IA Summit

The IA Summit turns out to be a lively, thriving, energetic, and unusually well-run conference. The entire hotel internet went down in mid-conference, so no blogging; I'm writing this in O'Hare where it seems that I can have either a power outlet or an airport connection, but not both.

Interestingly, most of the 300 or so people who came to Portland seem to have done so on their own ticket. Even people with Fortune 500 jobs had no travel budget (or dared not ask). It's a good sign that Internet pros are willing to invest in themselves, and in the 'net. And it's a good sign for IA that people seemed excited by new and difficult ideas.

Most impressive: a big and well-considered metadata project on The Eastenders, a long-running BBC soap opera. (Links and details later) Twenty years of plot tangles in RDF/FOAF, with intelligent attention to the hard parts without tons of terminological apparatus. Explicit representation of secrets, for example, needs to distinguish classes such as:

• Notional secrets that everybody actually knows
• Secrets that ceased to become secrets after a critical date
• Secrets known to viewers but not to characters
• Secrets known to some characters and not to others
• Secrets that musn't be revealed to the public until some future date (embargoed spoilers)