General

General and misc. discussions related to the semantic web

Incorporating RDFa, SIOC, FOAF

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Expect breakage...incorporating bunches of stuff...

Blogher Women in Tech Series featuring...Me

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Virginia DeBolt did me the honor of interviewing me for her first Women in Technology series at Blogher. If you're curious about my early years, my views on the semantic web, women in technology and how to modify the computer tech curriculum in order to obtain greater diversity, whether I like animals more than people, as well as some of the tech folks I read on a daily basis, you might want to check it out.

Warning, though, it is all about me, me, me.

And you will be tested.

How NOT to Write about the Semantic Web

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How not to attract new semantic web readers, especially among the women. Write the following:

I just thought that this is a smart strategy to make video tutorials about the Semantic Web more appealing to female* or otherwise not so super-tech-savvy* audiences: Just put a Lolcat in it!

Though the author wrote that she matches the "stereotype", which I guess means women who aren't tech and like LOLcats, by the time I followed the asterisks, I'd already passed from astonishment to loathing. FYI, I wrote the first book on RDF, babes.

A reference to females was unnecessary. Surprising, too, from the same company featuring an interview with Corinna Bath, author of the thesis, "Towards a De-Gendered Design of Information Technologies".

This Week's Semantic Web, Burningbird style

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Last week, Danny Ayers made a request to the semantic web community at large: that we take turns publishing our own version of This Week's Semantic Web. I volunteered to start, and hope that others follow, though in comments to Danny's post, the suggestion about the Gem of the Week sounded better (and a lot less work).

However, I decided to add a slight twist to my own version of This Week's Semantic Web, focusing not only on the stories, but how I found them. After all, the real purpose of the semantic web technologies is to make information easier to find. How are we, in the semantic web community, doing in this regard?

To start, I subscribe to various feeds including Planet RDF, as a way to keep up with most of the semantic web news. This week, the stories from Planet RDF that caught my eye were the following:

Correlation

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I noticed a correlation between my last two posts on the lack of women at Ajax Experience and the seeming lack of RDF or semantic web applications. Both are based on perennial questions: Where are the women in technology? Where are the semantic web applications?

Next time I'm asked either, I think I'll answer that the women in technology are off building RDF-based semantic web applications. Yeah, that's the ticket.

Where are the Semantic Web Applications?

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There's been an increase of interest about the semantic web lately.

One particular question and answer in Danny's interview has to do with the seeming cultural divisions associated with the semantic web.

Some say: "Europeans have developed the Semantic Web and Americans are going to capitalise it." What is your opinion?

Danny Ayers: Six months ago I attended the SemTech conference in San José. There were quite a few European folks with solid projects approaching venture capitalists and vice versa. The impression I got was that of a significant culture clash, with the Europeans generally caught on the wrong-foot.

I have also attended most of the Italian SemWeb conferences (SWAP) and there have seen many demos of potentially lucrative applications, which got forgotten once the presenter gained their doctorate.

At the same time, as far as the (Semantic) Web is concerned, national barriers count for nothing. I live in an 8-cat town in Tuscany and work for a UK company, the US-based company OpenLink has an expert in Outer Siberia.

Internationalization of communication aside, I've also noticed what seems to be a shift of semantic web research to Europe, while the States focus on, well, Twitter. Google. Facebook. Cloud Computing. I don't mean that in a derogatory sense—the States seem to be focusing on business based on known, possibly even exhausted technology and knowledge, while Europe is focusing on research for its own sake.

It may not seem like a big deal, but research without an end game is nothing more than ego wrapped up in white papers. At the same time, business that is focused purely on the moment isn't going to take the web in new directions. Instead, we'll be like the dog chasing its tail—all excited movement that doesn't really go anywhere.

However, I haven't been following the semantic web community as closely as I once did, and my view may be skewed because of it. The fact that this question was asked, though, shows I'm not the only one seeing a decidedly cultural bias in focus and interest.