Lost BoyA journal of no fixed aims or direction, by Leigh Dodds

From the way it’s shaping up, 2006 looks set to be my busiest year ever with respect to travel and conference attendance.
A few weeks ago I was at the ALA MidWinter conference in San Antonio, Texas. Ingenta has regularly had a stand at the conference, but this was my first time. A good chance to actually meet some users! Attended an interesting session providing an overview of the fledgling NISO Web Services and Practices Working Group. The co-chair of the group is Ian Davis, technical lead of the research group at Talis.
I was lucky enough to meet Ian last week, when he invited me up to Talis to speak to his engineering team about the experiences we’ve had at Ingenta with large RDF stores. It was great to meet Ian at long last; the Talis technical teams are a friendly and talented crowd. It was also a good chance to compare notes with Ian on a number of related topics including alternate RDF syntaxes, SPARQL interfaces, managing audit trails with RDF stores and other cool stuff. Ian has some nice demos of Web 2.0 concepts applied to Library applications which will hopefully see a public airing soon.
This week I’m off to the Carson Workshops “The Future of Web Apps” summit. Give me a shout if you’re planning to attend; looks like Edd’s going to be there. The summit is going to be a “grand day out” for the Ingenta engineering team, all of whom I’ll have in tow. I figured that a day’s intensive introduction to Web 2.0 from the impressive list of speakers that are lined up, would be a good way to get the creative juices flowing and prime them for the year ahead.
Web 2.0 will be the theme of a talk I’m giving in March for the ALPSP. Titled “Web 2.0?!…Huh?“, it’s a short introduction to the Web 2.0 concepts and technologies and is a natural extension to the Modern Palimpsest talk I gave last year. I’ve also recently accepted an invitation to join the ALPSP “FutureWatch” group whose remit, is in part, to discuss technology trends for the publishing community.
April is bringing the UKSG conference, and then May the Jena User Conference. There’s still time to submit a paper for this as the closing date is 20th February.
May is also going to bring with it XTech 2006 which I’m very excited about this year. I’ve been reviewing papers for the XML Europe and XTech conferences for the last 4-5 years, and while I’ve only seen a small number of the submitted proposals, those I have seen have been the highest quality ever. Book your places now, it’s set to be a great event.
And beyond that (if I’ve got any energy left!) is the 2nd Workshop on Semantic Web Scripting. So that’s the first 6 months of the year sorted!

I’m flying out to Amsterdam tomorrow for XTech. Like last year I’m staying in the Quentin England near Leidesplein, and have extended my trip to include a long weekend afterwards. So it’ll be a nice mix of geekiness followed by some fun, food and drinks with the missus and a whole posse of friends who are converging on Amsterdam this weekend. Should be fun!
As I’m giving my presentation on Wednesday afternoon, I should be able to relax for the rest of the week. Am hoping to catch up with the usual suspects, and hopefully meet face to face with a few more folk for the first time.
XTech has an excellent line-up this year. Edd and the team have done an really good job. I’m going to find it hard to narrow down my options. I suspect I’ll be spending quite a lot of my time in the Open Data track, which interests me in particular.
I see there’s a big BBC presence at this conference too. They seem to have been really pulling out the stops lately. Wonder when the rest of the world will catch on to the fact that their charter has been extended to include World Domination?
As there will be wireless access at the conference I hope to blog a number of sessions and upload some photos to flickr as well. Planet XTech is the place to watch the coverage appear.
See you all there!
xtech