WWW2006 - Experiences and Episodes: Day 4(Through Taowei’s Looking Glass)
by Taowei Wang
After last night’s “buffet” (which really means light snacking) at the Edinburgh Castle and a night of scripting, Chris and I are presenting “Tools for the Semantic Web” — Swoop (debugging/visualization) and PhotoStuff. Chris had been taking pictures around the conference for annotation. The conference’s wireless is… terrible (11b, and obviously the relay points are not well-placed), so we could not count on a demo with smooth connections. Chris had several scenarios scripted just in case the wireless fails, including a temporary takeover of the ESWC photo site. I, on the other hand, saved demo ontologies locally. Having around 5-6 minutes to demo each tool was certainly a challenge. I am happy to report that the crowd was interested and visibly impressed. Had a few people coming over to us after the session.
Among the other tools worth noting presented in dev day were Tim’s “Tabulator” view of RDF data. In the spirit of “Web 2.0″, it relies on Ajax interaction. One other tool that was interesting was from http://www.dbin.org/ . The presenter presented a framework of semantic web browsing experience, analogous to the today’s web experience. Instead of HTML pages, they have “Brainlets” that allows for a rich exploration-based RDF-storing unit for browsing. The entire “rich semantic web client” grabs RDF data from an annotation from existing known annotation repositories where a community of users collaborately annotate them. Interesting. Not too hot about the interface, but the idea is pretty cool.
In the morning, a representative of the Oracle security team was complaining that security is such an ‘after thought’ in programmer’s minds. Among other things, they have training, checklists, and embarrassing code-critique and live-ack sessions to bring attention to their programmers — not to mention over 200,000 automatic test suites for security checking on their 30 million lines of code. To the industry, each security hole may cost millions of dollars for their clients, and may additinally cost millions to review, re-engineer, re-evaluate any fixes, patches, upgrades. No wonder she was upset about how programmers are not taught to check for ‘evil’ (not just bad) inputs.
Speaking of security issues, an interesting vulnerability scanner http://www.secubat.org/ was shown. Though the site was in German, their paper (under Dokumentation) is ‘English-enabled’.
There was a Scotch Whisky tasting at the end of the day… it was all kinda blurry and hazy.
