Leobard's blog

First real conference day. During the day I attended one or the other session. Lunch in the Radisson was ok this time. In the afternoon, I chatted with Christiaan De Fluit, our co-conspirant in the sourceforge project aperture. I forgot to tell him that we had to release aperture in thursday, I somehow mixed up the conference timetable and thought I had my talk on friday. So we had to make the distro for Aperture and had some discussions on version numbers and about howto providing the download. Chris adapted to the changed deadline and said he will do the work. Good cooperation, gave me more time to think about the slides. We planed to make the first release of Aperture during my talk at the ISWC, will give aperture a good start in publicity.

Most interesting part of this day was the poster session in the big room. I made some photos there. And I met many new people during this poster session. Especially Patrick Stickler and Alistair Miles are people I first met there.

Afterwards, we flocked together and went to O’Neaghtaens ,Quaye street(hm, probably wrong spellt anyway). Patrick was there, a few Americans, later the Hannover group suddenly appeared for a few minutes. When this pub shut down, a flock of five headed for the appartment of someone and we got great liquor there. And had nice conversations. Thankfully, a good fairy drove us home and I had a nice sleep in the DFKI appartment. Topics this evening were about the censorship around the world, for example in Iran and China and how the semantic web relates.

Morning waking up motivated. Today we had an internal meeting in the morning. I went with some people with whom I am going to work together to a nearby restaurant. We did not have the lunch vouchers for this day and therefore headed to lunch outside. Again interesting talks, this time about real use cases in biology science. Afternoon I sneaked into the Semantic End User Applications Workshop. Hm, interesting discussion, but a little too high for me. I had to do my slides for thursday, anyway, so I started with them. I now really had the plan to completely change my presentation style, inspired by Dick Hardts talk I saw two days ago with Stefan really changed the way I saw powerpoint now. Powerpoint can be art. Don’t narcotise your audience with bad slides.

So, the scientific day was a great inspiration for me hacking on my slides.

In the evening, we went out together. What I remember is that we went to an indian restaurant. Michael is an expert on indian restaurants and was informed beforehand. We met the Rudiversum later on in a pub. One short beer there, but I knew that the big crowd should be at Mac Swiggans. So I asked Malte if he wants to join and we decided to reduce it to one beer with the Rudiverse and later move on. So, a couple of people went on to Mac Swiggans, where we found – nobody. We looked around, had a peek the stairs up, but didn’t find nobody. Hm, whatever, it was a 10minute walk from the other pubs away and this motivated us to stay and go for a few beers. Later we went home. I sold one gnowsis t-shirt to Francisco and gave him a demo of gnowsis.

The next day I learned from Libby and Uldis the interesting background info: sem-webbing people were upstairs and there were hundreds of them upstairs. argh, these pubs can really be big.

The day of the first Semantic Desktop workshop. My first glance of the community I live and work in.

For all my pictures of the workshop, click here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/leobard/tags/semdeskws2005/

For pictures by me and others (hopefully they use the same tag) click here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/semdeskws2005/

I had an intensive day, Stefan did much of the organizing, Jack Park organized the social event and Brian helped also very much. The day worked and we had an ignition of the community. Especially the social event in the evening and the poster session brought people together.
Here a pic from the poster session

here a pic from the social event:

We had much work preparing this workshop, but in the end every hour was worth it. I first met Jack Park and was surprised what a positive person he is.

In the night, I was last man standing at the bar, together with two other austrians and a german guy, many beers, many good conversations. more about this day in a seperate blog entry.

getting up, having breakfast at great southern. Hm, good tea there. Then to buseireann to get to galway. There, arrived, I headed for our bed&breakfast reception, to get the keys to our appartment.

Some DFKI members decided to take an appartment together, increases sociality. I had the task to get the keys, because the others arrived there at night. So, 11:00 and being at b&b. Greeted there by Christine. She is Austria, as I am and lives now for a year in Ireland, working. At a b&b. And now the final surprise – she blogs. Here is Christine’s blog. She also mentions our arrival in her blog. The blogosphere works.

