Social Networking and the Semantic Web

Twitter, twine. Delicious, digg. Facebook, flickr. Myspace, Meetup.

It seems like there are a million different social networks now. Web 2.0 has certainly received a lot of press lately - much of it well-deserved, but much of it over-hyped too. Movie stars "tweet". Rock bands have blogs and myspace pages. Even the White House is getting into the act, and everyone is talking about Gov 2.0.

What does all of this mean, and what does it have to do with the Semantic Web? Is Web 3.0 just over the horizon? This month, the Washington Semantic Web Meetup is teaming with the GMU Center for History and New Media in Fairfax. We will be taking over the Johnson Center Cinema for an exciting evening full of discussions on social networking semantics.

Our main speaker will be Mills Davis, of Project 10X. Mills is a well-known figure in the Semantic Web community, with many years of experience in the field. He will be discussing new developments in social networking and semantic technologies within government and private industry.

We will then have several presentations and demonstrations of new products and services related to the intersection of social networking and the Semantic Web. Our other speakers are:

Dan Cohen, Zotero (GMU CHNM)
Andy Roth, Glue (Adaptive Blue)
Mike Petit, OpenAmplify (Hapax)

After the presentations, the speakers will then form a panel, and answer questions from the audience. Brian Eubanks, the Meetup Organizer, will moderate the discussion.

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Speaker bios
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Mills Davis is the founder and managing director of Project10X, specializing in industry research and strategic programs. Mills consults with technology manufacturers, global 2000 corporations, and government agencies on next-wave semantic technologies and solutions. Mills serves as lead for the Federal CIO council’s Semantic Interoperability Community of Practice (SICoP) research into the business value of semantic technologies. Also, he is a founding member of the AIIM interoperable enterprise content management (iECM) working group, and a founding member of the National Center for Ontology Research (NCOR).

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Dan Cohen is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and
Art History at George Mason University and the Director of the Center
for History and New Media. His own research is in European and
American intellectual history, the history of science (particularly
mathematics), and the intersection of history and computing.

He is the co-author of Digital History: A Guide to Gathering,
Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web (University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2005), author of Equations from God: Pure
Mathematics and Victorian Faith (Johns Hopkins University Press,
2007), and has published articles and book chapters on the history of
mathematics and religion, the teaching of history, and the future of
history in a digital age in journals such as the Journal of American
History, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Rethinking History.
Dan is an inaugural recipient of the American Council of Learned
Societies' Digital Innovation Fellowship.

At the Center for History and New Media he has co-directed the
September 11 Digital Archive and the Echo project, and has developed
software tools for scholars, teachers, and students.

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Andy Roth is the Chief Quality Officer at AdaptiveBlue - a company that uses semantic analysis to see beyond the web of pages to recognize a web of everyday things like books, movies, and music. He has been a Software Quality Engineer for the past fifteen years for companies including Rational Software and IBM. He is currently busy helping improve and evolve AdaptiveBlue's flagship product: Glue, which is a browser add-on that allows you to find new things based on what your friends like, and find new friends based on what things you like. Andy is based in Frederick, MD and is an enthusiastic photographer and lapsed blogger. He can be found on Twitter @duckbrown.

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Mike Petit built his career around the integration of marketing and information technology, and has worked at such companies as Ogilvy & Mather Advertising and Scudder, Stevens & Clark. As a co-founder and the CIO of Hapax Ltd., he presides over a portfolio of multi-patented technology based upon computational linguistics, serving hundreds of corporate customers and thousands of end users from offices in Annapolis, London and Stockholm. In 2008, Hapax launched Amplify (www.openamplify.com), an open platform that mimics human understanding of content and offers a broad range of unique, and previously unavailable, data to SemWeb practitioners. He is passionate about the evolution of the Web into a more comprehensive, and comprehending, organism. Mike is a graduate of Vassar College, resides in Annapolis, and spends his free hours boating and performing jazz.