Oct Semantic Web Austin Meetup Summary

Thanks everybody who came out to the Semantic Web Austin meetup. It was held at Conjunctured which was an awesome place to have this meetup. Looking forward to having our future meetups there!

I gave a presentation on Data Portability on the Social Semantic Web. I am no expert on this topic, so I just took the slides of the experts! I want to thank Uldis Bojar and Alexander Passant for letting me use their slides. The slides really say everything that needs to be said, and shows how FOAF and SIOC can solve the Data Portability problem.

But lets be honest. It will never happen this way. And this was the discussion that started at the end of the talk, and that I was of course expecting. What are the insentives for normal users, or big social networks to implement this? Live Journal already does, but so what? This is the famous chicken and egg problem that we have (meaning we as the Semantic Web community): who should start and why? The whole objective of the talk was to let the devlopers and enthusiast know about these existing tools. Chris St. John has already started to experiment with FOAF and XFN, so that is a start.

However, we have to acknowledge that having linked data would be cool! And this will lead me to my next post: Linked Data on the Web of Data -how to do it and -why it is cool!