C-SHALS was well received!

I'm just recovering from a very intense, but really exciting C-SHALS conference we had last week. Over the last 2 months I had been pretty much pre-occupied with organizing it, and had my share of putting out fires. However, I couldn't have hoped for a better set of speakers and higher level of participation among the attendees.

Many different topics were covered, yet they never became too immersed in technical or philosophical disputes since someone would always bring them back to having to address a real world application. In one case, how to formally define ontologies was tempered with their need to have utility in immediate tasks, such as medical record encoding or tissue modeling.

Over the next couple of weeks, I'll be adding my thoughts and reflections of C-SHALS here.

-Eric

p.s. see Richard Dale's blog... 

Today's W3C Semantic Tutorial

I'm sitting in on the W3C Semantic Web tutorial, and pleased to see that it is quite interactive. Often people comment after having their questions answered "that is a real good selling point for SW, is W3C using that in their Semantic Web promotional material?". 

For example, in Eric P and Lee's presentation on SPARQL, they showed how easy it is to edit an existing SPARQL query by simple substitution, where attempting to do this as a SQL query would be much harder. This caused one participant to exclaim "this fact should be made more strongly to the public so that more folks can understand SPARQL's virtues".

We have just gone through a crash course on GRDDL, and will be touching on RDFa shortly....

Welcome!

Welcome to the C-SHALS Blog Site!

As part of this week's Conference on Semantics in Healthcare and Life Sciences (C-SHALS) kick-off meeting, we've decided to set up a blog for it.

We'll be capturing the different ongoing discussions through this site over the coming days, weeks, or whatever. We hope this becomes a useful resource for all attendees and virtual participants!

cheers,

Eric