2010-05-21: Travel Report for LDOW, WWW, DOE, OAC

I've just finished up a pretty busy four week stretch that involved one workshop, one conference, one proposal review panel, the space shuttle, a working group meeting and the end of the spring semester.

In the last week of April I went to Raleigh NC for the Linked Data on the Web Workshop (LDOW 2010) and the World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2010). I drove down to Raleigh Monday evening after giving the last lecture (on Memento) in my CS 751/851 class. In addition to myself, from the WS-DL team Scott Ainsworth and Jeff Shipman were able to attend the pre-conference workshops WS-REST 2010 and LDOW 2010 but they both had to return to work after that and missed the WWW conference itself. WS-DL alumnus Frank McCown was able to attend WWW and it was good catching up with him.

From the Memento team, Herbert & Rob were there for the entire week as well. We had a Memento paper at LDOW:
Herbert Van de Sompel, Robert Sanderson, Michael L. Nelson, Lyudmila L. Balakireva, Harihar Shankar, Scott Ainsworth, An HTTP-Based Versioning Mechanism for Linked Data, Proceedings of Linked Data on the Web (LDOW2010), 2010.
Herbert gave the presentation which was very well received:



Among the many good contacts we made at LDOW were John Sheridan & Jeni Tennison from the data.gov.uk project (see Jeni's blog and their LDOW paper for more info); the US equivalents would be data.gov (see this blog post for a comparison between data.gov and data.gov.uk) and citability.org.

The WWW conference itself was good, but I did not get to attend as much as of it as I would have liked: a dataset dynamics meet up, Memento planning meetings and other events it limited the number of paper sessions I could make. danah boyd's keynote was particularly good, both challenging and somewhat controversial, the latter of which I especially value in keynotes. Rather than attempt a summarization, I'll just link to danah's transcript and a nice summary from Elon. But perhaps the most thought-provoking highlight of WWW was the panel "Search is Dead! Long Live Search", of which Gene Golovchinsky has written a nice summary.

After WWW, it was back to Norfolk and exam week for my class. After the exam session, it was another Monday night drive, this time to Rockville MD for a Department of Energy review panel. I'm not supposed to say which panel it was, but it was my first DOE panel and it was illuminating for me to contrast this panel with the various NSF panels on which I've served. After the panel, it was back to Norfolk to grade exams & final projects before Saturday's commencement.

The following week Danette and I drove down to NASA Kennedy Space Center to watch the launch of STS-132. The week after that I flew out to Albuquerque, New Mexico for a working group meeting of the Open Annotation Collaboration (OAC) project. Some of the topics included the relationship between OAC and ORE (see, for example, the pre-meeting discussion on the OAC list) as well as discussion about whether or not an Annotation is an "event" (in the sense of, for example, LODE). Presumably meeting minutes will be published soon reflecting OAC's status on these and other issues.

--Michael

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