Max will present:

"I’d like to start off by introducing a few concepts and terms in order to create a common language and context, and then lead a discussion of some concerns and ambiguities in the design. Hopefully this will spark some interest in others, as well as help me evolve some of these ideas.

My research lies in the area of information and knowledge modeling. This involves understanding as many aspects as possible of information design and knowledge representation (data integrity, conceptual relationships, contextual boundaries) as well as how such a model will be used in human- to-human, human-to-machine, and machine-to-machine interactions. In other words, when writing software to allow information browsing (& filtering), searching, analyzing, querying, and so forth, it would be helpful if there was a consistent model with extensible schemas (i.e. ontologies) to facilitate reuse of various UI elements and caching algorithms.

What I am looking for is a model to represent information.

Existing examples include RDF/OWL, DB, XML, etc. I have a few concerns about all of those, however not yet a clear picture of all of the requirements and constraints needed to design a more adequate solution. I’ll present some trends in software evolution, some common design patterns, a few disruptive technologies, and what I think the need is for the next-stage software development, one aspect of which will be a common information model. Hopefully from there we can discuss how this picture shapes the need for a new information model.

We'll also discuss the multitude of web services available on the web for the semantic community.

Thanks for your participation.
Oz