It’s been a busy couple of months for the Semantic Web research community. At the very end of May the European Semantic Web Conference
returned to Crete, where the series began in 2004. Now in its sixth year the conference reflected the vibrancy of the research community
in this area, the progress made to date, and the increased emphasis on deployment and uptake of Semantic Web technologies. The latter aspect
was noticeable in many parts of the conference, not least of which in the Semantic Web In Use track, a new addition to the ESWC series, co-chaired by Talis Researcher Tom Heath.

With adoption of Semantic Web technologies and Linked Data principles increasingly rapidly, many members of the research community met in
late June at Schloss Dagstuhl in Germany for a seminar titled “Semantic Web: Reflections and Future Directions”. Almost ten years since the first Dagstuhl seminar on the Semantic Web the goal of this event was to learn lessons from the past and map out the research agenda for the next ten years of the field. Again acknowledging the practical aspects of the field, there were lengthy and productive discussions on the topics of hosting and persistence of RDF vocabularies, and the urgent need to examine how Linked Data and the Semantic Web can enhance Human-Computer Interaction; both of which are topics close to our hearts at Talis.

The natural question that arises from exploring the next ten years of research in any field is “who’s going to do all the work?” Fortunately
in early July the Seventh Summer School on Ontological Engineering and the Semantic Web took place in Cercedilla, Spain, part-sponsored by
Talis. This annual event, directed by Enrico Motta (The Open University) and Asun Gomez Perez (Univ. Politécnica de Madrid), provides over 50 students from Europe and beyond with lectures, invited talks and group projects in cutting edge areas of the Semantic Web field, supported by a team of leading researchers. In addition to the knowledge gained from this intense week of study, students of the summer school get to network with their peers and build the very community that will drive forward the Semantic Web research agenda over the next ten years.

No, these aren’t the necessary precursors for a conspiracy theory about the moon landings, but three of the topics touched upon at the first VoCamp, which took place recently in Oxford. VoCamps are events where motivated individuals can come together and spend some dedicated time creating vocabularies/ontologies for describing data on the Web.

You may have heard of these vocabulary things before. Two popular examples that have been around for some time and are in widespread usage are FOAF (as in Friend of a Friend), for describing people and who they know, and SIOC, for describing the contents of ‘social media’ sites such as blogs and discussion fora. But why do we need more vocabularies, and why do we need VoCamps?

We need more vocabularies because people are increasingly motivated to share their data online, and need some way of describing the data itself in a structured fashion. If people use the same vocabularies when describing data of the same type, or at least some of the same terms, it makes sharing and integrating those data sets much easier. For example, imagine you and I both run online shops selling sports equipment, and we want to describe the stock we hold, if we use the same vocabulary to describe that stock data then anyone wanting to cross search our two shops will benefit by not having to map my data structure to yours — we’ll have saved them the job by converging on the same vocabulary from day one.

At this point in time there just aren’t enough vocabularies around to describe the wealth of data in the world. Left to their own devices people will simply create ad-hoc vocabularies which do little to aid data sharing. It’s for these reasons that we need VoCamps, where people can put day-to-day distractions to one side and concentrate on creating technically sound vocabularies in domains that interest them, according to some of the best practices in the field.

VoCampOxford2008 was the start of this process. I used the time to work with Ian and others on a vocabulary/ontology for describing Whisky. Leigh created his Space Flight vocabulary — not just a flippant bit of fun, but a crucial component in his desire to make NASA data more widely accessible and easily archived. Other groups at VoCampOxford2008 worked on a vocabularies for describing IRC discussions, evidence, discourse, participation, votes, journeys and scientific data. See this page for more information on the vocabs we created.

Now, while some people would no doubt argue that whisky and space flight constitute the two most important topics around, there’s still some way to go in creating the rich ecosystem of vocabularies required for a Web of data. That’s why the second VoCamp will take place in Galway, Ireland in late November. Anyone interested in getting their hands (metaphorically) dirty and creating some vocabs should register now before the event fills up — it’s free. Given the location I’ll have to spend a little time in Galway refining the Whisky ontology, but no doubt there’ll be plenty of scope for creating vocabularies in other areas. I may even attempt a vocabulary for describing conspiracy theories, but I imagine that no-one would be able to agree on the details!