Thinking Clearly .

Mike Smith and I ran up to NYC yesterday to give a talk about Pellet and OWL at the New York Semantic Web Meetup. The talk went pretty well, though we still have a lot to learn about how to sell Pellet and OWL to people who don’t already get KR, logic programming, etc. Typically when we give a technical intro to Pellet, there are mostly blank stares. Then when we get to the section of slides about how people are using Pellet, the mood in the room changes. People get that stuff a lot more easily, since they have the same or similar problems.

So, natural born geniuses that we all are, from now on we’ll start leading with the ways Pellet is being used successfully, and only follow-up with tech details when people ask. Doh… :>

That said, there were plenty of very techie people in the room and some of them had very good questions in the Q&A about Pellet performance, our use of it to manage XACML policies, and probabilistic reasoning with Pronto.

Mike did a great job compressing a 60 minute talk into—whoops—20 minutes, which was just as well since we had to catch Amtrak back to DC and barely made it on time. As a SemWeb hub, NYC is starting to pick up steam. Lots of interesting people doing interesting things at the meetup last night, so that’s a great sign. Even in a crap economy, NYC is still a good place to do biz. As a place to be, NYC always kicks my ass for the first 2 hours, then I start asking myself: why don’t I live here? Goddam, I love that city.

Mad props to Marco Neumann who’s doing a good job organizing the meetup. Way back in the day I founded and ran a Linux Users Group in Dallas, which at its peak had 300+ at monthly meetings, so I know how much hard work it is.

Madder props to my old friend Paul Ford for coming out to listen to the talks and say hello. Paul, who lives (famously) in Brooklyn (ftrain!), is the genius behind Harpers.org—which happens to be a SemWeb-powered site, using RDF. This hasn’t gotten nearly enough play in SemWeb circles in my opinion. Harpers is certainly the best American magazine ever and it’s very cool web presence is all RDF-powered. How great is that.

Maddest props to Mike Smith for putting up with the mad dash up to NYC and for the great talk he gave.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 27th, 2008 at 10:29 am and is filed under Pellet, Talks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.