blogBarCamp Boston
28 May 2008Â 
Photo: Google App Engine discussion - ShimonRura, Brian Olson, James Hall, et al
Note: The following account of BarCamp Boston benefits from the additional time for reflection and inevitable blurring of facts afforded by the week’s vacation that immediately followed it.
BarCamp Boston is an annual gathering of Boston-area technology people, part of the BarCamp series. This year’s meeting occurred over the weekend of May 17-18th in Cambridge, MA. It turned out to be an excellent venue for developing entrepreneurial ideas related to web technology, social networking, mobile applications, software development, etc:
Sessions self-organize on the fly, allowing attendees to promote topics, receive feedback, and schedule talks in real time. The result is that you have good options at any time to find an interesting topic or create one and lead a discussion around it. This format also seems to have encouraged some experimental, and especially cross-subject discussions (e.g. At the Intersection of Everything, and the data-visualization discussion held by Matt McKeon of IBM’s Many Eyes). A discussion I proposed on Natural Language Processing & Semantic Web API’s, covering Calais, Textwise Semantic Hacker (& the $1M Challenge), Y!Q, etc. produced some insight on what to expect (an not expect) from semantic technologies, and on suggestions from web developers on what will be required for more widespread adoption of RDF and other technologies for putting content into more machine-processable context. One major theme: Better top-down tools are needed to make the process of adding context more automatic. This ReadWriteWeb article contains a good overview of semantic technologies covered in the discussion.
Warm thanks to Shimon and Mike Walsh for making it happen.
Mark Soper
