I just realized that blogging is a hard thing to keep up with. So a short summary on what I have been up to.
Before the Semantic Web Austin launch party, I was in Costa Rica at a Workshop for biologist and computer scientist, acting as a Semantic Web evangelist. This is a great community that can really benefit of Semantic Web technologies, because they need to integrate their data.
After Costa Rica, I went back to Austin to be at our launch which was a huge success. Many people blogged about it and now the LinkedIn group has more than 50 members. We are planning to have a first meeting in mid August at the Conjunctured space (congrats you guys!!!)
Now I am in Europe till mid August and just came back from the Summer School of Semantic Web and Ontology Engineering. This was an incredible experience because I was with the gods and goddesses of the Semantic Web. Made excellent contacts but specially realized that all the theoretical work is done in Europe and some of the commercial work is done in the US (Twine, Powerser, PeoplePad, etc..). Semantic Web research is not being funded by US universities, partially because DARPA has realized that the Europeans are doing everything... so why should we spend money on the same thing. Lets hope that with this new administation, things are going to change.
Anyways, I am promising myself that I am going to take 20 min of my time twice a week to sit down and write, and not wait a month and a half for the next post.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
"...the Europeans are doing everything... so why should we spend money on the same thing. Lets hope that with this new administation, things are going to change".
The Chinese too. The Bush "administration" has really dropped the ball with regards to supporting scientific initiatives of all kinds. It's really frustrating to see the country's R&D efforts (in every discipline it seems) slowly wane.
Maybe a new administration will be able to help revitalize basic research here, but I think it's also a social problem. Science isn't cool, sexy, fascinating enough for the average man-on-the-street to care. And if the average joe doesn't care, neither will our leadership.
Anyway, my two cents.
Brian
cptnstink: Very true. Europeans have done a lot of the theory work... and its up to us to start doing the cool and sexy applicative research. Semantic Web is a cool area and hopefully more people will get interested
Hey man, can't wait for you to have a meeting here! Let's dooooo it!!! :)
Post a Comment