SSSW Last Day

The Summer School on Ontological Engineering and the Semantic Web finished on Saturday, July 16th, and I can't remember having a more intense and packed week in years. I really enjoyed it - the tutorials, the invited talks, the workshops, the social events, the mini project - all of it was awesome. It's a pity that it's all over now.

Today, besides the farewells and thank yous and the party in Madrid with maybe half of the people, also saw the presentation of the mini projects. The mini projects where somewhat similar to the The Semantic Web In One Day we had last year - but without a real implementation. Groups of four or five people had to create a Semantic Web solution in only six hours (well, at least conceptually).

The results were interesting. All of them were well done and highlighted some promising use cases for the Semantic Web, where data integration will play an important role: going out in the evening, travelling, dating. I'd rather not consider too deeply if computer scientists are rather attacking an own itch here ;) I really enjoyed the Peer2Peer theater, where messages wandered through the whole class room in order to visualize the system. This was fun.

Our own mini project modelled the Summer School and the projects itself, capturing knowledge about the buildup of the groups and classifying them. We had to use not only quite complex OWL constructs, but also SWRL-rules - and we still had problems expressing a quite simple set of rules. Right now we are trying to write these experiences down in a paper, I will inform you here as soon as it is ready. Our legendary eternal struggle at the boundaries of sanity and Semantic Web technologies seemed to be impressive enough to have earned us a cool price. A clock.

Thanks to all organizers, tutors and invited speakers of the Summer School, thanks to all the students as well, for making it such a great week. Loved it, really. I hope to stay in touch with all of you and see you at some conference pretty soon!