SMW users meeting

The first meeting of Semantic MediaWiki users is scheduled to be held in Boston, Massachusetts, USA on Saturday, November 22, 2008, with a "tech day" on Sunday, November 23.

Contents 1 Overview 2 Location 3 Attendees 3.1 Definitely attending 3.2 Possibly attending 3.3 Sunday meeting 4 Schedule 5 Program 5.1 Global outreach 5.2 Academic issues 5.3 Corporate usage 5.4 Future developments 5.5 SMW best practices 6 Topics of discussion 7 Space available/looking for space 7.1 Space available 7.2 Looking for space

[edit] Overview

The main meeting, on Saturday, will start at 10:30 AM and will cover many aspects of SMW and its related extensions, including technical, usability, training, "best practices", marketing and business-development issues. The Sunday, "tech day" meeting will also start at 10:30 AM, and will cover in-depth technical aspects of some proposed additions to the SMW system.

[edit] Location

Both meetings will take place at the offices of the Monitor Group, at 2 Canal Park in Cambridge, MA.

[edit] Attendees

The following people will attend the main meeting on Saturday:

[edit] Definitely attending

• Jie Bao, RPI Tetherless World Constellation
• Li Ding, RPI Tetherless World Constellation
• Rui Huang, RPI Tetherless World Constellation
• Zhenning Shangguan, RPI Tetherless World Constellation
• Evan Patton, RPI Tetherless World Constellation
• Neil Davies, Monitor
• Dave Forgianni, Monitor
• Steven Forth, Monitor
• Jason Lawrence, Monitor
• Rich Slezak, Monitor
• Daniel Hansch, ontoprise
• Henrik Oppermann, ontoprise
• Yaron Koren, Referata
• Marc Feickert, FamilySearch
• Mollie Forbes, FamilySearch
• Don Stringham, FamilySearch
• Robert Freimuth, Mayo Clinic, caBIG(R) Vocabulary Knowledge Center
• Guoqian Jiang, Mayo Clinic
• Michael Cariaso, SNPedia.com & BioTeam.net
• Fabian Howahl, University of Karlsruhe
• Harold Solbrig, Mayo Clinic
• Joel Natividad
• Patrick Sbrzesny, mindXchange Ltd.
• Michael English
• Mark Greaves, Vulcan
• Mike Axelrod
• Clarence Dillon, SAIC

[edit] Possibly attending

• Sergey Chernyshev
• Joshua Shinavier, RPI Tetherless World Constellation
• Xixi Luo, RPI Tetherless World Constellation
• Ankesh Khandelwal, RPI Tetherless World Constellation
• Joshua Seagroves, i_SW Corp.
• Tom Eskridge, IHMC
• ericP, W3C

[edit] Sunday meeting

The following people will attend the meeting on Sunday:

• Jie Bao
• Dave Forgianni
• Steven Forth
• Guoqian Jiang
• Yaron Koren
• Harold Solbrig
• Joel Natividad
• Patrick Sbrzesny
• Clarence Dillon
• ericP, W3C

[edit] Schedule

This is the current planned schedule for Saturday:

• 10 - 10:30 AM - arrival, light breakfast
• 10:30 - 11 AM - introductions and welcome
• 11 - 11:30 AM - Global outreach
• 11:30 AM - 1 PM - Academic issues
• 1 - 2 PM - lunch
• 2 - 3 PM - Corporate usage
• 3 - 3:45 PM - Future developments
• 3:45 - 4 PM - snack break
• 4 - 5 PM - SMW best practices
• 5 - 6:30 PM - break into separate sections for further discussions on individual topics
• 6:30 - 7 PM - wrapup
• 7 PM+ - head out for dinner and drinks

[edit] Program

Here is the description of each planned discussion.

[edit] Global outreach

Led by: Yaron Koren, Steven Forth

Open discussion about making the SMW system easier to understand, both technically and conceptually, including for non-English speakers; and ways to popularize it.

[edit] Academic issues

Presenters: Jie Bao, Li Ding, Fabian Howahl, Guoqian Jiang

Developments of SMW in the academic community: research groups, current work being done, long-term projects. Specific topics could include:

• SMW for knowledge representation and meta-modeling
• SMW for concept modeling and light-weight semantic web applications
• SMW for data integration, e.g., RSS data flow
• SMW for distributed terminology development (LexWiki framework and use cases)

[edit] Corporate usage

Presenters: Steven Forth, Daniel Hansch

SMW in the business community: popular usages, marketing SMW, business models around SMW. Examples of current corporate usage (Volkswagen, UNESCO, PWC, Ontoprise, etc.)

[edit] Future developments

Presenters: Daniel Hansch, Yaron Koren

Discussion of planned, and desired, future changes and additions to the various Semantic MediaWiki-related extensions.

Explicit integration support

• Triple stores (Daniel: will present how to connect SMW to OntoBroker/Jena; how to use user-defined rules in SMW)
• Modelers
• Reasoners
• Search and semantic search
• Other platforms
  • Facebook
  • Google Apps
  • Salesforce & Force.com
• Standards
  • SIOC
  • Others?

[edit] SMW best practices

Led by: Yaron Koren, Steven Forth

Open discussion of what works and what doesn't in implementing SMW-based wikis, and how these "best practices" can be codified. Can include a discussion of current and past implementation problems people have had.

[edit] Topics of discussion

Please add below any topics/questions that you would like to see addressed at this meeting:

• How can workflow functionality be added to SMW? (Yaron)
• What are some ways to publicize and "evangelize" SMW, especially to corporations? (Yaron)
• Some brief demonstrations from groups regarding their implementation of SMW. (Marc)
• Discussion of best practices and methods in SMW ontology development, and perhaps some comparison between groups regarding methods. (Marc)
• Peer-to-peer consulting. Attendees can broadcast their needs and questions ahead of time, and other users can volunteer to couple up and share their expertise to help address those needs. (Marc)
• What implications, if any, does the current (and future) global economic slowdown have for the SMW project? (Yaron)
• Formal specification of the modeling language and query language to enable implementation on other types of databases (Jie)
• The need for privacy-preserving query (Jie)
• How rule will be supported in SMW (Jie)
  • See the Halo Simple Rules extension
• How to best "jump-start" a semantic wiki with corporate data/models?
• Next face-to-face meetings?
  • March 25? 2009 at Stanford, with the AAAI Symposium on Social Semantic Web: Where Web 2.0 Meets Web 3.0
  • Jun 14-18 2009 at San Jose, with SemTech 2009
    • Vulcan will sponsor a SMW get-together
  • 25-29 October 2009 at Dc, with ISWC 2009; apply for a Semantic Wiki workshop?

[edit] Space available/looking for space

If you need a place to stay in Boston for the meeting, or if you live in Boston and have extra room, please add your name and some contact information here:

[edit] Space available

Crash on the couch, one person, first come first served. Steven Forth. Contact me through this wiki only. Fourth floor walk up in the South End of Boston, no elevator. Easy subway access to meeting site.

Other hotel alternatives include possible short-term apartment rentals in Boston. Look for listings here: http://boston.craigslist.org/gbs/sub/ and here http://boston.craigslist.org/gbs/vac/. Suggest searching for terms including 'hotel' or 'hotel alternative'.

[edit] Looking for space