I'm back from New York, where I was given the great opportunity to talk about two of my favorite topics: Semantic Web Development with PHP, and (not necessarily semantic) Software Development using RDF Technology. I was especially looking forward to the second one, as that perspective is not only easier to understand for people from a software engineering context, but also because it is still a much neglected marketing "back-door": If RDF simplifies working with data in general (and it does), then we should not limit its use to semantic web apps. Broader data distribution and integration may naturally follow in a second or third step once people use the technology (so much for my contribution to Michael Hausenblas' list of RDF MalBest Practices ;)

The talk on Thursday at the NY Semantic Web Meetup was great fun. But the most impressive part of the event were the people there. A lot to learn from on this side of the pond. Not only very practical and professional, but also extremely positive and open. Almost felt like being invited to a family party.

The positive attitude was even true for the workshop, which I clearly could have made more effective. I didn't expect (but should have) that many people would come w/o a LAMP stack on their laptops, so we lost a lot of time setting up MAMP/LAMP/WAMP before we started hacking ARC, Trice, and SPARQL.

Marco brought up a number of illustrating use cases. He maintains an (inofficial, sorry, can't provide a pointer) RDF wrapper for any group on meetup.com, so the workshop participants could directly work with real data. We explored overlaps between different Meetup groups, the order in which people joined selected groups, inferred new triples from combined datasets via CONSTRUCT, and played with not-yet-standard SPARQL features like COUNT and LOAD.

And having done the workshop should finally give me the last kick to launch the Trice site now. The code is out, and it's apparently not too tricky to get started even when the documentation is still incomplete. Unfortunately, I have a strict "no more non-profits" directive, but I think Trice, despite being FOSS, will help me get some paid projects, so I'll squeeze an official launch in sometime soon-ish.

Below are the slides from the meetup. I added some screenshots, but they are probably still a bit boring without the actual demos (I think a video will be put up in a couple of days, though).