beTech :: Evolve Already

MEETING DETAILS

When: Wednesday, July 30th: 1:00pm – 2:30pm

Where: Newcomb Hall, Room 168

Meeting Title & More Below:

Title: RDF, and OWL, the Semantic Web, and Linked Data

Description: While some may roll their eyes when they hear about the
Semantic Web, usually because of unfair associations with the
pie-in-the-sky failed promises of Artificial Intelligence, many
developers are already building some very cool applications. In this
presentation, we’ll look at technologies that build on the simplicity of
the RDF data model to enable these applications. We’ll also see how
RDF/OWL enables the coding of useful semantics, and how the Linked Data
movement is building on many Semantic Web principles to make increasing
amounts of valuable data available to your applications.

Bio: Bob DuCharme (www.snee.com/bobdc.blog) is a Solutions Architect at
Innodata Isogen. In a recent XML.com newsletter, editor Kendall Clark
wrote “Does anyone write tech prose as clear as Bob?” Bob is the author
of Manning Publications’ “XSLT Quickly,” Prentice Hall’s “XML: The
Annotated Specification” and “SGML CD,” and McGraw Hill’s “Operating
Systems Handbook.” He’s written over seventy pieces for XML.com and has
contributed to Dr. Dobb’s Journal, IBM developerWorks, perl.com, XML
Magazine, XML Journal, XML Developer, O’Reilly Books’ “XML Hacks,” and
Prentice Hall’s “XML Handbook.” Bob received his BA in Religion from
Columbia University and his Masters in Computer Science from New York
University. He lives in Ivy.

Mark your calendars for beCamp! beCamp May 2nd-3rd 2008 @ Charlottesville Business Innovation Council (CBIC), 501 E. Main Street, Charlottesville, VA (on Downtown Mall)

We have 68 registered attendees so far. If you’re planning to come but haven’t yet registered, do it soon so you can get a t-shirt! You can register at http://barcamp.org/beCamp2008.

Last year this event was a huge success, with a huge range of topics from ruby, smalltalk, and solr (which you might expect) to 3D modeling, robotics, and reputation management (which you might not expect, which makes them even cooler). beCamp is whatever YOU want it to be, so bring your ideas for a session.

Event Details

When

• Friday, May 2nd, 5:00PM-9:00PM
• Saturday, May 3rd, 9:00AM-5:00PM

Where

• Charlottesville Business Innovation Council
• 501 East Main Street, Charlottesville, Virginia 22902

Bring

• Brain
• Laptop
• Reference books
• Games—cards, board games, Legos, video (bring a monitor as well)
• Snacks, beverages
• Camera (Flickr tags: beCamp, beCamp2008, BarCamp)
• Business cards

Meeting: BeTech Presentation: VMware and You
Where: Newcomb Hall (Room 389)
When: Thursday, April 24th : 2:30 pm 3:30 pm (presentation) 3:30 pm - 4:00 (open discussion)

Join us this Thursday, April 24th, at 2:30pm for a presentation by Ian Brill from ITC Microsystems on the subject of VMware. Ian will discuss and demonstrate how departments can obtain and manage virtual servers using the VMware system here at UVa.

If you missed this jam packed VMware session at the LSP conference or would like follow up with a more interactive discussion about how you can take advantage of this rapidly growing resource at UVa, join us this Thursday.

On Wednesday, March 26, Madelyn Wessel and Bethany Nowviskie will present their experience in making the Library’s Blacklight project (http://blacklight.rubyforge.org/) open source.

When/Where:
* Wednesday, March 26
* 3:00 p.m.-4:30 p.m.
* Byrd Seminar Room in the Harrison/Small Library
(http://www.lib.virginia.edu/harrison/facilities.html#byrd)
(http://www.virginia.edu/webmap/ACentralGrounds.html)

Blacklight is an OPAC (online public access catalog) developed at the University of Virginia Library; it has been made public under an Apache 2.0 license. Blacklight was the first project made possible by beTech Labs and is the first project to come out of beTech Labs as open source.

Madelyn Wessel is Special Advisor to the University Librarian and Liaison to the General Counsel, focusing on a broad range of library system legal issues including intellectual property, copyright, licensing, and special issues arising in the area of digital scholarship.

Bethany Nowviskie is the Director of Digital Research & Scholarship at U.Va. Library. She is active in digital humanities and is an advocate for academic open source.

Below is a quick synopsis of the meeting today. The room was packed. The meeting and info shared was great. Thank you Eric Pugh.

Eric Pugh started off the meeting with the following hilarious youtube.com video “Code Monkey”:
  http://youtube.com/watch?v=v4Wy7gRGgeA

Eric explained the wide adoption of OpenID by many of the internet powerhouses like Yahoo, Google, and others. Interesting resource links include:

• http://openid.net (for more explanation about the standard)
• http://openiddirectory.com (to discover who is participating)
• http://spreadopenid.org
• http://www.37signals.com/openid/ (37 signals is using open ID for their systems)
• http://myopenid.net (popular openID provider)
• https://pip.verisignlabs.com/seatbelt.do (verisign offers a firefox plugin and openID service too)
• http://www.opensourceconnections.com (Eric will offer more information about his presentation on his company web site soon)

Eric also show a demo of his “Fish4Brains” application using OpenID put together at the 48hour long Rails Rumble this year. We also discussed the upcoming BeCamp event. Last year this event was tremendous, get involved this year and make it even better. Visit http://barcamp.org/beCamp2008/ for more information and keep up on the developments.

Great information, thank you Eric!

The beTech blog has been migrated to a new server, one of the beTech Labs virtual servers. Hooray! Watch this space for more changes.

Join beTech next Wednesday, December 19, at 3:00PM to map out the future of beTech. This last beTech session of 2007 also marks the end of my run at the helm of this fine organization. In January my family and I will be moving West.

Three years ago Anna Tubbs and I assembled an open group of enthusiastic Web designers and developers and coined the name beTech—Bleeding Edge TECHnology. The name was a little poke at, among other things, many of the University’s inaccessible table-based layouts and dry, brochure-ware sites in an age of CSS, Ajax, and social software. Our goal, then and now, was to subtly coax the UVa Web experience into the 21st Century—to evolve already. We engaged designers, developers, administrators, and anyone that saw the Web as a fascinating realm of possibilities with powers to change the social fabric of this institution and the World. We merely asked that everyone share whatever knowledge, skills, and inspiration they had and to start building the Web they wanted to work in. We’ve come a long way since then.

Today beTech is a strong and vibrant community with almost 200 members on the mailing list and a blog that is followed on every continent that Google tracks. Our inaugural beCamp brought in over 75 campers from across Grounds, across the region, and across the country. The spinoff WeeCamp series is also proving to be quite popular (a WordPress WeeCamp is in the planning stages). beTech Labs, our virtual Web development environment, is really starting to pick up steam with 8 Labs rolling as we speak. It’s truly been an amazing ride and one that I hope will continue to provide opportunities to others for a long, long time. Thank you all!

So let’s get together next Wednesday, dream up the next chapters of the beTech story, and then figure out how to divvy up the organizational duties. Unfortunately, in leaving I won’t have any ceremonial tarball of Mosaic or disc of FrontPage to lay at the base of the beTech Tim Berners-Lee alter but I will pass along any insider knowledge and username/passwords that I can conjure up. I hope to see you all next Wednesday.