Jim Pick

2009 is the year the Semantic Web takes off in Vancouver

April 18th, 2009

I was interviewed for the Georgia Straight’s “The Web’s future is a matter of semantics” article.

A few weeks ago, the interview I did with Stephen Hui was published in the Georgia Straight — Vancouver’s main entertainment weekly newspaper. It was the geekiest article I think you will ever see in the mainstream press ever. Great stuff.

The next week, I was invited by Mack Flavelle to give a talk on the Vancouver Base at Why in the Web at BCIT. The slides I used are roughly the same as my previous talk at VanDev, but I spent more time this time surfing through some live examples. I think that worked a bit better. There was a awful lot of information for anybody to absorb — I hope the students found something there to inspire them to learn more about the semantic web.

Keeping things rolling, I approached Boris Mann with the idea of doing a mashup using Drupal’s cool new semweb features with the data from the Vancouver Base. We had a kickoff breakfast meeting on Thursday, and OpenRestaurants.org was born! It’s all about bacon, patios and beer. Should be fun.

Finally, Melanie Courtot has started up a new Vancouver Semantic Web Meetup Group. The first meeting is this coming Thursday at Waves on Broadway at 6pm. I’ll be there. Unfortunately, I had to back out of talking about #vanbase at the local Drupal meetup, which is at the same time.

I updated the RDF Vancouver pages to point people to the new meetup. I wasn’t quite ready to organize another RDF Vancouver meetup yet, and now I don’t have to. :-)

Please, please, please come to the meetup if you are interested in doing any semantic web stuff in Vancouver. I know firsthand how difficult it is to organize a new semweb event — we need people to show up in order to build a community.

With all this happening in the past few weeks, we have a good foothold and some momentum building. Vancouver is going to be the template that the rest of the world can follow for putting a city on the semantic web.

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