Trip report of European Conference on Digital Libraries 2001 Darmstadt, 4-8 September by Lynda https://www.ecdl2001.org/ The first keynote was by Mike Keller of Stanford university Library. http://highwire.stanford.edu/~mkeller/ It may be nice to get hold of his slides. His talk wasn't particularly useful for what we are up to, but it was a classically good keynote - full of interesting observations and insights that you wouldn't otherwise come across. Points of note: the 3 fallacies of dot.com (thus leading to the bursting of the dot.com bubble) Early innovators will predominate in any segment, service or sensation. Consumer behaviours will change quickly adopting early innovations & abandoning traditional favorites. Business models built on hope. He included a direct quote from the Scientific American Semantic Web article. http://www.sciam.com/2001/0501issue/0501berners-lee.html The mission of the Stanford library is to become a library of the mind. (His words, not mine...) This includes the marshalling & presentation of information (that's us). Interesting to note that Vannevar Bush is as large a hero in the DL community as he is in hypertext. (JCDL gives the Vannevar Bush prize.) Scholarly endeavors (such as ScholOnto) Challenges to Cybrarians Eric Miller's keynote was the next day. He is activity lead of the Semantic Web at W3C. Eric had his own vision of what the Semantic Web should become & did a fair job at explaining it. His slides are at: http://www.w3.org/2001/09/06-ecdl/ I chatted to him later (and since he had been warned of my presence by Jane Hunter he was primed that he wanted to talk to me - so he knew my name without any introduction. He is very much for public involvement in the development of the Semantic Web. I wondered how he could defend this to the W3C members of the working groups. His argument was that it was to the benefit of the membership as a whole if more people are involved. (I then wonder what the benefits are of being a W3C member). The Semantic Web activity is financing advanced development - not typical for a working group. (Although I think the WebOnt charter is clearer about this?) His talk is definitely worth browsing through, although it starts a bit slowly. Try reading from http://www.w3.org/2001/09/06-ecdl/slide16-0 .html In his talk he was also very enthusistic about Annotea. Member TR page example. Emulating joins in a DB. (I think this is cool... Slide 28. Given some of the responses to his talk it wasn't clear whether everyone got it.) http://www.w3.org/2001/09/06-ecdl/slide28-0.html http://www.w3.org/2001/07/25-swws/all.gif Cost effectiveness stems from re-use. So don't go Semantics if everything is one-off. (I think this is where we have to be very clear in any of our "Semantic Web advertising". It does involve extra effort to set up all the metadata, so there has to be good reason to do it.) I also chatted to Eric about our involvement in SMIL, W3C, Semantic Web. He seemed to think that a W3C note on RDF+SMIL and/or RDF+SVG would be useful. (Is this research though? Something fun for Joost to do in Oz?) Chatted to Constantino Thanos about their work. ECHO - poor sister to Vizard. (Vizard is the project Gwendal Auffret is currently working on. Video editing & annotation suite.) Interesting to know it is happening, not worth looking any further. Poster from Crete looked promising. I have the paper-(put URL) I didn't get to meet Carl Lagoze (Jane has co-authored with him). Open Archive Initiative. Cornell. http://www.cs.cornell.edu/lagoze/lagoze.html He has some interesting recent publications, Open Archives Initiative and "ABC ontology and model" co-authored with Jane. I chatted to Jane & Eric at the conference dinner. Eric is basically Mr. Semantic Web. I get the impression he understands his responsibility, is open to the opinions of others (he seemed to understand our vote for WebOnto). I think he's a good person for the job. Martin Doerr, FORTH, was there too. I mustn't forget CIDOC - the museum ontology - although I get the impression that no-one has actually used it yet. Heard talk from Jen Shin Hong from Taiwan. He is doing work on "second generation multimedia presentation generation", so to speak. He visited me at home. He said XSL wasn't powerful enough. He is coming to France next year for a few months. He should definitely visit us for a week or two and talk about longer term cooperation - for example he gets his students to implement things he can publish. He is very aware of the conceptual shortcomings of his own work. ------ I couldn't access the ECDL site when editing this, so I need to go back and add in a URL for Jen Shin's paper.