small trip report: visit to Bangalore...

Hi everybody,

I had a recent trip to Bangalore, and maybe it is interesting to collect
some SWEO-specific experiences here...

I have a small blog on the conference itself[1]. I usually do not like
to brag about my presentations, so I did not add the pointers to the
blog; they are [2] and [3]. I also participated at a panel. Finally,
outside of the conference, so to say, I had a W3C related meeting at
Infosys, Wipro (both are Indian monster sized IT companies) and at a
meeting with small local companies.

Some experiences that are worth noting for this group (in no particular
order)

- need to create SW communities locally. I actually refer to that in [1]

- there were lots of questions on the relationships of Web2.0 and
Semantic Web. My answers were always along the lines of[4] which was
well accepted. Actually, the interesting remark was that, for many in
India, Web2.0 and Semantic Web _are the same_, they do not even know the
difference:-). I saw that you guys had a long discussions on the
microformats vs Semantic Web issue while I was away:-) but the questions
were usually more general than that. For example, the issue of giving
more 'structure' to tags came up several times, something that the
Web2.0 community begins to hit in general...

- I got asked several times on whether major search engines use the
Semantic Web or not, and if yes how. And, more generally, how would
these two technologies work in future. Honestly, I did not have a proper
answer, though it _is_ a FAQ (it would be good to extend the [5] with
this, if one of you have more knowledge about it than I do!). I know
about Yahoo Food using SW tools, but I am not sure how; my best shot was
to refer to the GoPubMed project[6] as a good example. Actually, I was
the one opening the flood gates by referring to search problems in [2]
and [3], I should try to avoid that:-)

- there were several (technical) questions on provenance, access
control, etc, of data accessed via Semantic Web means. This *is* on the
future stack, I am not sure we at SWEO can say anything else...

That is it for now. B.t.w.: any comments and, mainly, improvement text
on [5] is _always_ welcome!

Ivan



[1]
http://ivanherman.wordpress.com/2007/02/25/semantic-web-and-digital-libraries-conference/
[2] http://www.w3.org/2007/Talks/0221-Bangalore-IH/
[3] http://www.w3.org/2007/Talks/0223-Bangalore-IH/
[4] http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/SW-FAQ#does1
[5] http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/SW-FAQ
[6] http://www.gopubmed.org/

-- 

Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead
URL: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/
PGP Key: http://www.cwi.nl/%7Eivan/AboutMe/pgpkey.html
FOAF: http://www.ivan-herman.net/foaf.rdf