Information Overload

Wow...Wednesday, March 26, 2008 must be "Explain the Semantic Web Day". When I fired up my newsreader, I was greeted by this article on ReadWriteWeb:

Semantic Web Patterns: A Guide to Semantic Technologies

Then, about an hour later, came a response from Nodalites:

Nitpicking Alex's Semantic Web Patterns

Then, for lunchtime reading, came this from Planet RDF:

The Semantic Web in Action

C'mon guys, I have a real job to do...but you can be sure I've bookmarked all of these articles and later I'll sit like Jim Carrey in Batman Forever, sucking in all of this information. Great job, folks!

Institutional Change

This article has some age on it, but I read about it on a plane last week and I've been thinking about it ever since...

More teenagers ignoring CDs, report says

Two interesting points to me:

• 48% of teenagers bought zero CDs in 2007
  
• iTunes is the number two music retailer in the United States, behind Wal-Mart
  

My entire life has included the ritual of physically going to the record store on Tuesdays to see what new records are available...something that the new generations will likely never know. I'm not nostalgic...just fascinated at how technology evolves over time, and the effect that change has on people's lives.

The lesson for enterprise architecture practitioners: don't get too directly enamored to any specific technology, because it could go away - better to be well-versed in theory and logical application so that the technology becomes simply another tool in your toolbox.

DAMA Conference Update

I'm attending the DAMA International Symposium & Wilshire Meta-Data Conference this week in San Diego, CA. It's a standard conference - lots of buzzwords, new ideas, old friends, etc. Normally, I wouldn't comment on this sort of conference - it's really interesting to us data geeks, but really boring and fairly irrelevant to the world at large. However, I was really excited today at two of my sessions:

An Ontology-Based System of Registries for Metadata and Information Exchange

Semantic Complex Event Processing for the Real-Time Knowledge-Driven World

Now, the titles of these sessions could make even the most technical users cringe, I know. But here's the thing - I attended the CDI-MDM conference last year, with a session about Semantic technology and its relation to Master Data Management. It was attended by two people (including me). This year, these sessions had nearly overflow crowds (well, 40-50 people each, but still) with very engaged audiences.

The moral - here comes the Semantic wave, folks...

Required Reading

Expanding on the news of yesterday, here is a nice little post on how to prepare your sites for the coming wave (h/t PlanetRDF):

Preparing your sites for the data web

Now if I could just get someone to take over my "regular" work...

Semantic Yahoo

(h/t Paul Miller)

Yahoo Embraces the Semantic Web?

It's long been said that the pornography industry has had a big effect on Web standards and technology. In the "clean" world, search vendors tend to lead the way. I'm a little more excited than Paul here, simply because any movement in a nascent technology is exciting. However, I'm also fairly confident that the implementation of semantics will follow my experience in implementing ERP applications: it will get done, it will be useful to the end users, but it likely will not look like you think it will at this time.

Return to Forever Returns

Time out for music...

Return to Forever is, along with Weather Report, one of the seminal jazz-fusion bands from the 1970s. Their members are all legendary: Chick Corea (keyboard), Al DiMeola (guitar), Stanley Clarke (bass), and Lenny White (drums). They have reformed after 25 years to go on a tour this summer, with a potential concert DVD and/or CD forthcoming. This is one reunion tour well worth seeing if you're serious about good music.

The details (h/t Rolling Stone, of all places):

Tour Announcement

Return To Forever

May 29-30 - Austin, TX @ Paramount Theatre
May 31 – Houston, TX @ Verizon Wireless Center
June 3 – Denver, CO @ Paramount Theatre
June 4 - Salt Lake City, UT @ Kingsbury Hall
June 6 - Portland, OR @ Schnitzer Concert Hall
June 7 - Medford, OR @ Britt Music Festival
June 8 – Seattle, WA @ The Paramount
June 9 – Vancouver, BC @ the Centre in Vancouver for Performing Arts
June 11-12 - San Francisco, CA @ The Grand At the Regency Center
June 13 - Los Angeles, CA @ Gibson Amphitheatre
June 14 – Phoenix, AZ @ Dodge Theatre
June 17 - St. Louis, MO @ Fox Theatre
June 18 - Omaha, NE @ Holland Performing Arts Center
June 19 – Minneapolis, MN @ Orpheum Theatre
June 20 – Chicago, IL @ Chicago Theatre
June 21 – Detroit, MI @ Freedom Hill Amphitheatre
June 22 – Indianapolis, IN @ Murat Theatre
June 24 – Cleveland, OH @ The Plain Dealer Pavilion
June 25 – Toronto, ON @ Sony Centre
June 26 - Ottawa, ON @ Ottawa Jazz Festival
June 27 – Montreal, QC @ Pelletier Hall/Place Des Arts
June 28 - Saratoga Springs, NY @ Freihofer’s Jazz Festival
July 30 – Miami, FL @ The Fillmore Miami Beach
July 31 - Clearwater, FL @ Ruth Eckerd Hall
August 1 - Orlando, FL @ House of Blues
August 2 – Atlanta, GA @ Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre
August 4 – Baltimore, MD @ Merriweather Post Pavilion
August 5 – Philadelphia, PA @ Mann Center for the Performing Arts
August 6 – Boston, MA @ Bank of America Pavilion
August 7 - New York, NY @ United Palace

No Surprise Dept.

Those of us who fly for a living won't be surprised to hear this at all:

TSA can't believe MacBook Air is a real laptop, causes owner to miss flight

Note to Engadget: I don't think ignorance or incompetence rate tags such as "comedy" or "funny"...

Career Limiting Maneuver

These guys have a limited shelf life in Redmond...

At Redmond, Wikipedia becomes Micropedia

Of course, since it's running on Windows, it might not be entirely stable...oooh, a hit on MSoft without warning!

(h/t Beyond Binary)

The Title Says It All

Every now and again, sports will creep its way into this blog...

I give you - the Blog of the Day:

Barry Melrose Rocks

Almost makes me with I kept my mullet from days gone by....naaaah...

Posted Without Comment

Cosmo: Apple stores the place to meet men

Java Beta Test

(h/t Mike Walker)

My kind of beta test...unfortunately, they don't give you an option for decaf, but I signed up anyway...

Free coffee for bloggers?

I can smell it brewing already...

Semantics Links

I just ran across the Semantic Focus blog by James Simmons today (thanks, Google Reader recommendations!)...he has posted an insane list of resources for those who are interested in the "next big thing" (warning - geek factor 9.25 :-D ). I'm posting it here mainly as a reminder to me to check out these links, but also as a massive shout out to James for such a great list...

302 Semantic Web Videos and Podcasts!