My talk was:

• @ 2:45 on Weds : Semantic Web Calendaring: RDF Calendar, hCalendar, and GRDDL

  I spent a lot of time preparing my slides, Semantic Web Data Integration with hCalendar and GRDDL, but at show-time, there were still too many. I had to basically skip over the cool OWL DL consistency checking example that I spent the better part of two days putting together, but I'm OK with that; the more basic points were more important.

I unfortunately didn't leave any time for questions, but I had some interesting follow-up conversations:

• Somebody asked about using GRDDL and RDF to track relationships between specs, products that support them, and all that. I recalled that when the folks that run the OASIS standards registry contacted W3C, we told them we prefer a more decentralized approach: each organization publishes stuff about their own standards, in RDF, and anybody can aggregate it. TimBL's roadmap diagrams show one approach. It is somewhat bit-rotten, but we have an automated system in production for publishing basic title/author/date/version metadata about our specs and we're adding more stuff over time; e.g. which WG produced the spec (for patent policy reasons), comment due dates, etc. I told him this had come up in spec-prod; while I'm happy for the discussion to go there, my impression that it had come up there before was wrong. I hope to organize my thoughts on this near NormativeReferences in the QA/ESW wiki and re-kindle discussion in spec-prod or qa-ig.
• At lunch, somebody brought up my slide about email headers in RDF and asked if thunderbird has RDF support like mozilla and firefox. I don't know, but I hope to find out. DanBri? Anyone?

On the non-technical front, jamming with Len Bullard was a blast. We had a fascinating discussion of DRM and the recording industry where I relayed AaronSw's viewpoint that any model based on scarcity is uninteresting. Len says Prince is no longer independent, which contradicts the impression I got from studying Prince in Wikipedia recently. Len says the big customer ripie for SemWeb technology is transit, at least as much as intelligence. Gotta look into that.

Later in the evening Len brought out a fake book and Tony and Lauren and Eve and John sang and I tried to accompany them on Len's guitar. I was having so much fun that I raised a sizeable blood-blister on my strumming hand before I noticed. I think we did OK with Annie's Song as well as mangling lots of Beatles and such.

Then Len took the guitar and Eve asked him to play Angel from Montgomery by Bonnie Raitt. When he said he didn't know it, I was able to use my sidekick to find chords and lyrics and since it was your basic three chord number, he picked it up in no time.

As to the conference program...

The DIG URL has changed to dig.csail.mit.edu and will no longer redirect to its previous location.

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.

In the TAMI project, K is giving us clues about how the U.S. federal government works. She told us a bit about the federal register. It seems to be one of the main PaperTrails of the U.S. government; reminds me of an item about learning about the Hansard at XTech.

tags pending: TAMI? transparent datamining?

In a PAW project discussion of writing assignments for WWW2006, KR, etc., I asked that we use XHTML rather than LaTeX to collaborate on the papers.

The WWW2006 deadline is too soon to make the transition, but I took the source of one of the papers in development and translated it to XHTML in order to test my Transforming XHTML to LaTeX and BibTeX tools. Since the tools have only been tested on one project, of course they needed some tweaks. And they'll need some more for figures.

But I'm hopeful that it'll be cost-effective to do things this way.

Meanwhile, there's a cite-formats discussion in the microformat community. My work includes a microformat for bibliography stuff. I haven't figured out URIs for the properties nor converted it to RDF just yet, like I did for my old index of URI schemes and like we did for automating publication of W3C tech reports.

I recently took a turn leading discussion in the Notions & Notations class; I presented Issues in Semantic Web Logic, a hasty set of slides based on one of TimBL's DesignIssues notes, The Semantic Web as a language of logic. I expected that the idea of dropping the law of excluded middle in order to deal with self-reference paradoxes (liar's paradox, Russel's paradox, ...) would be controversial. It wasn't at all, to this audience. Hmm... See also: LogicalReflection wiki topic.

Fire at Highfield campus... Fire destroys top research centre ...

Good to hear the SemWeb people aren't effected[sic] -- folks in #swig

SteveH says they lost most of their networking infrastructure. He's got photos.

Writing to this journal involves Yet Another Password. Sigh. Oh for OpenID support in drupal. Some folks seem to be working on it.

Of course, if our policy aware web project gets anywhere near where we hope to go, it should provide enforcement for very flexible policies.

What's a good comment policy?

• You can comment if your homepage has pagerank>K
• You can comment if any of my friends say you can comment

Hmm... I'd like something a bit more scalable. I wonder if the advogato trust metric can be distributed. I seem to remember some distributed time protocols that were robust up to massive collusion, but I looked hard for them in citeseer and couldn't find them.

postscript: Karl notes Russell Beattie on Anonymity. I'm not sure I agree that most people are anonymous by default. I think that by default, people identify themselves whent they speak, but they don't speak to very many people. Until the last few generations, most people lived out their whole lives in the same city and never spoke to anyone outside that city.