My day at RPI
I went on a trip two days ago to meet the “Tetherless World Constellation”, a research group at Rensellaer Polytechnic Institute, a university in Troy, New York. The group is headed by James Hendler, who is a fixture in the semantic-web world, possibly best known as one of the co-authors, with Tim Berners-Lee, of “The Semantic Web”, the 2001 article that introduced the idea of a semantic web to many people (as could be expected, he’s done many other things). To my surprise, the group has embraced Semantic MediaWiki, Semantic Forms and some of the other extensions in a big way in the last five months or so - they even run their own pretty extensive semantic wiki. It certainly felt a little surreal, meeting various people who work with my code and use it for their research. They’ve already created some very interesting extensions of their own, as well as useful additions to my own extensions that I hope to be able to incorporate into the code soon. Prof. Hendler has interests that extend in many directions, and he knows a lot of people, so it was interesting, in my talk with him, to hear his conceptions of how my projects fit into the overall semantic world. He also told me about some research collaborations they’re doing with outside groups, that were nice to hear about.