I've been talking about this endlessly for the last week - but it's now happening. Planning for SemanticCampLondon is now underway. It's like a little BarCamp intended for anyone who's interested in the Semantic Web - the Web of Data - whatever you want to call it. The sort of technologies that I hope get covered at SemanticCamp are RDF/RDFS/OWL, the various ontologies built on top of the W3C stack, microformats and lightweight data formats (XML, JSON, YAML etc.) and interesting problems - aggregation, attention, comparison, portability and so on.
SemanticCamp is intended to be the BarCamp equivalent of events like XTech, ISWC, Semantic Technology Conference and ESWC and XML Conference.
Beyond that, we've got a lot of possible challenges on both the usability front - making the Semantic Web friendly and accessible for normal people (ie. anyone who doesn't know what qualified property cardinality restrictions are), making business models for the Semantic Web and how portable, linked data is relevant to a variety of current Web-based trends - including 'social media', wikis, tagging and so on.
Think of these as a guide - you can talk about anything that's vaguely related. The rules are similar to those at BarCamp - basically, have a conversation, not a product pitch.
Beyond a wiki page and some ideas, I haven't got much. SemanticCamp needs a venue, sponsorship and all the other stuff that is required for a BarCamp type experience. And we need volunteers. If you are interested in helping, please get in contact. I want to make this as open as possible on the planning front. There will occasionally be things which I have to keep quiet about in order to keep them surprising (like chocolate fountains, Segways, deckchairs - that kind of thing), but I want SemanticCamp to be run in a spirit of openness. Over the next few days, I'll be contacting a lot of different people and communities about getting this off the ground.
I'm hoping you can join in and help make this event a great success - both by helping share the organisation of it, and also by participating at the event and giving interesting talks to your fellow participants. There's nothing wrong with the vision of the Semantic Web - at least nothing that can't be fixed with a bit of BarCamp-style openness. Heh.
Tags: SemanticCampLondon, semantic web, microformats, london, BarCamp
