SWEO Introduction: John Davies

John Davies - Next Generation Web research, BT

I lead a team at BT (British Telecommunications) looking at the application of semantic technology to a number of areas of interest to BT, most notably knowledge and information management and semantic web services. BT coordinates - and I manage - the SEKT EU collaborative project (www.sekt-project.com) looking at semantic knowledge technology and also participates in the DIP project (dip.semanticweb.org) in the area of semantic web services. I am a co-organiser of the ESWC conference series (www.eswc2007.org). I have also done my share of books, publications, program committees, etc. Other current interests are the use of semantic technology in health informatics (and particularly terminological services) and in data integration (ontology as unifying access layer to multiple heterogeneous data silos). Web 2.0 and "social software" are also attracting some attention...

Part of my role is explaining the business benefits of semantic technology both inside and outside BT so I think the group will be very relevant. I have done a certain amount of semantic web outreach previously including organising a Semantic Web "Industry Day" at this year's WWW conference (http:/www2006.org/sekt/) and various interviews and press articles (for example, http://www.director-magazine.co.uk/September06/semantic.html, or chuckle at my less-than-relaxed style in front of the camera: http://www.telecomtv.com/vzine/jun06/video.asp?ttv_id=791&url=vzine/jun06/video.asp?ttv_id=791&action=video&bit=hi&cp=view). 

Current telecon time is good for me in principle but in practice I am often in meetings or travelling. If my participation rate proves too low, I may ask a team member here at BT to attend on my behalf.

Regards,
John.


Dr John Davies
Head of Next Generation Web Research
> BT Group Chief Technology Office
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-----Original Message-----
From: public-sweo-ig-request@w3.org [mailto:public-sweo-ig-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Uldis Bojars
Sent: 29 November 2006 16:00
To: public-sweo-ig@w3.org
Subject: SWEO Introduction: Uldis Bojars


Uldis Bojārs - a researcher in the Semantic Web / Social Software cluster at DERI Galway.

I am working on the SIOC (Semantically Interlinked Online Communities) project [1] aimed at putting the information from online community sites (forums, weblogs, mailing lists, ...) on the Semantic Web and using this information to derive new relations and provide richer services to users. 

This project involves a fair bit of education and outreach itself because its users (both for generating data and consuming data) are regular people and businesses who may not have heard about the Semantic Web before. While the core of this project is the SIOC ontology there are many tools built around it and some of these tools have outgrown the project, e.g.:
 - Semantic Radar [2] - a Firefox extension that lets users discover the "invisible" Semantic Web as they browse the web and also ping PTSW. 
 - PingTheSemanticWeb (PTSW) [3] - a Semantic Web ping service created by Frederick Giasson which collects pings from applications like Semantic Radar and acts as a source of URLs of RDF data for use by Semantic Web applications. A good example of such application is the new doapstore.org by Alexandre Passant.

[1] http://sioc-project.org
[2] http://rdfs.org/sioc/spec/
[3] http://ping.semanticweb.org/

Semantic Web Education and Outreach is a very important initiative and I look forward to working together with you in achieving its goals. I have been interested in and doing Semantic Web related work for >4 years and hope to contribute to SWEO education efforts (tutorials, documentation...) and in practical demonstrations of SemWeb. DERI Galway has an Education and Outreach program which Ina O'Murchu is working on - I hope this program and SWEO IG can work together and benefit from each other.

I have been doing some Semantic Web education on my weblog [4] and together with others have formed a Latvian SemWeb interest group (SemWeb.LV). As a part of my master thesis I worked on representing personal resume/CV information in RDF. Unfortunately I have not had much time to follow up on this work and it is good that now there is the ExpertFinder initiative which aims to develop this area.

I come from Riga, Latvia and am now living in Galway, Ireland. Current telecon time (it's 4pm local time) is good for me, can participate almost any weekday. For communication you can use email: uldis.bojars@deri.org or contact me on IRC (CaptSolo @ #swig, #sioc on irc.freenode.net) or Skype
(id: uldis.bojars).

Personal interests: photography, science fiction, cinema.

Uldis

[ http://captsolo.net/info/ ] = [4]