Montreal's First Semantic Web Meetup

Can someone tell me why the semantic web's deep philosophical aspects draw more attention than the engineering considerations? Why is nobody interested in practical semantic web conversations?

Anyways, three weeks ago, on Monday January 3rd, I was at Montreal's first Semantic Web meetup. 4 people attended : Karl Dubost, Yan Bodain, Vamshi Raghu and myself.

After due introductions, the first thing on the agenda was to decide over a RTFM policy for newbies. We agreed to redirect them to a set of official resources, including Karl's websemantique.org. As the meetup organizer, I also committed to make printed versions of a Semantic Web 101 kit available at each reunion.

The second item at the agenda was for each participant to talk about his personal involvement with the semantic web. Vamshi introduced his distributed music annotation project he is doing for his master degree at McGill. Basically (correct my if I'm wrong, Vamshi) he wants to create a synthesizer able to... well... synthesize music from those annotations. For exemple, based on what people's annotations identified as Celine Dion's very own ska technique in songs from all Celine-like artists including herself, it could generate a Celine Dion-like ska rendition of NIN's Closer aka I wanna fuck you like an animal. For exemple.

Then I briefly presented
Pödznsnatch and we pretty much spent the rest of the meeting debating on how monstrously evil it is to use the semantic web to crawl, build, index, aggregate and offer querying functions for formal human profiles (what Pödznsnatch is about). As always, I'd defend the most radical position : that privacy is dead anyways. It is dead for corporations (read Don Tapscott and David Ticoll's The Naked Corporation) just as it is dead for individual citizens (just think of the trails you leave with all those loyalty programs, credit bureau profiles, blog posts, and Flickr pictures). You'd better learn to live with your past and with yourself than waste your time trying to hide, trying to escape the realization of an accurate cyberself. I believe that in the digital world we live in, it is completely illusory to think you will keep your little secrets forever. Paradoxally, and I know it's cheesy to say, it's really because I love and (try to) live the purest, strictest utopias of liberty and individuality that I do everything possible to challenge the very ideas of self-being and being free. I think digital transparency, digital nakedness, is one of the most complete form of freedom : it seems to me that here, there, everywhere in physical or cyber spaces, everything - people, emotions, stimuli, memes -, everything is the same, as real as it can get. Because getting naked on the web comes down to this : exist more. Because as far as I'm concerned, everything and everyone has always been a monotonous stream of information through my nervous system. And I think that's great enough.

Something else is worth mentioning about the meetup. Even if he was pretty intensively involved in the conversation, Karl said hew doesn't want to blog on this because he thinks I'd want him to. And although he didn't admit it, I guess that's because he would not want to please the monster he thinks I am. But a few days after the meetup, I went to his blog, looking for a follow-up of some kind. And I saw this. Some kind of follow-up indeed! Is escaping the cyberspace partly explaining why Karl is gone to south-eastern Asia? The monster is me is smiling of a monstrous smile because I know Karl's every moves are echoed within some dark, supposedly restricted, area of the cyberspace thanks to the eyes of some lovely people's mm-precision spy satellites.

So here's life as usual, I momentarily killed Karl off the blogosphere and in return, I fathered Xavier, Jane and (soon) my employer, Braque.

Next Semantic Web meetup is Monday, February 7 2005, 7:00 PM @ the Second Cup on 1122 Ste. Catherine St W, in Montréal, of course. Please RSVP.