11 March, 2006

WLAN on SAS flight from Washington to Copenhagen

Cannot find many good words to describe this; connection is really bad, even GPRS would be faster. In addition, for some reason I cannot connect to our corporate email servers. It would have been so nice to check out, manage and respond to emails...

Collaborative travel report from SemTech 2006

A Wiki travel report of the conference can be found from here.

Highlights from the SemTech 2006

Here we are again, flying and writing blogs. This time the flight is operated by Scandinavian Airlines, and the connections, at least to our corporate network via VPN, is awfully bad. Well, actually I cannot connect to our email servers at all...

Well, three and a half days of SemTech has now past, and I have to say that it was really a nice conference. Well organized, good speakers, and well-prepared presentations. And most of them were very interesting.

Some of the most interesting topics I heard about were (go and google for more information about these):
  • Jena programming and inferencing in Jena
  • Ontference and the architectural things behind it
  • TopBraid Composer - a really good alternative (better?) for Protege
  • From the keynote of Hendler/Lassila: go and link your ontologies with others, and make them available
  • Ontology integration and merging by integration ontologies
  • Semantic Wikis
  • Microformats
That's all for now, more info and possible ideas related to my PhD later...

09 March, 2006

InferenceWeb - Putting the trust in place among the web applications

Deborah McGuinness had a keynote about trustable services, and presented their work about Inference Web - Explanations for the Semantic Web. The presentation will show up here at some point.

TopBraid Composer - an alternative for Protege

During the SemTech 2006 Holger Knublauch from TopQuadrant presented TopBraid Composer, an eclipse-based OWL editor. It has been build from the ground up aimed at OWL, so it does not suffer from the "limitations" of frame-paradigm of Protege. The first beta-version will be out in about two weeks, and first commercial version in about six weeks. Demonstrations looked very promising, so I will look forward to having the beta version to play with.

07 March, 2006

SemTech on its way

The second day has just began. So far the conference seems like a successful one. Last year the number of attendees was at around 300, but now here are about 600 hundred people. Impressive. On the first day I attended tutorials "Semantic Web programming" and "Jena programming", and both of them were really good, especially the latter one. All the presentations can be found in here. More information later on while I have some more time to write.

05 March, 2006

On my way to SemTech 2006

quite cool, Lufthansa provides WLAN access on their selected long-haul flights. Seems to work reasonably well, and price is not bad either; 26 dollars for the whole flight. Now I would just need better batteries...

Anyway, I'm currently flying to Los Angeles and then to San Jose, where the SemTech 2006 will take place. So, lot's of SW presentations coming up, I will post some comments along the conference.

12 February, 2006

Bookmark folder at del.icio.us

In addition to this blog, I will also maintain my PhD related bookmarks at del.icio.us/mikkolaukkanen.

Nice article about the future of the Semantic Web

Where now for agent-based computing?

AgentLink III has published a new version of a roadmap for agent-based systems, check it out here:

IST Results - Where now for agent-based computing?

My Road to PhD has been created

This blog will be dedicated on collecting and publishing information related to my PhD, which will deal with the usage of Semantic Web technologies in service architectures. The main areas under research are the following: advertising and searching for semantically annotated services, modeling and using end-user's identity information in while accessing services, and modeling the services themselves with Semantic Web technologies. I will post a more detailed reasearch plan on this blog soon.