Brian Sletten

REST Workshop

9:00 AM MDT

Many people are drawn to the ideas of REST but aren't sure how to take the next steps. This workshop will help get you to a comfortable place by introducing the concepts and walking through a series of exercises designing REST APIs from a variety of domains.

We will break up into teams and tackle the various aspects of a solid, stable, evolvable REST API design. This will not be a tutorial in particular REST implementations (Jersey, Restlet, etc.). The ideas will transcend specific technologies although we will talk about some particular choices.

R : Analyzing and Visualizing Data

8:30 PM MDT

At the intersection of Big Data, Data Science and Data Visualization lives a programming language that ranks higher on the TIOBE index than Scheme, Fortran, Scala, Prolog, Erlang, Haskell, Lisp and Clojure.

The R language and environment is an open source platform that has quickly become THE language for analyzing data and visualizing the results. This talk will introduce you to the language, the environment and how it is being used with Big Data and Linked Data.

You don't need to be a stats head to attend this session. We'll introduce some basic concepts. If you are a stats head, there is plenty of material that you will still enjoy.

• History of R
• Language basics, data types and main structures
• Some statistics fundamentals
• R Graphics
• R and Big Data
• R and Linked Data

Modeling Resources: REST and Hypermedia

9:00 AM MDT

This is the first in a new series on resource-oriented systems. The goal of the series is to provide practical guidance on the design and implementation of next generation systems that are flexible, extensible, high-performance and future-friendly. The talks are designed to work as arc, building upon each other, but they should also stand alone. The first topic is a guided walk through of building quality REST APIs.

We will focus on the architecture of the Web and how it can help us model and manipulate our important business concepts. We will discuss the role of stable identifiers, intentional representation design, hypermedia affordances and architectural consistency. The goal is not to be “RESTful”, the goal is to build systems that display the properties we require.

This talk will be accessible for people new to REST, but also different enough that those who have attended previous REST talks will learn new things.

Describing and Linking Resources: RDF and SPARQL

11:00 AM MDT

This is the second in a new series on resource-oriented systems. The goal of the series is to provide practical guidance on the design and implementation of next generation systems that are flexible, extensible, high-performance and future-friendly. The talks are designed to work as arc, building upon each other, but they should also stand alone. This second talk is an introduction to the use of Semantic Web technologies to enable collaboration without coordination.

REST is a means to an end, but it is not a satisfactory end state. It usually pushes complexity to the client in ways that make data integration difficult across multiple sources. The W3C Semantic Web initiative introduces us to new technologies for linking resources and querying across them in powerful new ways. We will learn about the RDF model, what it brings to the table and how we can use it connect information regardless of where and how it is stored. We will use the SPARQL protocol and query language to ask powerful questions of arbitrary resources. We will also see how we can create new information just by asking for it.

Semantic Web Workshop

1:30 PM MDT

The Web is changing faster than you can imagine and it is going to continue to do so. Rather than starting over from scratch each time, it builds on what has succeeded already. 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.

Roughly 25% of the Web is semantically marked up now and the search engines are indexing this information, enriching their knowledge graphs and rewarding you for providing them with this information.

In the past we had to try to convince developers to adopt new data models, storage engines, encoding schemes, etc. Now we no longer have to worry about that. Rich, reusable interface elements like Web Components can be built using Semantic Web technologies in ways that intermediate developers don’t have to understand but end users can still benefit from. Embedded JSON-LD now allows disparate organizations to communicate complex data sets of arbitrary information through documents without collaboration.

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 blow your mind and provide you with the understanding of a technological shift that is already upon us.

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
Query RDF and non-RDF datastores with the SPARQL query language
Encode data in documents using RDFa and JSON-LD
Create self-describing, semantic Web Components
Model and use inferencing with the Web Ontology Language (OWL)

Semantic Web Workshop

3:15 PM MDT

The Web is changing faster than you can imagine and it is going to continue to do so. Rather than starting over from scratch each time, it builds on what has succeeded already. 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.

Roughly 25% of the Web is semantically marked up now and the search engines are indexing this information, enriching their knowledge graphs and rewarding you for providing them with this information.

In the past we had to try to convince developers to adopt new data models, storage engines, encoding schemes, etc. Now we no longer have to worry about that. Rich, reusable interface elements like Web Components can be built using Semantic Web technologies in ways that intermediate developers don’t have to understand but end users can still benefit from. Embedded JSON-LD now allows disparate organizations to communicate complex data sets of arbitrary information through documents without collaboration.

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 blow your mind and provide you with the understanding of a technological shift that is already upon us.

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
Query RDF and non-RDF datastores with the SPARQL query language
Encode data in documents using RDFa and JSON-LD
Create self-describing, semantic Web Components
Model and use inferencing with the Web Ontology Language (OWL)

Resource-Oriented Architecture Patterns for Webs of Data

5:00 PM MDT

The surge of interest in the REpresentational State Transfer (REST) architectural style, the Semantic Web, and Linked Data has resulted in the development of innovative, flexible, and powerful systems that embrace one or more of these compatible technologies. However, most developers, architects, Information Technology managers, and platform owners have only been exposed to the basics of resource-oriented architectures.

This talk, based upon Brian Sletten's book of the same name, is an attempt to catalog and elucidate several reusable solutions that have been seen in the wild in the now increasingly familiar “patterns” style. These are not turn key implementations, but rather, useful strategies for solving certain problems in the development of modern, resource-oriented systems, both on the public Web and within an organization's firewalls.

Information

3:15 PM MDT

In our industry, we have a problem. It's called the Software Problem. It is an embarrassing indictment of our capacity to deliver quality software on time and under budget. Beyond that, when we do deliver running code, it is often fragile and hard to extend. There are many reasons for this and many solutions. But one that does not get enough attention is how we approach information.

This is a theoretical discussion. You may not learn something you can use right away, but you may learn new ways of thinking about designing and building systems with an information-centric focus. We will discuss the roles of databases, services, software models, REST, the Web and the roles they all play together.