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9 October 2007
Confabs in Cambridge
Posted by Paul Miller at October 9, 2007 10:38 PM
Peter Murray-Rust has taken advantage of not having to drive across the country this evening to get in before me with a report on my day.
As he wrote, I took him up on a kind invitation and visited the Unilever Centre for Molecular Informatics at the University of Cambridge, to see what they're up to, and to share some of our ideas about the emergent Web of Data. This was my first stab at a set of messages that will figure highly in the next few presentations, so I'm glad that Peter seemed to like what he heard. I wonder if he heard what I think I said? I wonder if I said what I think I said?
Before and after my presentation, I spent time talking with Peter, and learning far more about the work of the Centre from a number of those involved in doing that work. Their pragmatic application of a plethora of technologies to the solving of real problems was inspiring, and it was fascinating to see the things possible now because of Peter's early involvement in pushing the Chemical Markup Language (CML) way back in the mists of Internet time; a language I remember watching from afar as it grew.
Golem seemed to share many design considerations with some of our stuff, and apparently went down well at SciFoo this year. CrystalEye pointed to interesting combinatorial possibilities (and I'm amazing it works at all, given the need to screen scrape the websites of nineteenth century (at best) information hoarders). Oscar has the potential to make scholarly texts far more actionable, and some of the pieces that Nico showed pulled the pieces together nicely.
Lots of interesting ideas. Lots of open data licensing issues to tease out. Lots of Platform synergies. My head, it is a-spinning. Which is always the sign of a good day!
Technorati Tags: open data, open data commons, Peter Murray-Rust, scifoo, Semantic Web, Talis, Web 2.0, Web 3.0
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