marco Neumann says: “We aim for a professional, business and R&D audience in casual attire. We now have about 500 members in New York and attract up to 50-100 people per
session. The corporate sponsors that we will have in the next couple of weeks: the New York Times, Morgan Stanley, Thomson Reuters, Dow Jones …”

We´ll see how Europe will embrace such new communication channels since the semantic web community here is used to either academic conferences or rather formal business talk, I guess.

Andreas Blumauer

The social hub @ LinkedData Planet 2008

by , Category: Conferences & Events

Eric HofferThe LinkedData Planet conference is over now. I had a great time here and met a lot of great and inspiring people. The exhibition area especially turned out to be THE meeting point of the conference. People from media companies, major IT-companies like IBM or from governmental and non-governmental organizations were there, meeting up with some of the most prestigious software providers and experts of the semantic web world.

Mike Bergman in SWC gear

And that says a lot about the semantic web both as a technology and a movement: The semantic future is made happen not behind closed doors or in some ivory tower, not thought up by some secluded genius, but by people, companies and research institutions that are as close to the heart of the web as one can be.

I learned a lot about the upcoming new release of UMBEL (Upper Mapping and Binding Exchange Layer) thanks to Mike Bergman (who you can see in the picture below, sporting Semantic Web Company gear). UMBEL (in the words of the project itself) has two purposes:

1) to provide a lightweight structure of subject concepts as a reference to what Web content or data “is about”;
and 2) to define a variety of binding protocols for different Web data formats to map to this “backbone.”

You might want have a look at the UMBEL subject concepts explorer provided by Mike’s Zitgist: Start exploring here, with a preset concept search for ‘Manager’.

I also learned more about the huge variety of possible applications which can be built on top of the Talis platform – thanks to Ian Davis. One example is the Lancashire Lantern WiCI – WiCI because it is a service providing Community Information.

And finally I met Richard Cyganiak in person who gave me a thorough overview of the Semantic Web index Sindice – try a search for Richard Cyganiak to see how it works (and to learn more about him, of course).

I ended up discussing possible applications using linked data with Tom Heath, Mike Bergman, Gregory Williams, Eric Hoffer (picture on top, see also his blogpost where he features the SWC “Escape from the Data Silo” logo) and Marco Neumann, both from Semantic Web Meetup NYC. It was a great evening!

Thank you, folks!

Read also pt. 1 of our conference report: LinkedData Planet in New York: A great community event for all things semantic

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