First of all: I enjoyed this year´s Triple-I very much. I met a lot of friends and colleagues in Graz, had plenty of interesting discussions, I gave a talk about “Enterprise n+1” (together with Franz Novak and Henry Story) and a semantic wiki tutorial (with Denny Vrandecic and Sebastian Schaffert), I have seen interesting keynotes and other talks and we all enjoyed very good food and excellent wine.
To get an impression of the great atmosphere of the congress go to Leo Sauermann´s photoset about the triple-i on flickr.
The congress showed that the interest for semantic technologies from industrial perspective has exceeded a level where it´s not necessary anymore to be a missionar, but rather to offer concrete products. Together with the huge changes in people´s minds which came in with Web 2.0 the Semantic Web will also offer some answers to the privacy discussion.
Marc Smith´s (Microsoft Research) keynote was an excellent example how fascination about what can be done with technology sometimes covers possible dangers too much. Marc was fascinating the audience a lot. He showed nice applications in the mobile social web. And at the end he warned: “Hey guys, do you really want to be observed by some companies?”.
Same thing with Peter Reiser´s (Sun Microsystem) keynote: He said, that Web 2.0 principles can be applied for internal knowledge management, but it will only be accepted if the privacy issue will be discussed beforehand.
So my question: Do you really know what Amazon, Google & Co. know about YOU – the person of the year 2006? And isn´t that another important issues also for the Open Data philosophy?
