Both Leigh Dobbs and Danny Ayers published notes that the Jena User Conference schedule has been posted.
(Danny also made mention of dreaming about Jena and white-velvet pouffes, but don’t let that scare you away from RDF.)
This has all the makings of being a pretty damn good conference. The sessions are focused either on specific applications or about the practicalities of Jena and RDF. This is not a ’scholastic paper’ conference–this is people making stuff. And fun stuff, too, from the descriptions. (The papers and presentations most likely will be published online, and I’ll post notes to these when they are.)
With SPARQL (the RDF query language) in release candidate status, one of the last and necessary missing pieces is now in place so we’ll be seeing more implementations in the future. The can merge any kind of data effortlessly nature of RDF is going to start attracting larger corporate interest. Jena, being the dominate Java implementation of RDF, and Java being so popular in corporations, I expect to see more RDF and Jena in corporate development.
Speaking of Jena and SPARQL, the person who wrote ARQ the Jena compatible SPARQL engine, Andy Seaborne has a new weblog. He’s not listed in Planet RDF just yet, but I’m assuming this will change fairly soon.
I’m particularly interested in SPARQL because of some of the work I want to do at my site. I’m using PHP and Ruby, though; I can’t use Jena for any personal web development I want to publish online because my server isn’t set up for Java. What we need is a Jena enabled server where people can host their personal development projects–somewhat like wordpress.com hosts WordPress weblog, or typepad.com for TypePad weblogs and so on.
Not that I’m hinting or anything, but publicly accessible servers setup for specific RDF environments, such as Jena, where one can affordably lease space isn’t such a bad idea.
Disclaimer: I’m working with the HP folks who are involved with Jena, and presenting at the conference. I thought I should probably mention this, otherwise, you might be confused as to why I’m talking enthusiastically about RDF.