Ok, after chatting I headed for Stefan Decker’s office at DERI to prepare the Semantic Desktop Workshop with him. DERI isn’t so easy to find, they have recently moved and when I visited them last, they were somewhere else. So when I finally found the building I stumbled through offices until by accident stumbling into some W3C meeting taking place there. Whoops. I found Stefan’s office and found him busy as usual. Ok, first I talked long with Eyal Oren about his semperwiki, he gave me a demo and I instantly saw the resemblance to the ideas I already hacked 2003 for gnowsis, but now with a different approach. Funny, that I learned to use wiki technology at www.monochrom.at.

Stefan and I had the whole afternoon to talk about architecture, upcoming projects and other stuff. Nice to get something done, looking forward to next year when we work together more closely. He insisted to show me the identity 2.0 talk by Dick Hardt and I was baffled. If you haven’t seen it, go watch it. And do it like Lawrence Lessig said: “Dick Hardt is brilliant. Watch (and copy) the style. Learn tons from the substance. (My pride is tied to the style only).”

So a thought started in me: I have to copy this style.

In the evening, when I came home, Bertin Klein was already there, funny thing. He came before the others. We decided to go eat something and instantly stumbled across Gerald Reif, who was my Diploma Thesis mentor and since 2003 is a very good SemWeb friend of mine. So we headed to get a beer and had our first semdesk discussions great. At the evening, I saw “Dude where is my car” on local telly, never saw this one before but was surprised how funny the movie is.

ISWC!!!! ISWC!!!! my first big conference and my first chance to meet the community I live in. Great. Astonishing. Zoot! Pimp my life at the ISWC. From my arrival on the green island until our departure, it was a good time. Networking, Discussing, bringing the semantic web alive, architecture discussions, planning open source stuff….

so, my pics are on flickr, justr clickr thisr:

And most important: I met all those people whom I only knew as CVS commit names or as mailinglist posters. The community is great and 99% percent of the people there were interesting. My biggest feeling after this event: these people think similar to me, have ideas, have plans, great projects, nice lives, are moving around, work here and there, make photos, etc.

In this blog entry, I am going to just writeup my personal notes of the trip and how I felt my being at the ISWC, follow ups will come for the Semantic Desktop Workshop and my talk on thursday and everything else.

I arrived on Friday night, at about 23:00 in shannon airport. There, I met another guy from DFKI who took the same plane as I but whom I never have seen before. Funny thing when you work in a company with over 200 artificial intelligence researchers + hundreds of students. Hotel was great, here is a pic of my room.

It helped me to have a productive day on saturday.

I always forget the swig chatbot command syntax, so here a little example just scratched from here:

summary:

url - add a new comment
answer: A: ....
A:|title
A:comment
A:->keyword,keyword

complete communication:

dajobe - http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2005/HPL-2005-171.html
dc_swig - M: http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2005/HPL-2005-171.html from dajobe
dajobe -  M:|Note on database layouts for SPARQL datastores, Richard Cyganiak
dc_swig - Titled item M.
dajobe  - M:caution: PDF
dc_swig - Added comment M1.
dajobe  - M:->swig,sparql,rdf,jena
dc_swig - Set keywords for M.

To get a pointer from the current logger:
logger, pointer?

DFKI members sitting at Shannon airport, surfing using free wifi. ISWC2005 is over. Was really nice, met many people and learned much.

more to come tomorrow (or sunday)….

we will annotate you!

Tomorrow is the first Semantic Desktop Workshop and I suggest to tag it using SemDeskWS2005.

see you tomorrow at the ISWC

Today I am getting up up and away to the ISWC2005. I propose that all that happens at this conference will be tagged heavily with ISWC2005.

You can see me at the workshop I co-chair on Sunday, the first Semantic Desktop Workshop.

We have a nice evening event on Sunday, going to Harbor Restaurant at about 20:30. See more in the program of the workshop.

So, I will back my pack now and try to get to the airport asap, to fly away. In my hands only 5 printed papers that are hopefully vouchers for a flight, a hotel, a second hotel and a bus. Hope all this works well, at least I trust good old numbers printed on papers. see you in Galway!