I’ll be speaking about semantic web technologies at Berkeley’s Center for Document Engineering on 12 Apr 2004.

Science is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out, but that is not the reason we are doing it.

— Richard Feynman

What happened was, Alex Milowski asked me if I’d come and give a guest lecture about RDF at Berkeley’s Center for Document Engineering. I was going to be in the area so I was predisposed to accept. We chatted a bit in IM and I concluded that I could probably reprise some of the material I presented at XML 2003 which meant I could pull together a 45 minute presentation without too much difficulty. I decided to do it.

It’s not like I get asked to speak all that often, so when I do, I almost always accept if the venue fits in my travel schedule. How do you get to be a better public speaker? Practice. How do you get practice? By speaking in public. Natch.

A few days later, Alex asked me to send an abstract of my talk. Dutifully, I banged out a paragraph or so and send it along.

Another couple of days go by and I get a message from Bob Glushko[1], the Center’s Director, suggesting that “it would also help a bit…if you ‘sexed it up’ a little”. Really, it said exactly that. Now, I’ve known Bob for years and I thought it was quite funny, although I can’t claim to have immediately made the intended connection to recent allegations that Blair had “sexed up” intelligence data on Iraq. I fear Bob’s ironic sense of world affairs is keener than mine.

Sex up the abstract? Alex suggested that I paste my head on some super model’s torso. Me? All I could think of was Fat Bastard’s line from one of the Austin Powers movies, “I’m dead sexy!” I may be scarred for life.

With a little help from chat on irc://irc.freenode.net/rdfig, I came up with this description. It’s as sexy as I get.

Introduction to Semantic Web Technologies: How to Change the World, Again.

12 Apr 2004; 4:00p-5:00p PDT; South Hall room 202, University of California, Berkeley

There is no question that the web, the HTML web, changed the world. It placed vast oceans of information at our fingertips. Unfortunately, most of that information is designed only for human consumption. We can read web pages and understand them, but their intrinsic meaning is not exposed in way that lends itself naturally to machine interpretation. One way to change the world again would be to provide information in a way that machines could understand, paving the way for, among other things, the development of user-agents capable of carrying out practical, autonomous tasks. That's the goal of the Semantic Web:

The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.

—Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, Ora Lassila, The Semantic Web, Scientific American, May 2001

In this talk, Norman Walsh will introduce the concepts of the Semantic Web including the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL). Beyond an overview of the concepts, this talk will look at the RDF/XML syntax and other serializations. It will conclude with a look at some practical applications of RDF in use today.

Speaker Bio  Norman Walsh is an XML Standards Architect in the Web Products, Technologies and Standards group at Sun Microsystems, Inc. His work is currently focused on Core XML Technologies.

Norm is an active participant in a number of standards efforts worldwide, including the XML Core and XSL Working Groups of the World Wide Web Consortium where he is also an elected member of the Technical Architecture Group. At OASIS, he is a member of the RELAX NG Technical Committee, the Entity Resolution Technical Committee for which he is the editor, and the DocBook Technical Committee, which he chairs. Norm is also one of the specification leads for JSR 206, the Java API for XML Processing, version 1.3.

He is the principal author of DocBook: The Definitive Guide, published by O'Reilly & Associates. He is also one of the principal designers and maintainers of the DocBook XSL Stylesheets and a number of other open source projects.

Norm holds a Master of Science degree from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

It’s open to the public, so feel free to come and down and heckle if you’re interested. I promise not to model any swimwear.

[1]Bob also graciously consented to attribution of the remarks, something I had been unwilling to do without permission as they came in private email. Thanks, Bob.

Comments:

I don't think anyone took in a single word I said, but this slide went down extremely well:

http://semtext.org/2004-02/slides/img4.html

Posted by Danny Ayers on 30 Mar 2004 @ 08:38pm UTC #

Is there going to be a web version/recorded version for us distant folks....?

Posted by Christopher Brooks on 30 Mar 2004 @ 10:09pm UTC #

I'll post the slides when they're ready, that's probably the best I can offer.

Posted by Norman Walsh on 30 Mar 2004 @ 11:15pm UTC #
Add a comment or subscribe to (existing and future) comments on this essay.
Name:
Email*:
 *Please provide your real email address; it will not be displayed as part of the comment.
Homepage:
Comment**:
 **The following markup may be used in the body of the comment: a, abbr, b, br, code, em, i, p, pre, strong, and var. You can also use character entities. Any other markup will be discarded, including all attributes (except href on a). Your tag soup will be sanitized...