It turns out that people don’t adjust to daylight savings very well at all. Our circadian rythems are, apparently, very grumpy and delicate dears which are inclined to through up to 10 week long hissy fits.
Of course, I have this problem licked—I just never sleep.
Yay! To any who care, it went rather well. Found a few flow bugs in the slides, but that’s ok. The reception was good. I think it was pitched a little high for a chunk of the audience, but the intro slides seemed accessible enough. The funny part were all the query language guys (from deductive database/logic programming background) who were rather appalled by the many difficult issues RDF puts upon us (future post: Why BNodes Suck).
The students are nice and fun to talk to. Lisbon is hot and sunny (I miss my lovely cool rainy Manchester!), but the ocean is lovely. I saw my first sun set over an ocean (and it setting over the Atlantic is very weird for ye olde eastern seaboard/Jersey Shore lad me). It was amazing. Worth the work, I would say. Worth it, indeed.
The second paper/tutorial was a survey of RDF Query languages (an update of a course from last year’s summer school). Their slides use W3Slidy, which I shall definitely check out to augment the S5 stuff I’ve been using. The Table of Contents feature is very slick. I like the freedom of no footer, but it also means that you aren’t forced to be disciplined about the amount of slide content.
One thing good and bad about their presentation was the focus on actual query langauges (it is a survey after all). One problem with that is that it’s hard to really grasp the features involved (e.g., path expressions). It would be nice to have a uniform language (and semantic framework) that one could use to explicate the various features and their interactions. I.e., so you could study the features without getting hung up on all the different languages.
Hmm. Probably isn’t too hard (he says, blithely). A lot of the features are sort of unimportant, in some sense. Well, if someone wanted to write up such a thing, I’d happily give some advice!
DL 2006 was a rousing success with about 80 people attending, not far from half students. The talks overall went very well, with plenty of good feedback and loads of interest. And I’m no longer organizing it :) Of course, there’s still some (grumble) followup, but all in all I’m relieved that it’s over and a success.
I highly recommend you (whomever you are) come next year!
(And the Lake District really is beautiful as all get out.)
On to OWLED 2006.
Sorry for the light, well, non-existence blogging. I have a place now in the UK. I’ve given 5 presentations since I’ve come here and attended three events. Nothing like hitting the ground running!
Haditha makes me weep. Can we stop this now? Please? Is there any question that we’ve gone completely nuts?
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