Speaker: Eran Shir, founder and CEO of Dapper Inc.

Title: Practical Semantic Web: Web Plumbing 101
 
The semantic web is a decade old vision promoted by web visionaries like
Sir Tim Berners Li in which the web will become a set of semantically
interconnected "databases" for programs to interact with, mash together
and in general make sense of it all. As a bottom up technological adoption
approach, it has failed miserably, and outside some research labs none of
its icon technologies ( e.g. RDF/OWL) have gained much traction. In fact,
the web has continued to evolve as a messy technological babel tower. We
will advocate a new, top-down approach that transforms the existing web
into a semantic web, where every site becomes a semantically aware API,
using a combination of structure analysis algorithms and user generated
effort. We will showcase the Dapper service that allows the creation of
semantic APIs from any site and will present the promise such approach
holds for the advancement of fields such as semantic search. We will
discuss some of the algorithmic challenges faced with when attempting
to transform each and every web site into a nicely behaved programmatic
lego block.
 
Eran Shir is the founder and CEO of Dapper Inc., a M.Sc. physics
graduate from the Technion and a Ph.D. student at the EE-Systems Dept.,
Tel-Aviv university under the supervision of Dr. Yuval Shavitt. As part
of his academic research work, Eran founded in 2004 the DIMES project
( www.netdimes.org) - an international research effort to map the low
level infrastructure of the Internet using distributed agents.