Gearing up for Oxford

This year the XML Sum­mer School in Oxford is at the end of Septem­ber, rather a change from pre­vi­ous years, when it was in July. This morn­ing on the organ­ising call we decided that we need to go punt­ing on the Monday before din­ner rather than after din­ner, since the even­ings will be dark soon­er, but that’s about the only draw­back to the late-sum­mer timing. 

Apart from being heav­ily involved in organ­ising the event, I’m chair­ing two courses this year. There’s Trends and Tran­si­ents, a fun day with lots of dis­cus­sion and debate about hyped, over-hyped, and cur­rent tech­no­logy issues. This year we have Tony Coates talk­ing about how XML could have saved us from the cur­rent fin­an­cial crisis (some­what tongue-in-cheek), Paul Downey rant­ing on what’s wrong with Rich Inter­net Applic­a­tions, and Rich Salz telling you what to look for and avoid in cloud com­put­ing. The day is capped off by uncon­fer­ence ses­sions in the even­ing where every­one gets to have their say in as much length as people will listen to them. 

New this year is the oth­er course I’m chair­ing, the Semant­ic Tech­no­lo­gies course, where Bob DuCh­arme, Leigh Dodds, Andy Seaborne, and Duncan Hull are join­ing forces to teach classes in Linked Data, OWL, RDF, SPARQL, and all those oth­er acronyms that are form­ing the basis of what some people are call­ing Web 3.0. I’m look­ing for­ward to catch­ing up on what’s new in all of these, and fig­ur­ing out wheth­er some might be use­ful for a pro­ject I have in mind.

I haven’t decided which oth­er courses and classes I’ll sit in on yet; they all look good.