Paul Miller speaking at UCC

I should have blogged this earlier but was too wrapped up in my talk for yesterday. Still if anyone in the Cambridge area is reading this, Paul Miller of Talis is visiting us today and giving a talk in the afternoon (1415, 2007-10-09, Unilever Centre, Chemistry).
I can’t remember when I ‘met’ Paul, but he invited me to a session on Open Data that he ran at WWW2007 and I was extremely impressed with the activities that he and his extended collaborators are working in. I also heard elsewhere that he had given a very good talk on the future of data on the web so I suggested he should be one of our speakers.
Bio:

Paul Miller

Senior Manager, Technology Evangelist

blog: Thinking about the Future

Paul joined Talis in September 2005 from the Common Information Environment (CIE), where as Director he was instrumental in scoping policy and attracting new members such as the BBC, National Library of Scotland and English Heritage to this group of UK public sector organisations. Previously, Paul was at UKOLN where he was active in a range of cross-domain standardisation and advocacy activities, and before that he was Collections Manager at the Archaeology Data Service. At Talis, Paul is exploring new models of collaboration and identifying further areas in which our technology or knowledge would be of value. Paul has a Doctorate in Archaeology from the University of York.

PMR: Note that you don’t have to have a degree in Computer Science to be a world expert on the semantic web. The future requires people with a vast range of experience and skills
Abstract:

Moving from a web of documents to the web of data
Dr. Paul Miller, Senior Manager & Technology Evangelist Talis (http://www.talis.com/)
The open web has been transformed by a tide of newly interactive applications, many of which approach the utility of software previously installed locally on your own computer. Flexible and interactive, they also leverage the power of the network to compare your behaviour with that of your peers (Amazon’s famous recommendation services are a prime example), and aggregate individually irrelevant actions together to deliver network-scale benefits.
Into this visibly evolving world of richly ‘Web 2.0’ web sites comes the long-held promise of Tim Berners-Lee’s ‘Semantic Web’. Escaping from the laboratory, previously esoteric technologies such as ‘RDF’, ‘OWL’ and ‘GRDDL’ are being put to work in building the next generation of the rich applications that have so transformed our use of the Web.
This presentation will illustrate and comment upon these trends, as well as introducing ways in which they might impinge upon all of you… and not just when you order a new book from Amazon in your lunch break.

PMR: Among many other talents Paul is able to blog talks as they are given. I can’t type fast enough to do this for Paul, but I’ll try to summarise my impressions.
And anyway, everything that Paul and Talis do is Open. They are leading the way in developing Open licences. I am sure it will be a good business investment.