Hands On Semantic Web: An interactive tour of the possibilities & technologies

The recent wave of interest in semantic technology has led to the growing popularity of Semantic Meetups in US and around the world. The purpose of local Meetup is to provide a forum for newcomers to learn about the foundational technologies of the Semantic Web and for the well versed to keep up on industry trends and share their experiences.

We are pleased to announce the formation of the Central Maryland Semantic Meetup. This is free social network and meeting community open to industry, government and academia. The goal of the organizers is to create a vendor neutral environment for open discussion and provide the membership with a valuable resource of information on industry trends and going research. We will work on behalf of the membership to coordinate regular meetings with respected speakers from industry, acedemia, commercial software companies to keep abreast of their innovations and will be invited in to keep members up to date on available tools and the adoption trends in the broader markets.

Our inaugural meeting will be held on Wednesday, January 19, 2001 in or near Columbia, MD. We will announce the exact location in the next 30 days. Meetings are held after hours, starting at 6:00, ending around 8:00 PM. The evening opens with a social mixer, followed by a research or industry brief. The meetings will conclude with the featured speaker who will be available to the group at the conclusion of the presentation.

PRESENTATIONS

John Hebeler, Semantic Architect and Developer, Booz Allen and Hamilton
Author; Semantic Web Programming, Wiley, 2009
Discussion Topic: Hands On the Semantic Web: A pragmatic, interactive tour of the
possibilities and the technologies.
John will present a fast pasted, visual and fully interactive tour that illustrates the business cases, underlying architectures and technology that demonstrate how semantics give meaning and purpose to disparate data. The presentation will address the current state of maturity of these technologies and a review of the growing amount of available semantic data from the Linked Data movement to governments around the world. Finally, an update into the evolving, innovative technologies and architectures that establish semantics for large-scale integration, cloud computing, SOA, immersive worlds, and more.

Michael Lang, Jr., Revelytix, Inc.
Director of Ontology Engineering
Discusson Topic: Ontology Visualization and Notation
There is a belief of many in the semantic technology community that ontology visualization is key to accelerating adoption. Michael will demonstrate a new ontology visualization feature in Knoodl.com. Revelytix is currently formalizing the notation used in the visualizations so that it can be submitted to the W3C for committee consideration. Revelytix intent is to use its efforts thus far to help define and open standard for ontology visualization and notation.

Spread the word, all are welcome. We look forward to seeing you there.