We had our first SIOC brainstorming session in DERI last week, and I think it was quite productive (though I missed a big chunk of it). Thomas Schandl has written up the minutes here, and I’ve vectorised / rendered Uldis’ whiteboard notes below.
Archive for December, 2007
See Saw Margery Daw
Johnny shall have a new master
He shall earn but a penny a day
Because he cannot work any faster
I’m happy to announce that our tutorial proposal on SIOC entitled “Interlinking Online Communities and Enriching Social Software with the Semantic Web” (Uldis Bojars and John Breslin of DERI, NUI Galway, Alexandre Passant of EDF R&D / LaLICC, Université Paris 4) has been accepted for WWW2008, the 14th International World Wide Web Conference to be held in Beijing, China in April. The abstract is as follows:
This tutorial will give an overview of current research issues and solutions for using Semantic Web technologies in order to enrich social software and to interlink online communities. We will discuss current standardisation activities as well as research prototypes, focusing on the work of the Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities (SIOC) project. This initiative recently produced the W3C Member Submission for the SIOC Ontology, which describes a standard way to represent rich data from online community sites and Web 2.0 tools in an interoperable form using RDF.
On a larger extent, we will cover additional topics such as search and browsing based on community metadata, large-scale data integration in decentralised communities, and linking social media contributions to the social graph. We will also focus on implementations of tools that work with SIOC data, providing the audience with the know-how to build such systems using open-source APIs and frameworks. We will also discuss how the technologies described in this tutorial can be applied to enterprise scenarios, and we will detail some commercial applications that are now using SIOC.
Finally, we will describe how a network of interlinked communities powered by semantic social software can lead towards the creation of Social Semantic Information Spaces.
A full list of the accepted tutorials is available here.
I’m happy to announce that Gerry Shanahan has recently been appointed as Managing Director of boards.ie Ltd. We are also now looking for a full-time tech developer with LAMP expertise.
boards.ie has increased its daily visits from 30k per day in November 2005 to around 60k per day at present. Thanks to all our readers, posters and moderators for your continued support.
Well done to the Paddy’s Valley Irish entrepreneurs who gave great pitches to venture capitalists in the Bay Area. And thanks to Damien for the videos. Here are the links.
- Joe Drumgoole, PutPlace (pitch, Q&A, site)
- Marcus Mac Innes, Pix.ie (pitch, site)
- Jan Blanchard, Tourist Republic (pitch, Q&A, site)
- Hélène Haughney, Nubiq (pitch, site)
- Alan O’Rourke, Toddle (pitch, site)
There are also some “behind the scenes” vodcasts at paddyvalley.blip.tv and an associated social network at paddysvalley.ning.com.
So why is BlogTalk 2008 coming to Cork, Ireland? You may not know it, but there are a lot of connections between the “People’s Republic of Cork” and the world of Web 2.0 and social software.
- Tom Raftery, BlogTalk 2008 co-chair, social media consultant, and the person behind the hugely successful Thought Leaders podcast series (interviewing the likes of Ross Mayfield, Loic Le Meur, Dave Sifry, Thomas Vander Wal, Chris Messina, Vint Cerf, Michael Arrington and Robert Scoble amongst many other luminaries) is from Cork.
- Conor O’Neill, founder of Argolon (known for their LouderVoice service), editor of blognation Ireland and Web 2.0 Ireland, and co-ordinator of the Cork OpenCoffee Club (we should organise one to co-occur with BlogTalk) is based in Cork.
- Pat Phelan, founder of Cubic Telecom (whose services include MAXroam), and a proponent of Web 2.0 and telecommunication crossovers, has his headquarters in the city of Cork.
- Web 2.0 guru Tim O’Reilly was born in Cork.
- Sxoop Technologies, the company (Walter Higgins et al.) behind the Pixenate online photo editor, are located in Cork.
- Donnacha O’Caoimh, co-founder of Automattic and lead programmer for WordPress MU (on which WordPress.com is based) is in Cork.
- Blackrock Castle is home to Ireland’s first “social software” cinema, allowing an audience to influence the design of a space mission so as to divert a comet from colliding with the Earth.
- Damien Mulley, organiser of the Irish Blog Awards, winner of the 2007 IIA Net Visionary award for technology journalist, and former chair of IrelandOffline, is from Cork.
- And there’s a bunch of other companies in this space from Cork: waveson, eWrite, Lukulu, Comhar, Beecher Networks and CIX.
So I expect to see more submissions from all of you Corkonians about your social software products and development experiences to BlogTalk 2008 before Friday!
Eyal Oren successfully defended his PhD at DERI, NUI Galway last week. I’d again like to say well done to Eyal, and since he was such a great person to work with, I know his new colleagues at VU Amsterdam will benefit greatly from his expertise and love of learning.
I first met Eyal when I arrived in DERI in early 2004 and I was talking at lunch about local access to IEEE papers that we’d secured. He had some tips on how to access related resources, and continued to be a source of knowledge that we will now miss in the Institute. The best of luck to you Dr. Oren.
We had a very interesting event in DERI last week - the DERI Entrepreneurial Forum #2 - where six CEOs from the west of Ireland gave us their views on entrepreurship. There was some frank sharing of professional and personal experiences on both starting and running a company in Ireland.
The speakers were Jan Blanchard, CEO of Tourist Republic; John Brosnan, CEO of Netfort Technologies; Greg Cawley, CEO of Traventec; Julian Ellison, CEO of Tablane; Alan Duggan, CEO of Nephin Games; and Karl Flannery, CEO of Storm.
I think it was very useful for buddying entrepreneurs in DERI to engage these CEOs and to exchange ideas about their “dos and do nots”. (We even got some book recommendations from Jan!)
(Aside: God, I hate it when Google do their link tracking stuff for searches. I just want to be able to right click and copy a link, not have to copy some text on a page or click through, CTRL+L and CTRL+C. Stop it Google, you have enough tracking information already!)
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