ISWC2005 Experiences

Some of my notes on experiences at ISWC2005 in Galway, Ireland.

SIMILE was associated with part of the End User Semantic Web Interaction Workshop by way of Fresnel and with David Huynh's paper talk on Piggy Bank. As Eric had responsilibities as metadata chair for the conference, we were also behind the scenes running a conference-enhanced version of Semantic Bank. Having widespread exposure across a workshop, a highly anticipated paper talk, and particularly plenary sessions increased the visibility of our work and our persons; people were telling me how great Piggy Bank was, and I wasn't sure how they knew I was part of SIMILE.

We ran a contest to further promote the conference bank. The contest was a bit of a last minute plan and, in any future scenarios similar to a raffle, we should probably put in more advance planning for determining rules and winners.

The top two issues I heard at ISWC concerning our work were 1) whether or not the conference bank was queryable (yes, but not really - you would need to reverse engineer David's querying system to get to the subset of RDF you wanted, and it's grounded in faceted browsing, not the more free-form SPARQL) and 2) how hard it was to get Piggy Bank running. I watched a number of people struggle through the process who likely would have given up without some guidance from me. Probably the greatest benefit would come from cutting the Google Maps step out of the initialization wizard and/or fixing it so the link to acquiring a key is not modal.

There was further confusion on how to properly tag things in the bank (part of the contest rules), and it became clear that, in certain environments, Piggy Bank cost more than it was worth, even with an iPod Nano at stake. The hurdle to tag one paper seemed to be quite high.

We have much food for thought for the next round of enhancements.

Extra: an extremely small selection of some of my photos on Flickr from Galway and all Flickr photos tagged iswc2005.