These go to eleven

Ian and I are on a two week tour of the US, we’re spending a few days in each of Boston, Athens, San Francisco and finished of with a day in Washington DC. While we’re here we’re attending two conferences, ISWC2006 in Athens, Georgia and Web2.0 in San Francisco and trying to meet as many interesting people as possible and talk to them about what we’re doing, what they’re and whats going on in general. Now we’re in departures at Logan Airport, waiting to board our flight to Atlanta, from where we’ll drive to Athens ready for ISWC2006 tomorrow, so its time for a brain dump.

We arrived in Boston early Wednesday evening and headed straight out to meet up with the Harvard chapter of Wikipedians, including Aaron Swartz of Reddit fame, SJ and Nicole. We were pretty tired what with the time zone changes and travelling all day so we didn’t stay out long, just saying a few hellos really before heading back to the hotel to crash out.

Thursday.
Met up with Ben Adida at MIT, ostensibly to talk about the Talis Community Licence and if/how it meshes with what Creative / Science Commons movements are doing. Ben was pretty enthusiatic about the TCL (’though I’m not a lawyer’) and it was great to get postitive feedback about this because we think it could be a really useful tool for us as we try to open up access the data we know is out there.
Ben’s also one of the main guys behind RDFa, and we spent a really productive hour or so chatting about eRDF and RDFa, joined for a while by Ralph Swick. Its looking to me as though the two approaches are really beginning to converge, which has got to be a good thing. Another thing that came out of the discussion, and which I think has the potential to be huge was a small alteration to the RFDa spec which would seem to remove the XML dependency, making it viable to embed RDF in plain old HTML. w00t!
After lunch we a headed few blocks over to IBM to meet up with Elias Torres and the Semantic Web team. Elias, Wing, Lee, Robert, Ben and Rouben showed us some really cool stuff but I’m not sure to what degree its public yet (apart from Queso of course), so I don’t want to say to much. Suffice to say that there’s going to be some very interesting things coming out of that group in the not to distant future. More than anything, I was really impressed with the whole ethic of the team, its amazing what you can do with a bunch of smart and really focused people and it was nice to put faces to some familiar names from #swig.

Friday
This afternoon we took a cab out to Burlington (about 10 miles from Boston) to meet Susie Stephens. Susie is a Life Sciences expert at Oracle, and a big Semantic Web advocate in the company. She’s also co-chair of the newly formed (forming?) Semantic Web Education & Outreach working group at the W3C. It was a kind of impromptu meetup, so we didn’t have too long to talk, but we all agreed that SWEO is coming just at the right time, and its really important now to start getting some takeup of semweb technologies and ideas. Susie’s also going to be in Athens this week, so hopefully we’ll bump into her again.

I’ve enjoyed the little bits of Boston and Cambridge that we’ve managed to see. Its a pretty cool area and certainly different from anywhere else I’ve been in the States, mainly I think due to its age. Its true what they say about it being architecturally a lot closer to a european city than places further west.

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