November Semantic Web Austin Meetup: The Data/Information Integration Aspects of the Semantic Web

Last Semantic Web Austin meetup turned out really well! After the presentation, Roger Nasr told me that he liked the format that I was organizing: presenting other peoples work and slides, and that he wanted to help! Roger attend the JavaOne conference in May and was at Dean Allemang's talk on the Semantic Web. Dean Allemang is the Chief Scientist of TopQuadrant, a company that develops semantic web tools and together with Jim Hendler wrote "Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist: Effective Modelling in RDFS and OWL".

Roger expressed his interest of presenting the data integration aspects of the Semantic Web, inspired by Dean's presentation at JavaOne. Therefore, this Monday, Nov 17, at 6:30pm we will have our next Semantic Web Meetup. It will be at Conjunctured (1309 E. 7th St)

Title: The Data/Information Integration Aspects of the Semantic Web

One aspect of the semantic web that is getting a lot of attention from enterprise IT quarters, is its good fit for tackling the data/information integration issues in that space. In this presentation, Roger will review presentations covering this subject, emphasizing one by Dean Allemang, TopQuadrant's Chief Scientist, earlier this year at JavaOne 2008. Note that Roger's presentation is mostly meant to set the context for a group discussion of these aspects of the semantic web.

Who is Roger Nasr?

Roger started his software career in the mid 1970s, working on operating systems at Digital Equipment Corporation. He later worked on compilers, run time systems, and applications of logic programming-based AI languages. This included a six-year stint at the Austin MCC research consortium, which brought him to Austin in 1985.

Later in his career, Roger got bitten by the startup bug, and hopped around a few companies in that space. In that context, he joined Vignette Corporation, an enterprise content management company, in 1996 as one of its first five founding engineers. In 2002 he retired from Vignette after capping his career there in the role of chief technologist responsible for research projects.

Between 2004 and 2006 he was co-founder and CTO of Content Discovery, Inc, a search technology company that served the litigation digital discovery industry. Roger is currently enjoying retirement, but staying involved by studying and exploring, among others, semantic web technologies and their applications.

See y'all on Monday!

Next Semantic Web Austin meetup: Wed Oct 15

Finally!!!! The next Semantic Web Austin meetup will be this Wednesday October 15 at 6:30pm. It will be at Conjunctured (1309 E. 7th St).

After talking to a lot of people in Austin, I realized that the social media crowd is big! And during these past months, I have personally gotten interested in the social aspect of the Semantic Web, especially data portability. Obviously I am no expert, but I am trying to read and learn about the current Semantic Web technologies that can help solve the data portability problem.

I've decided to title the presentation: "Data Portability on the Social Semantic Web". This presentation is based on another presentation titled "Data Portability with SIOC and FOAF" by Uldis Bojars, Alexandre Passant and John Breslin, highly recognized researchers in the Social Semantic Web community. I will be giving a brief recap on what the Semantic Web is (my personal definition) and explaining what FOAF and SIOC are and how they can help.

I am really excited about our first official meetup. Future meetups will cover other topics presented by others. If everything works out well, our next meeting will about Data Integration with Semantic Web technologies! I'm sure there is going to be a good crowd for that one too!

However, can't wait to see all the interested people this Wednesday!