Today’s meeting was interesting in that it ended half an hour earlier than usual, but fit in twice as many topics as usual, although that may have been because the first few were summaries and reminders.
The meeting started with a thanks to everyone who came to the Drupal Site Hackathon, with some discussion of the work that was done, the quality (and lack thereof) of the pizza, and some final tasks that need to be looked at such as the RDFa parsing that is needed to make an improved editor GUI. After that, Tim came up once again to remind everyone to keep an eye on the lab’s efforts to coordinate the SPARQL endpoint information and management, with some explanation of how that was working out so far. The last of the organizational talk was about the planned visual presentations on the monitors that will be placed around Winslow for visitors to be able to see our work on. It didn’t really seem to differ much from the initial meeting, seeing as how there are still debates over whether an approach using powerpoint slideshows, web slideshows, interactive demos, or Concerto should be used.
Next, Dominic talked a bit about the recent trip to D.C and Professor Hendler talked about the great rising interest that is being shown in semantic applications and how large numbers of people stopped him to ask about where and how they could get them. The TWC professors emphasized also that, in the future, all trips ought to be accompanied by a blogpost outlining what they did/saw/heard/thought was interesting/etc.
Finally, someone from dotCIO came to talk about their own approach to the decentralized data of the campus. They have a huge amount of different Content Management Systems and so their solution is to aggregate all of the data and deaggregating it in various ways for individual purposes. The example shown was the way they aggregated all of the building names/data to allow easy tagging to each building, and how this same method applies to people, where everyone’s RCSID’s are annoying to look up and this system allows for much easier tagging. He noted that although this is not as optimal as a semantic solution, they were looking to add applications of things like RDFa.
After that, the meeting ended early so that we could welcome two new people working with the lab to manage finance and funding issues (I think).