CeBIT Day 3 ... finally

Finally I'm back home at the HPI in Potsdam. Yesterday (Sunday) was my last day at this year's CeBIT computer fair and there were a lot of interesting things going on...
First, by chance I met HBS-fellow Jan Schmidt. Together with Oliver Gassner and Reinhard Karger as host he was talking about the use of networking platforms such as second life, their use, the hype, and social spam (read more about it in Jan's blog).
Another very interesting talk was scheduled afterwards: Carsten Waldeck, founder of iverse was talking about liquidfile - a file browsing application based on liquid browsing. Liquid browsing offers the possibility to arrange and manage a huge number of data items (e.g. documents) in a rather efficient way by a smart 2d-visualization. This principle is now applied to file system management on your local computer. There is an implementation for the mac and I will test it asap to give you a report.
In addition Carsten Waldek and host Reinhard Karger were talking about the plan of installing a social networking platform for archiving intellectual content (not in the sense of intelectual property). But, you should be able to express an idea, to upload your idea in any form of document, and to receive an official timestamp. Of course maintaining a database of 'ideas' will be rather difficult. Thus, all those ideas have to be translated into 'logic' (means with the help of ontology and rule representation languages). Then, if you have a new idea, you can check, if anyone else has already thought about it and if there are some people with similar interest. The other way around, you will be able justify that you have a claim in some idea because you have registered it previously. The trouble is....translate a natural language document into logic representation...you know that this - if done completely automatically - will fail (at least too often....). Thus, we will have to wait, until the semantic web will come.
On the other hand....we have been thinking and thinking again about possible killer applications for the semantic web. This(!) could be one....

BTW, I also met another HBS-fellow Andreas Scheper after the talk (read more about the CeBIT future talks and see some videos in Andreas sein Blog). We decided to meet again at re:publica in berlin, where als the HBS has a so called plugin that will be filled with some fruitful discussion...

So, CeBIT is over for me now... If you want to stay informed about ongoing CeBIT work and CeBIT after hours, keep on reading Miss Marple's Blog.

International Semantic Web Conference 2006 (ISWC 2006) - Aftermath

Back home again, jetlag is almost gone while already travelling to Potsdam again for a talk on 'Semantic Annotation in Use'....After all, ISWC 2006 was a very nice and interesting conference...although being set up at a rather remote location (at least from my point of view). One of its highlights (as already pointed out) was the panel discussion about web 2.0 and semantic web. Leo Sauermann was raising the question, why there is such a bad marketing of semantic web technology. Obviously - as TBL was replied - because the W3C invests all funding into hiring scientist and not marketing people. One of the major problems is that semantic web applications don't look 'cool' and 'sexy' ... and therefore, they don't get public attention. BTW, right at the same time, the 3rd Web 2.0 conference took place in San Francisco. Why did the conference organizers of ISWC not try to organize a panel discussion with a live connection between the two conferences? At ISWC of course there were only 'Semantic Web'-people and (at least as far as I have realized) nobody from the 'Web 2.0'-community. Allright, you can be both SemWeb and Web2.0. But, as long as you are are focused on Semantic Web most people will have common focus (and argument) on Web 2.0. Another point of view for sure would have been interesting to listen to.

Closely related to the lack of marketing question is the question about the Semantic Web killer application. Nobody knows what type of application it will be - of course ... otherwise the application would already be there. But, as for all killer applications, it will not necessarely be somthing 'really' useful :) If you consider that the killer application for the WWW (at least for the time in its early beginnings back at CERN) was the 'telephone book'. Not to mention the sms and the mobile phone. Maybe the semantic web killer application will be related to rather ordinary applications such as a dating service that is really able to find a match....

BTW, I have switched to the new beta release of blogger.com... (comments should be working now - at last! - and also keywords)...and the other guy on the picture is Ulrich Küster (also from FSU Jena) at the ISWC dinner reception...