Henry Story, one of my favorite semantic Web bloggers and a Sun development guru, has produced a very useful video and PDF series on the semantic Web. Here is the excerpt from his site with details about where to get the 30 min presentation (62 MB for the QuickTime version, see below), highly useful to existing development staff:
. . . how could the SemWeb affect software development in an Open Source world, where there are not only many more developers, but also these are distributed around the world with no central coordinating organisation? Having presented the problem, I then introduce RDF and Ontologies, how this meshes with the Sparql query language, and then show how one could use these technologies to make distributed software development a lot more efficient.
Having given the presentation in November last year, I spent some time over Xmas putting together a video of it (in h.264 format). . . . Then last week I thought it would be fun to put it online, and so I placed it on Google video, where you can still find it. But you will notice that Google video reduces the quality quite dramatically, so that you will really need to have the pdf side by side, if you wish to follow.
Your time spent with this presentation will be time well spent. I’d certainly like to hear more about OWL, or representing and resolving semantic heterogeneities, or efficient RDF storage databases at scale, or a host of other issues of personal interest. But, hey, perhaps there are more presentations to come!
scalable databases
resolving semantic heterogneities
more about OWL and how it relates to OO programming
[...] [The original Learning Pyramid analysis traces back to the 1960s and is now attributed to the NTL Institute; the actual picture is from Dr. Tom Bayston at the University of Central Florida. It would be interesting to know whether repeated viewings of online videos, or simultaneous video + Powerpoints act to increase retention. (Actually, blogging about something may be at the higher end of retention within the Learning Pyramid.) I’m also finding that the combination of video/slides with the audio explanations to be immensely helpful.] Nonetheless, I have previously reported on some great online Semantic Web videos, for example, one by Henry Story and another by Tim Berners-Lee, and faced with a rainy day I tried to be more comprehensive in my discovery. [...]