A year ago this morning, I watched my first Florida sunrise as I left behind Florida and (and ISWC) to start a new chapter in my life: This morning, this sunrise, was a beginning not an ending. From here forward, I realize the dream. On the plane home, I worked out the details of my decision. Immuexa, our six year old software & website service business would need to close to new clients to focus on internal product development (which we did). I'd have to learn more about the semantic web, writing down what I found in a blog (which...

Riding now on the train to Dublin, watching the Irish countryside with its very green fields and patchwork stone walls, I’m finally rested enough to properly reflect on my week in Ireland and the crazy month before. For a small Pennsylvania company to fly to Ireland, there best be a good reason for it. Our primary goal was to create PhotoBingo, then play a game at FOAF Galway, giving nifty shirts to all involved. Beyond this, our goal was useful conversation: Q&A on other efforts, breakout session brainstorming, table chat on shared topics, and feedback on our own products. Though...

We've been extra busy here at Immuexa, trying to get PhotoBingo up and running in time for FOAF Galway. I've been neglecting my blog, which is a sure sign that I'm getting real work done :) Last night I finished the jersey we'll be giving away to people who play the first game, which will be named "1st FOAF Bingo". We'll start it before the workshop and let it run a while after that, so people have time to waste time when they get back home. Here's the bingo jersey, front and back:     The illustrations were done just for...

Today Immuexa agreed to sponsor the First Workshop on FOAF, Social Networking, and the Semantic Web, being held in Galway, Ireland, in early September. We're making "FOAF Bingo", a website game that hopefully will get people uploading photos and annotating using FOAF, much in the same spirit as w3photo.org, only in a somewhat more arbitrary and ridiculous way. I'll write more about it in the next post. Tonight, my mind's on Ireland, having never been there myself. I'm roughly half-Irish, given that my father's mother (King) and my mother's father (Brady) were Irish. My grandma was born and raised there,...

Last night I ate dinner at the Carnegie Deli with Nick Gibbins, Stephen Harris, Dave Becket, Libby Miller, Jim Hendler, and several others I know only by IRC nickname. We then chatted till 11pm in the hotel bar about a great many semweb things. I'm exhausted! This morning I packed up and checked out with plenty of time to make my bus, then talked for an hour in the lobby with Mor Naaman from Stanford, causing me to miss my bus by 8 minutes. My penance was sitting two hours on the floor in Port Authority, which is its own...

Waking after what seemed like mere minutes of sleep, I dressed in a daze and wandered down to the photo annotation session of Developer's Day. Greg Elin, Libby Miller, and Mor Naaman gave talks while I played a bit with Tidepool, trying to get it behave. After I made a point regarding privacy at the show, mentioning that we were working on a photo annotation program, Greg asked if I'd like to show it. "Sure", I said without much thought as I wandered up to plug in my Powerbook into the overhead projector. I said a few things about it,...

A line that stood out for me at yesterday's Tim Berners-Lee talk was "Start off with islands and stitch them together." He said this in answer to a question regarding ontology standardization. Later as I talked to people about it, I was surprised at how controversial an opinion it was. Many thought (or knew people who thought) that modeling efforts should be less haphazard, that we should we aim at a kind of "imperial ontology" and instill a sense of responsible conformity in those around us. One guy even said, when confronted with some "fringe attributes" that people may consider,...

Just got back from two meals at the Zen Palace, first with semweb photo folks such as Jennifer Golbeck, Ben Shneiderman, Nick Gibbins, and Stephen Harris, then as we were leaving, I ran into Libby Miller, Dave Beckett, Dave Reynolds, etc, so stayed for their meal. Five hours of dinner talk. Storymill.net will have to wait. :)...

An hour away from the start of www2004, I'm in my hotel room at the Sheraton, listening to the coffee brew and my wife Paula prepare for her bus trip back to Pennsylvania. We've been here three days, starting with an Ani Difranco concert in Carnegie Hall on Saturday, then roaming round Greenwich Village, South Street Seaport, and lower Manhattan on Sunday, then sleep and work on Monday, topped off with Times Square and Super Size Me, a film that cured me of fast food forever. Now Paula's leaving, which is making me sad. I wish she were staying the...

I lived in Florida for a few years in my mid-twenties in a town called Bonita Springs, between Naples and Fort Myers, just south of Sanibel. It's where I started my first business in 1989, hoping to create something like the web. It's where I first faced the business world as an adult, where I took my first "slings and arrows", where I did a lot of growing up. After I left Florida for Pennsylvania, my parents moved to Bonita permanently. I went back to visit at least once a year for the next eleven years. A lot of life...

Given my entrepreneurial background, I was shocked at the open exchange of ideas in Sanibel. Most projects I've worked on have had non-disclosures. Most of my colleagues hold their cards close to the chest. My amazement reached its peak on the demos & posters night as I walked from station to station, hearing one breakthrough after the next. "This is way too easy," I thought. Given adequate funding, I could probably turn at least six of those projects into lucrative ventures. If you're doubtful, call me up. I'll rattle off the how and who, brainstorming market, branding, and sales potential....

Many of the talks I had in Sanibel were about our current social problems: what they are, why they persist, what can be done. I loved having so many Europeans to talk with, since I find them to be more open, more personal, more informed about world events than many Americans, particularly in professional settings. It might seem odd to have a whole lotta philosophizing going on at a technical conference, but I was thrilled by it. As technologists, we have more power to change things than often we realize. With something as pervasive and as influential as the Semantic...

A day before the conference started, I was sitting in the whirlpool at the Sundial reading Practical RDF by Shelley Powers with a highlighter. I was pretty focused on the book, so I didn't notice the four people that joined me in the whirlpool while I read. I looked up after a while and began being more friendly ... they were all Americans, and all on vacation. After we talked for a while, the man across from me asked, "What's the twenty second rundown on RDF." Apparently he had worked in IT before he retired, and geniunely wanted to know....

I decided to do this a month ago tonight. I was getting a reckless drive home along Sanibel streets to the Sundial, just coming from a talk-filled dinner with a dozen or so DERI folk, worried I wouldn't have enough time to sleep and pack before returning to Pennsylvania the next morning, when I thought of it: Big Fractal Tangle would be the name of a blog. Earlier that day, we'd all seen the Tim Berners-Lee keynote speech at the end of the five-day ISWC 2003, during which he said the phrase as an aside while describing the Semantic Web....