Portland Java User Group: An Argument for Semantics - Why Developers Should Give a Hoot about OWL February 16, 2010

This month's topic: An Argument for Semantics - Why Developers Should Give a Hoot about OWL

In the push to make use of tagging and other forms user-driven information architectures, developers have overlooked the value of adding semantics, or contextual meaning, directly to the data that powers web sites and applications. The addition of Microformats to a Web site's markup can further the exchange of semantic information such as contact information for people and events. For the most part, however, web sites and applications are still populated by largely non-semantic prose organized in large blocks of HTML or generated from the walled gardens of relational databases and data warehouses.

While everyone agrees that HTML isn't going away anytime soon, several Web Standards have arisen over the last few years to help application developers store, serve, and distribute information with ever-increasing levels of semantics and meaning. The current pinnacle of the Semantic Web Standards pyramid is OWL - the W3C's Web Ontology Language. In this talk I will describe the roots and basics of OWL and how it can be used to power the next generation of smart, data-enabled Web applications.

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Speaker: Brian Panulla

Brian is a technology consultant and developer for Dealerpeak - the Portland-based Web-enabled CRM for automotive dealers. A recent transplant to Portland, Brian formerly led grant-funded R&D projects in the information sciences at Penn State University. He moved here primarily for the high quality and variety of beer.

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