2 papers worth reviewing from ISWC2006
by Bijan Parsia
There were a fair number of interesting papers at ISWC, but I direct your attention to two:
Read the first to remind yourself that just because something is respected, respectible, and even cool doesn’t mean it’s useful (for your task). Read the second to remind yourself that formal semantics are good (or can be; done right!).
The first is a polemic, and a quite useful one. The second is a nice piece of theoretical computer science. I’d have to rate this ISWC as a good one since you can get at least one decent instance of each (i.e., a polemic and a bit of compsci theory), and these are better than merely decent.
The SPARQL paper won best paper (deservedly) and is serving as the basis of the new specification of the SPARQL language. Let me just say: Yay!
