[Tim's online slides and streaming video]

His main topic was the Semantic Web, with a particular focus on how the RDF would enable it to happen. Tim's pleasant personality came across in buckets, as the audience lapped up his gentle but accurate wit.

He is presenting his quest for the 'semantic web' in the same manner in which (with hindsight) one would present the world wide web to a bunch of people in Bletchley Park during the war. "It sounds nice Tim, but we've got a war/profit margin to fight"

The problem one faces on adoption of any new idea, is, if nobody else is doing it, it is not as useful, particularly when the true power comes from the automatic consolidation and merging of disparate data sources.

How can Java developers help in this endeavour of his? I guess our true potential is in implementing useful code that enables his (and others) vision, and in promoting more heavily the open standards than the usual proprietary solutions.

I have great respect for Tim's ideals, as he is surely as strong a proponent of open source and open standards as RMS or ESR.

My cynical eye (based on many human's I've met up till now) tells me that Joe Public have already had the 'head slappin' moment of wonderment at the world wide web, and probably don't want to relive the experience, as they were only just getting over the shock of how digital watches are (still) a pretty neat idea.

But I guess as the main audience for the semantic web is no longer the human mind consuming the html rendered view of content, but instead processing agents within our electron based devices. I'm just waiting my mobile phone to slap it's LCD, and exclaim 'O, wow, you mean I can actually call other phones on this thing, cool.'

I loved the way Tim presented the quaint old view of transferring data from one old system to another, via your pen and the back of napkin. Everyone burbling in the audience 'at least it's not like those bad old days', and bang Tim then gives a modern world example with events published on the web, which you then enter by hand into your own calendar of events. He's right, the old, bad days are still with us, and we're doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past. (some mangled quote in there :)

Anyways:

• RDF is the biggie with all of this, it is the standard data space which Tim is promoting with all the power he can muster, and good luck to him in his crusade.
• OWL is a language for publishing and sharing ontologies, which I have no idea about so leave here as an entry for me to google later update: What is an Ontology?
• RDF should be your companies 'Enterprise Integration Hub', if you go in Tim's direction now, you won't be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
• The end result of the semantic web, as seen from this faraway location, is that of a simple 'proof checker' and 'trust mechanism' at the top of the application stack which combined will be able to prove that black is white, and that you should watch out on the next zebra crossing.
• Dial 'F' for Frankenstein (Arthur C. Clarke - The Wind from the Sun) sounds like a cool short story that I need to read.
• My old SoftEng lecturer asked the question about the lack of xlink and 'out-of-line' links in Tim's discussion, but I think Tim deftly showed that this was purely due to lack of time, and in fact the wonderful Amaya is not dead, but alive and well and living in Purley, with people at the w3c using the annotation server capabilities for useful stuff such as document reviews, cool. (I always liked the concept of Amaya, but as Tim suggests it can crash on ya)

The greatest concept that I think I'll take away from this evening is that not all data in the real world is always in the shape of a rectangle (db table) or a tree (xml), because the stuff outside of this dusty computer just isn't like that. Tim claims RDF can take us there, lets hope so...

Thanks to Tim and the Royal Society for a good presentation,

and thanks for the autograph :-)

update: All this reminds me that Jena looks like a cool java implementation of some of this semantic web stuff.