Gregory Todd Williams

I’m finally back from Ireland (and England) and ISWC. There are pictures online from ISWC Day 1 and ISWC Day 2 (including the conference dinner). Also, pictures from a brief moment of non-rain on Sunday morning in South Park.

As far as the conference proper, the most interesting parts to me were: Carole Goble’s keynote regarding the potential for semantic web in the life sciences (and in particular in bioinformatics); David Huynh’s presentation on Piggy Bank and a demonstration of Solvent (simply amazing stuff coming from Simile recently) and having Eric Miller and Ryan Lee talk a few of us through installation and usage so that we could start tagging the conference schedule; and talking at length with Christian Halaschek-Wiener about PhotoStuff, image annotation, research interests, and being a grad student at UMD and Mindswap.

As always, the discussions outside of the formal conference were excellent, and reason enough alone to have gone. Particularly enjoyable and interesting were discussions with: Stefano and Libby on a wide range of topics, Bijan (instigated by Libby) about privacy, and Tom Heath about lots of things including KMi and graduate work in England. All in all, an excellent time. It’s a shame it can’t happen more often.

After the conference, I spent the weekend in London visiting Leo (and, as it turned out, five other people I had met a couple of years ago in Brussels). Pictures from London are here and here.