Meetup at the Semantic Technology Conference 2010 in San Francisco
This year our Alliance Semantic Web meetup event will take place at the Semantic Technology Conference 2010 in San Francisco. Come and meet your peers to discuss all things Semantic Web, Web 3.0 and Linked Data to make the Web of Data a reality. It took more than 10 years to get the Semantic Web initiative where it is today and we have good reason to believe that it's about time to hit the mainstream web. This I believe will not happen without friction since the standards in the Semantic Web initiative are geared towards a more academic audience rather than web practitioners. With the growing adoption in the mainstream community this might therefore require some fine tuning to the standards. So it's interesting times again, I hope to see you in San Francisco this summer.
Participating Meetup groups (4048 members)
Atlanta - Austin - Cambridge - Chicago - London - Los Angeles - New York - Philadelphia - Oslo - Ottawa - Princeton - San Diego - San Francisco - Seattle - Silicon Valley - Thessaloniki - Toronto - Vancouver - Vienna - Washington DC
Proposed Sessions
| Sunday | June 20 | Pre-conference Day | Semantic Code Camp 2010 |
| Monday | June 21 | First Conference Day | Big Meetup Social |
| Tuesday | June 22 | Second Conference Day | Semantic Social Networks - Meetup Ontology (or on June 23) |
| Wednesday | June 23 | Third Conference Day | Incentives & Roadblocks for Participating in the Semantic Web(or on June 22) |
| Thursday | June 24 | Fourth Conference Day | |
| Friday | June 25 | Fifth Conference Day |
Proposed Session Overview
Incentives & Roadblocks for Participating in the Semantic Web - As exposure of the Semantic Web (SW) grows, companies are pushing back against participation citing a number of concerns. These concerns include attribution, performance, reliability and reciprocity, among others. This includes both data publishers and data consumers.
For publishers, chief amongst these concerns can be simply put as "What's in it for me?". While retailers like Best Buy are quick to see the value of publishing data with semantic markup in order to increase their search visibility, individual benefits to other industries are not as clear. This is especially true when, if successful, the publishers information will be aggregated alongside any number of additional sources, possibly losing any sort of attribution for the original publisher. For consumers, the distributed design of HTTP & the World Wide Web has created unparalleled access to information. However, it's also created a frail infrastructure on which to depend on for individual pieces of data. Web servers regularly disappear, links go dead and latency hinders immediate access to some information. How can consumers, including application developers, be convinced to build applications on top of fragile, possible transient, data stores that they themselves do not own and control?
What can be done to address these concerns? Such concerns cannot simply be dismissed by equating the Semantic Web with the World Wide Web and assuming participation will be guaranteed. Instead, the SW community must take a hard look at other disciplines of distributed data sharing for patterns and practices that can be applied to the SW. Only then can the pragmatic adoption of the SW begin.