Product Pitches and PhDs, Oh My!
Aaron and I got back last week from the 2009 Semantic Technology Conference, aka Semtech2009, and after four solid days of twittering and forgetting people’s names and awkward conversation, I figured I should comment on what was cool and what was forgettable before everything shifts from the first category to the second.
The basic conference elements were all good: it felt well-run, there was a good mix of people and the sessions were more-or-less mostly-kinda interesting. The conference itself was in San Jose, so… it was warm outside, I guess? We weren’t tempted to skip sessions because there might something more interesting to do? I’ll do breakdowns by category, going in decreasing order of importance.
Keynotes
I attended the opening keynotes on Tuesday, which started with Thomas Tague from OpenCalais letting us know that People With Money™ (my term for it) were about to descend on our sleepy semantic backwater. He was a good speaker, and his message was well-received. What I got out of his talk was that we (as software developers) need to figure out where we can succeed in this new landscape, that there are still a lot of potentially profitable niches and that opportunities for tool developers still exist. Tuesday’s second keynote was Tom Gruber from Siri, who gave a demo of their upcoming mobile “virtual personal assistant”. It was a pretty rad demo, and I’m very excited about the ecosystem of services that it might cultivate. Siri has the potential to be a killer app in both the mobile and semantic web spaces, and I’d love to see their execution match their vision.
I skipped the other two keynotes. One was a panel discussion; I find it difficult to get much out of anything in this format. The closing keynote was two gentlemen from the NY Times discussing semantic technology uptake at the Grey Lady. I probably should have gone to that one.
Sessions
I’m not going to go over every session, because that’s a lot of writing that no one wants to read. The following sessions were ones I found worthwhile, so if you’re ever undecided about seeing these people, or say, booking them for your conference, you should just go right ahead on my say-so.
Elisa Kendall and Deborah McGuinness: Ontology 101 – a lot of content in this one. One of the key themes that I picked up on during the conference is that almost every way to incorporate semantic tech in an organization starts with understanding and developing ontologies. Another one is that you shouldn’t feel bad for thinking that ontologies are hard… there are people that devote a lot of time and effort to making them, and they still sometimes get it wrong.
John Hebeler and Matthew Fisher: Semantic Web Programming – loved this. It had a great format, with short lab-like exercises that got progressively more complicated; we started with building simple models in Jena, and ended with using the Pellet reasoner to infer new knowledge. It was so good and well-presented that I immediately went out and bought their book.
Dave Wood: Active PURLs – a great, no-nonsense introduction to PURLs and their in-development “active” variants. Dave, along with quite a few people at the conference, really came across as a true believer in the infrastructure of our current web. I had always thought people just made it up as they went a long, but no, a lot of thought and effort went into those early RFCs.
Random people: Visualizing RDF – this sort-of panel was sort-of organized on the spur of the moment. I’m glad I went, because I got to see AllegroGraph’s Gruff and someone else’s Diagramic. Cool tools, these.
Food
The catered stuff was quite good for conference food. I’m going to spread the rumour that, due to certain “economic realities” (*cough*recession*cough*), the turnout was less than the organizers were expecting, and so the catering budget (which had been decided per-head much earlier) was relatively high.
Outside the conference, found a few places in San Jose which might be worth going to if, like us, you didn’t rent a car and don’t have enough time to trek to San Fran.
Mezcal – featured mezcalitas (good) and pan-fried grasshoppers (less good). Get the lightest-coloured molé… best of their three.
Angelou’s – went here while on a burrito hunt. (To a Canadian, America is the Promised Land of the Burrito). I ordered their Super Burrito. It was Merely Okay (A Bit on the Salty Side).
Hanuman – ordered the curried duck (“Thai spicy”). It was fantastically tasty, but it was not Thai spicy.
Conclusion?
This year had a good mix of people from the business, acedemic and technical communities. As expected, there was lots of networking, not all of it involving Twitter or Cat-5. They say next year will be even more business-focussed, but since grad students love to travel, expect to see them too. And maybe us, as well.
