Thu 17 Jul 2008
The semantic web, NON-technically speaking
Posted by ejhoffer under conferences , local , mashup , semantic[4] Comments
Image via Wikipedia
Yesterday, I had the pleasure of being guest speaker at Seton Hall, where the TLTC (Teaching, Learning and Technology Center) held a session as part of their Summer Series. Not every university has the tech research focus as does MIT, for example – so I really like that the objective of this group is to help their faculty understand and take advantage of available technology to aid in their teaching efforts.
The event was called “Web2.0 Day”, so maybe you’re wondering why they wanted to hear about the semantic web. Part of the point of the day was to clarify some of the language they may hear thrown around about the web, and (pardon the web versioning references) part was to help define and classify the memes – and of course, part was to expose faculty and staff to specific tools they may want to use.
The interesting part of putting the the talk together was in taking a subject around which most conversations are focused on its technical underpinnings, and explaining it in a way that is NON-technical. While this slide-deck doesn’t impart the spoken words during the session, viewing them might still give a decent layperson-sense of what the semantic web is/will be. See presentation below:
(use the control buttons in the window below to page through the slides)
(click “view” if slide pane doesn’t appear above)
July 18th, 2008 at 11:41 am
[...] friend Eric Hoffer was a guest speaker at the Web 2.0 Day I co-led at SHU, and he turned us on to this. It’s not [...]
July 22nd, 2008 at 3:49 am
Hi,
really like the phrase “semagically”
bye
Andraz Tori, Zemanta
July 29th, 2008 at 6:13 am
Ha, love it: semagically. The word will make its print debut in Nodalities, I think. (Unless one of you have printed it somewhere else!)
Thanks for the link, Eric; I really like this story. I particularly like the way you explained the relationships between your interests. I wonder where you are taking the granularity? Have you given any more slides about this? Specifically about Granularity?
Cheers,
-Z
July 29th, 2008 at 10:55 am
Regarding the word “semagically”, I’d been racking my brain as to where it came from. The closest I’ve been able to come is Andraz’ use of “automagically”, which i really like as well.
In the presentation, the part focused on the intersection of interests is interestingly at the heart of the granularity concept as well. The area of overlap between domains happens to be the realm in which language, perspective and context, interoperability, usability… all come into play. Making the necessary bridges is about recognizing the granular elements, and exposing the ones that are appropriate for furthering understanding. Granularity in terms of the semantic web is the addition of detail to the data, description to the information, metadata to the data.
-Eric