Trip Report
ISWC 2005
7-10 November 2005
Galway, Ireland
by Lloyd Rutledge

KMI's Paul Mulholland co-authored a paper presented here on their
Bletchly Park project.  This museum has visitors SMS keywords to their
number.  When logged on later, the visitors enter their cellphone
number to get a presentation generated around their keywords. This
presentation links pre-existing stories on many topics together, as
relevant for the SMS'ed keywords.  They cited and discussed Topia and
Noadster as a more generative approach than theirs.

monica schaefel and I chatted all week with the organizers of the
End-User Semantic Web workshop.  We will start a SWUIG mailing list at
w3.org by around end of this month.  monica and will with submit a
SWUI workshop for next year's conference.  We all discussed other
details of SWUIG as well, such as responding to a request to provide
topics for the ISWC2006 CFP.  Tim Berners-Lee had a slide about the
importance user interfaces in his closing keynote.  Several papers,
such as the killer app one, mentioned the problem of not currently
having a SW tool we'd want to show our parents.  The conference showed
both strong motivation for and strong interesting in SWUI, as well as
a community forming around it.

There was also a presentation on upcoming EU funding from FP7, coming
out mid/late 2006.  Heaps of money.  Knowledge is an attractive topic
to them.  Frank vH hinted almost bluntly that there's be a strong
preference of scruffy over neat, or at least for practical over
formal.  "Putting the Web back in the Semantic Web" is the motto of
next year's conference.  It was also a big part of Tim Berners-Lee's
closing keynote.