wllm

I've been pretty busy since we last spoke. First off, as the following badge indicates, I'm now a proud member of PAWS:

Actually, I'm a proud member and the proud organizer of PAWS, although I'm hoping to share some of the organizing responsibilities soon. The idea here is to get together and talk about the various and sundry applications, complications, and consequences of and related to widespread adoption of Semantic Web technologies- both technical and business-oriented. As anyone who's taken even the briefest look at the Semantic Web can tell you this is a huge subject, and I would fully expect some fragmentation of this group in to smaller sub-groups as people self-organize around their own areas of interest. So far the group has grown to 20 members in its 1 week of existence, so it looks like we're off to a good start. If you happen to be around Palo Alto and are interested in learning more, feel free to join us at our first meetup.


I've also been busy prototyping my own Semantic Web application. I don't want to let the whole cat out of the bag just yet, but I can tell you it has to do with a distributed, user-focused programming structure (I hesitate to say language for reasons I'll get in to in future posts). For now, I've been impressed with the quantity and quality of thought that has been put in to Semantic Web technologies, which have their roots in decades-old research and have been directly thought about WRT the world wide web almost since the web's inception by many of it's innovators, including Tim Berners-Lee as one of its principal proponents. I've been less impressed with the standards around the technology. The fact is, the Semantic Web is complex enough without having to juggle RDF, RDFS, OWL Full, Owl DL, and OWL Lite- not to mention all of the other "standards" that aren't W3C recommendations. I fully expect the standards to become simpler and more "usable" over the next few years. I don't think that it's much of an over-generalization to say that the technologies are ready for primetime, even if the standards aren't.


Besides this, I've been learning how to write- and not write!- a business plan while looking for just the right co-founder. So, if you don't hear from me for another few weeks, don't be surprised. :)