Wrapping up WWW2007

The 16th International World Wide Web conference is over and i am still in the phase of sorting out and getting my mind around the ideas and concepts i learned about. It was my first academic conference and it was really cool. Mez is asking on the IW3C2 blog what kind of hot trends participants have spotted during WWW2007. While i have blogged already a bit about the conference i try to do a quick personal recapitulation of the ideas and approaches i found the most fascinating.

To me the most prevalent theme was the Semantic Web – also called the Web of Data or Linked Data these days. The idea (still) is to markup and publish data in a more structured way so that it would become better accessible to computers and thus also more easily remixable for humans. While the Semantic Web might not be counted as something new anymore, it still is quite hot. It seems to me as if Semantic Web, tagging, and conventional metadata converge allowing easier and at the same time richer ways of annotating and linking resources.

A related concept is Open Data that i understood as a logical extension of Open Access and Open Source towards the realm of data, e.g. maps, scientific data, bibliographic data, going hand in hand with open/free licensing, e.g. Creative Commons. Consider a “socialized” map service that is fed by GPS enthusiasts and mashed up with other free information repositories. Think about publicly funded institutions publishing their generated data in standardized formats so that it can be reused (read: mashupped). The Semantic Web technologies are in place and more than appropriate to relate resources with each other (RDF), formulate ontologies (OWL), and query the semantic repositories (SPARQL).

At the VIP reception on Friday night i talked shortly to Tim Berners-Lee about whether Web 2.0 communities – e.g. Flickr, Delicious, Lastfm – could be decentralized using Semantic Web technologies and how community features could be implemented in this way. He said that links and backlinks (using referrer logs and/or trackback) could allow to create a social network in a decentralized way. RDF can add meaning to the links and RDF crawlers/trackers could enable search and discovery.

The four keynotes mostly focused on the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of Web research and practice. While the Web becomes an essential part of our lives its social, economic, and political aspects need to be acknowledged, studied, and understood.

After all it was awesome to be part of such a conference. I got to meet quite a few interesting and nice people. I even met with some former colleagues from Santiago from the time i did my internship last summer down in Chile.

Several other people blogged about the WWW2007 conference, e.g. Justin Thorp, Brian Kelly, Ivan Herman, Yuan Niu, Peter Murray-Rust.