Keynote: Practical Semantics
The Semantic Web has always been one of those Big Ideas that makes perfect sense in theory but is difficult to apply in practice. Fortunately, technologies such as HTML5 Microdata, JSON-LD, schema.org, and Activity Streams have helped put the sometimes lofty goals of "Linked Data" into the hands of every day developers. Are these technologies perfect? Do they achieve the utopian paradise of a fully interconnected world of rich semantic relationships and meaning? Perhaps not, but they are still quite powerful. This talk will explore the practical, real-world applications of Semantic Web technologies that exist today; it will demonstrate the things that work well along with the things that do not; and, most importantly, it will provide clear practical examples of using Linked Data with current state-of-the-art RESTful application infrastructure.
James M Snell has dedicated his career to developing, contributing to, and evangelizing open technologies. He currently serves as IBM's Technical Lead for Node.js and as such is one of IBM's primary liaisons to the Node.js technical community. Previously, James has worked on open standards such as W3C Activity Streams 2.0, The Atom Syndication Format, HTTP Patch and various other IETF RFC's. James never seems to remain in one location for very long but can be randomly spotted for ever-so-brief moments at coffee shops throughout Central California and the San Francisco area.