Brian Sletten

Presentations

RDFA : Weaving Richness and Meaning in the Web

The human web is reasonably well in hand by now. We are getting pretty good at building systems that people find valuable and entertaining. We have not spent as much time concerned about our software friends. There is a ton a rich content available on the web that is too difficult to extract in automated ways using just XHTML, the meta tag and microformats. This talk will introduce you to some emerging technologies from the Semantic Web camp to enrich your web pages with useful information for both automated extraction and improved browsing experiences.

Meta tags and microformats are useful but will only get us so far. The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is the metadata substrate of the Semantic Web that will take us to the next level of machine-processability and the Web. It allows you to express fairly arbitrary relationships about people, places, things, and content in an open world way. It is trivial to mix and match terms, vocabularies, etc. and to have a rich expressive capability not bound by the limitations of the relational data model and XML schemas. GRDDL is a technology for generating RDF metadata from content on demand. This can include XML documents, XML-RPC requests, XHTML pages, etc. The content could include authorship information, geotagging, creative commons license information, the topic of the document, etc. RDFa allows us to be more explicit about the metadata by embedding actual RDF relationships in our content. With technologies no more complicated than the presentation markup we are already using, you can imbue any web tier with extra semantic specialsauce that will benefit your users as well as help link you into the emerging Web of data.

NetKernel: Making IT Matter Again

The premise of Nicholas Carr's "Does IT Matter?" book was that if everyone uses the same tools, processes, products, etc., is there any competitive advantage to be had from the average IT organization?

NetKernel represents a fundamentally different approach to building systems. It takes what we like about Unix, REST and SOA and mixes it together. It inexplicably changes everything while allowing you to reuse existing code, services and libraries. Not only can it make building the kinds of systems you are building today easier, it does it more efficiently, with less code and a far more scalable runway to allow you to take advantage of the emerging multi-core, multi-CPU hardware that is coming our way.

This workshop will be a deeper dive into Resource-Oriented Computing with NetKernel. We will explore:

• the resource model as it applies to general computing
• the intersection of REST and the resource model
• scaling your software without really trying
• interacting with relational databases
• orchestration around different service types
• logically-layering applications for flexibility
• advanced caching strategies
• leveraging dynamic languages with the resource model

It is rare that a technology comes along that is both revolutionary and lets you reuse what you already know. All it takes is a bit of different thinking and a little courage to try something new.

Semantic Web Workshop

The Web is changing faster than you can imagine and it is going to continue to do so. Webs of Documents are giving way to machine-processable Webs of Information. We no longer care about data containers, we only care about data and how it connects to what we already know.

Perhaps the concepts of the Semantic Web initiative are new to you. Or perhaps you have been hearing for years how great technologies like RDF, SPARQL, SKOS and OWL are and have yet to see anything real come out of it.

Whether you are jazzed or jaded, this workshop will provide you with the understanding of a technological tidal wave that is heading in your direction.

In this workshop, we will:

• Explain the Web and Web architecture at a deeper level
• Apply Web and Semantic Web technologies in the Enterprise and make them work together
• Integrate structured and unstructured information
• Create good, long-lived logical names (URIs) for information and services
• Use the Resource Description Framework (RDF) to integrate documents, services and databases
• Use popular RDF vocabularies such as Dublin Core, FOAF, DOAP
• Query RDF and non-RDF datastores with the SPARQL query language
• Use the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) to represent taxonomies in RDF
• Model and Do Inference with the Web Ontology Language (OWL)