Trip report of WWW10 in Hong Kong 1-4 May 2001 Lynda 13 June 2001 A public version of this report can be found at http://www.cwi.nl/~lynda/spool/www10-report.txt Jacco, Steven, Ivan, Frank Roos and Lynda were all in Hong Kong. The Semantic Web Workshop (Tues 1 May) turned out to be less inspiring than expected. Although a lot of the Semantic Webby people were there OIL: FrankH, Jeen, Dieter, Ying; COHSE: Wendy, Les, Carole (Southampton and Manchester); DAML: Stefan Decker plus other DAML-ites; EU:George Stork. The workshop web page (including a number of bad photos): http://semanticweb2001.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/ Permanent archive of papers: http://sunsite.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/Publications/CEUR-WS/Vol-40/ The quality of the presentations left something to be desired. And while the audience was an expert one, every time interesting discussion struck up it was cut short due to time constraints. (Luckily I missed most of this, since I was giving a SMIL tutorial.) The following day Tim's keynote talk was fast paced. http://www.w3.org/2001/Talks/0501-tbl/ It gave an overview of where the W3C infrastructure is currently at and what the next steps are. I was glad I'd read Jacco's thesis so I could almost keep up. Jacco was happy that Tim's conclusions were similar to those in his thesis. The base architecture is done. Processing has not been done yet, e.g. how can languages be mixed? Tim spent a lot of time discussing sending messages between machines. How to express what you want to say in XML(+namespaces)+RDF, keeping receipts, allowing the information to be used by other agents. He of course talked a lot about the Semantic Web, but from the point of view of services. He was very excited about the diagrams he could generate using a program which takes RDF as input and draws nodes and arcs in a nicely laid out way. More and more based general tools, stores, processors RDF based applications RDF streams with RSS 1.0 benefits of scale kicking in evolvability techniques becoming relevant DAML+OIL ready for W3C entry i.e. no longer research Clean-up pass of RDF core started (cf XML P.M.) I liked the talk from the Sybase guy, John Chen on "Best Practices in Moving your Business to the Web", although its clear and simple message eludes me now. Powerpoint slides are available, but only worth a quick flick-through if you are keen. http://www10.org/keynoters/speech/john_chen.html http://www10.org/keynoters/speech/john_chen.ppt The afternoon was more semantics. First a W3C session on where they are with the Semantic Web. Most of it was Tim demonstrating a graph drawing program he'd been so thrilled with during his keynote talk. Ralf Swick and Dan Connolly gave the main presentations. It was very RDF'y and using RDF for e-commerce. (Jacco was at a different session, which may or may not deserve mention.) Immediately afterwards was the Semantic Web panel chaired by yours truly. http://www.semanticweb.org/resources.html#pastevents Semantics for the Web, May 3, 2001 The panelists had been warned beforehand to keep their presentations short. (This was fine for Tim, since he was briefed only 7 minutes before the beginning of the panel.) As the panelists finished their talks, discussion began spontaneously from the audience. A number of issues were touched upon, but the main one was why do we need both XML schema and RDF schema. Tim tried to explain, Dieter tried to explain, and FrankH gave a good answer. The real answer lies in Jane Hunter's paper (presented the next day), but unfortunately Jane wasn't at the panel. (She was chatting to Dan Brickley who should have been in the panel but forgot to show up...) Next day (Thursday) Jacco gave his talk. This went very well. Afterwards Marcos Caceres came up to chat more, and seemed to be doing highly related things - both from the multimedia and the semantic perspective. (Turns out he is currently being supervised by Jane Hunter....) The official URL, for the record: - Jacco van Ossenbruggen, Joost Geurts, Frank Cornelissen, Lynda Hardman, Lloyd Rutledge Towards Second and Third Generation Web-based Multimedia http://www10.org/cdrom/papers/423/index.html The COHSE (Carr et al.) paper was also quite good. Basically, how to generate links from ontologies. Les's sparkly green trousers were used as a live illustration of how difficult it is to agree on a description. Jeen's paper and Jane Hunter's paper are also worthy of mention. Jeen's paper basically explained why RDF schema is not enough, and a richer language is needed to extend it (i.e. why do we need OIL). Jane's paper was the difference between XML schema and RDF schema (and was discussed in the reading club of 9 May 2001). URLs for the papers in order of decreasing importance: - Jane Hunter, Carl Lagoze Combining RDF and XML Schemas to Enhance Interoperability Between Metadata Application Profiles http://www10.org/cdrom/papers/572/index.html local copy: http://media.cwi.nl:8080/www10/papers/572/index.html - Jeen Broekstra, Michel Klein, Stefan Decker, Dieter Fensel, Frank van Harmelen, Ian Horrocks Enabling Knowledge Representation on the Web by Extending RDF Schema http://www10.org/cdrom/papers/291/index.html local copy: http://media.cwi.nl:8080/www10/papers/291/index.html - Les Carr, Sean Bechhofer, Carole Goble, Wendy Hall Conceptual Linking: Ontology-based Open Hypermedia http://www10.org/cdrom/papers/246/index.html local copy http://media.cwi.nl:8080/www10/papers/246/index.html - Rune Hjelsvold, Subu Vdaygiri, Yves Léauté Web-based Personalization and Management of Interactive Video http://www10.org/cdrom/papers/405/index.html local copy http://media.cwi.nl:8080/www10/papers/405/index.html - Patrick Chiu, John Boreczky, Andreas Girgensohn, Don Kimber LiteMinutes: An Internet-Based System for Multimedia Meeting Minutes http://www10.org/cdrom/papers/527/index.html local copy http://media.cwi.nl:8080/www10/papers/527/index.html - Adam Field, Pieter Hartel (Twente), Wim Mooij Personal DJ, an Architecture for Personalised Content Delivery http://www10.org/cdrom/papers/384/index.html local copy http://media.cwi.nl:8080/www10/papers/384/index.html We missed the keynote "The Meme's Eye Web" by Susan Blackmore, but apparently it was a nice talk about the way memes (idea "genes") spread themselves. Might be nice to find a fuller paper sometime for a leesklub. http://www10.org/keynoters/speech/susan.html