[VoCamp Discuss] Welcome, and Introductions

[Ian Davis]

Hi all,

Firstly, thanks to Tom for kicking all this off and to David and Jun for
helping with the organisation. It's certainly something that is much needed
and should be a fun venue to get some cool collaborations started.

So, my introduction...

I'm Ian and I'm CTO at Talis, based right in the centre of the UK. I've been
involved in semweb research, development and deployment for most of this
decade. I have a strong personal interest in seeing the Semantic Web succeed
but this is also core to Talis, so I have dual motives for working on the
Semantic Web :)

My interest in vocamp falls into a couple of areas.

I'd like to discuss vocabulary persistence and management, especially for
the very long term (50+ years). I have operated http://vocab.org/ as free
schema/vocabulary hosting for about 4 years and I'd like to see other
similar sites become available. I'm also interested in strategies for
keeping vocabulary terms available after the original creator has lost
interest / gone AWOL / lost control of domain etc. At Talis we have an
experimental service called SchemaCache which might suggest a way in which
dead vocabularies can still be accessed - however it means applications have
to know that there are mirrors of vocabularies available and where they are.


I have also been working on a way for a vocabulary to be created in a
communal / wiki fashion. An alpha version of this is available at
http://open.vocab.org/ - it allows anyone to create and edit terms within a
shared namespace. Every change is logged like a wiki. Please go ahead and
try this application out - the data is dummy for now and there are lots of
bugs I'm sure. The code is available at
http://code.google.com/p/openvocab/as is the issue tracker to report
those bugs!

Finally, I have a long standing interest in genealogy and am looking for
collaborators for an evidence-based model of genealogical research (or
general historical research).

Look forward to seeing you all in Oxford!

Ian
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