Lotico New York Semantic Web

What the RDF? ... Firsthand perspectives from Semantic Technology in action

January 14, 2010 · 6:30 PM
New York's Hotel Pennsylvania

Semantic technologies promise to change the landscape of the web and enhance the user experience. Like many evolving technologies, there remains a gap between theory and practice.

We’ll share our experience developing enterprise and consumer facing semantic search applications from three perspectives: Content and user experience, knowledge engineering and technology.

Speakers: Chris Smith, Samir Batla and Karl Muth.

Topic Breakouts:

Content and User Experience (Karl)

Challenges in content
The user perspective Do they “get it?” What do they “want”?

Knowledge Engineering (Batla)

Practical ontology and taxonomy development
Data quality and its impact

Technology (Chris)

What worked, what didn’t for our use cases.
Flexibility vs. Performance
The Annotation Problem
Inference - practical or necessary

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A former member

Its hard to say where to begin. I don't want to be overly negative however this was the worst meeting I have attended for this group or any for that matter. Especially considering the organizer charged $20. The meeting did not seem to have a focus. The speakers were not very good at presenting their ideas or experience. The projects they discussed seemed to be several years old and in one case no longer active. They started with slides, then stopped , then started. The questions from the audience and the side discussions were difficult to hear and did not really contribute anything as far as I can tell and gave me the sense the whole thing was out of control. The meeting was poorly moderated. I was also embarrassed because I invited a friend and had high hopes that he would gain useful info about Semantic technology. I feel that my time and $20 was wasted .

0 · January 21, 2010
Juan C Rodriguez

Wished we have had more time to actually go into the more complete aspects of this group's experience. The beers and Pizza was great afterwards

0 · January 19, 2010
odoncaoa

I thought the "What the RDF? ... Firsthand perspectives" that was given by Chris Smith, and Samir Batla couldn't have been more up close up and 'nose to the grindstone'. Listening to how some of the early on adopting technologists made out, without a marketing department presence, is always enlightening. I certainly got the sense that unless an organization gets the portion of the back-end that is being involved in a progression, that it shouldn't be thinking about more advanced functionality, such as inference. Alternately, the engineering effort needs to recognize that their efforts within the organization are contributing the newest 'external' mega-base, and approach it more from a data integration perspective, I found it extremely informative. A real 'peak under the covers' view. Also, the "old school' DBMS types that were present, left satisfied that they could continue on the way that they have been for the previous 10-20 years, and on into the forseable future without a problem!

0 · January 17, 2010
Ralph Warren

The presentation was good overall. I would have preferred more attention to the topic that was dropped, content and user experience, because a presenter dropped out. I hope this can be a focus of a session sometime before the summer.
I share some of the other comments on the session regarding a need for more depth of discussion of the implementation details. It was good that the moderator allowed a lot of time for questions. Also the presenters were very open and flexible in handling questions. I did not ask this at the time so one area for implementation to explore in more depth might be: How can the integration of sentiment analysis at a sentence or paragraph level best add value to other NLP and semantic analysis at the sentence or document level. Much thanks to the presenters!

0 · January 16, 2010
A former member

It was not the right one for my first meetup on RDF, when I know little about it. But that is not your fault, it's mine (and the friend who brought me).

0 · January 15, 2010
Rachel Lovinger

Interesting talk from people who have first hand experience using this technology in the publishing and business sectors.

0 · January 15, 2010
Michel Biezunski

The content was good. It was interesting to have a feedback which was quite informative about the challenges of implementing semantic web applications in the "real world" (meaning that things don't turn out to be like we want them to be!).

0 · January 15, 2010
Cristina Mota

Maybe because I'm a newbie to the Semantic Web, I felt a bit lost on this one. Also, I thought I was going to see a successful example of applying Semantic Web technologies, in particular RDF, and in the end I got the impression that was not the case. Anyway, it's when facing difficulties and obstacles that we learn and improve the most, so I'm sure this can be an important session for the Sematic Web community.

0 · January 15, 2010
Christine Connors

Great session with some practical advice on data integration, open world vs. closed world assumptions, user experience, technology decisions and business management. The speakers have great experiences that they shared around RDF/OWL/XML and the enterprise stack. Looking forward to seeing the slides!

0 · January 15, 2010
David G

While appreciate the first hand experience shared by the presenters, I felt that I didn't get the value that I wanted from the presentation. It was unclear what technical level the presenters were aiming for - the first part was way too general for advanced users but too thin in content to help a newbie understand what the Semantic Web can do.

When I go to the NYSW meetup events, I want to learn practical things that are going to inspire me to try new software, explore new uses for semantic technologies and write code, and unfortunately this event did not do that for me.

0 · January 15, 2010
Lynn

The talk was supposed to start at 6:30. After 50 excruciating minutes of introductions and ramble, the speakers stepped up...and proceeded to fumble and ramble. At 90 minutes into it, there had only been a few minutes of focused presentation and nothing of substance. I did not stay for the whole so I don't know it it improved.

0 · January 15, 2010
Jim Hall

Samir Batla is an engaging speaker; good choice for covering this subject. Interesting and spirited discussion followed the talk, which moved into a critique of Newswire, a (somewhat flawed) application using RDF technology.

0 · January 15, 2010
Marco Neumann

Valuable lessons for Semantic Web professionals. It wasn't a session for Semantic Web beginners, who might find it difficult to follow the side conversations. The speakers presentation and the sharing of their experience is highly appreciated. PS: In regards to "Lynn"'s comment: I have just checked the records and we have started the official part of the meetup at around 6.44. We had less than 5 minutes for the welcome and announcements and 20 minutes for attendee introduction. So the speakers started at around 7.09. This is still in line with my desired schedule as an organizer. btw the meetup was scheduled to start at 6.30pm and it did so. The "talk" (the meetup presentation) started shortly after 7pm. A pattern you can expect for future events.

0 · January 15, 2010
A former member

Started an hour late. Boring speakers

0 · January 14, 2010