There are mainly two sorts of motivations to go to a conference. The first one would be to be confronted to other scientific scholars with high-level accomplishment, the second would be that conferences are a very good occasion to visit a nice place (even if many institutions, like mine, refuse to pay for conference organized in tourists resorts). As a matter of fact, not only did the Triple-I 2008 edition achieved a very satisfactory scientific level, but Graz was a delicious place to enjoy all these presentations. Now let’s talk about the conference itself.
There is something that everyone seems to be very worried about in the semantic web community, is the purpose of this technology. Many discussions and keynotes were organized in order to identify what were the challenges that the semantic web was about to face. Organizing and structuring the knowledge is definitely the most obvious goal of the semantic web, but indeed, quite a few of use-cases were proposed. Prof Henry Lieberman (MIT Media Laboratory, USA) identifies the goals of the semantic web as a way to enhance common sense for machines (arguing that common sense is the bottleneck for any artificial intelligence) and asserts five ways to enrich the applications which are using semantic web:
- Map from goals to concrete actions
- Anticipate the use of the application
- Make most likely things easiest to do
- Integrate applications (diminish the role of the user interface)
Some industry partners did presentations (I could not see all of them) : SAP (with a very completed solution for collaborative work) and us (BMW Forschung und Technik and our infotainment platform), IBM also, etc. A brilliant keynote was made by Peter Kemper on the use of Wikis at Shell. The rest of the presentations were made by people from academical background, universities and research institutes.
There is one point that made no debate, the semantic web exists, and there are already huge databases of tagged media available on the web. What can we do with them? The answer is not clear, and I would bet that they will not be for a long time (because I do not see any killer-app’ for the moment). Most people argue that it is necessary to prepare the future and to tag as much information as possible. Other people argue that it is necessary to make more consistent the existing tag systems. Katrin Weller and Isabella Peters (Dusseldorf University, Germany) made a very interesting presentation on tag organization strategies called “tag gardening”. I was one of the rare people to defend the idea that the most part of the knowledge is hidden not in the relationship existing between the different databases, but in the dynamic process of their evolution, i.e. there is more knowledge to get by observing how the relationships between the knowledge representations are transformed than by observing the knowledge representations themselves. Dr Ralf Klamma (RWTH Aachen, Germany) in his closing lecture of a workshop on Knowledge Acquisition from the Social Web made it clear that semiotic system are dynamics and should be considered as such.
On the top of that, the conference was a very interesting way to make contacts with other researchers, and especially PhD students (Special thanks to Ahmet Yildirim from the technical university of Istanbul who presented an interesting tagging technique using both object and predicate and who borrowed me his computer). The Triple-I was also a very social event. In spite of the some inconvenient events (my laptop broke at my arrival in Graz), I will have a very nice souvenir of the Triple-I’ 08 conference.
