Downscale 2012 - First International Workshop on Downscaling the Semantic Web

First International Workshop on Downscaling the Semantic Web - Crete, May 28th, in the pre-conference of ESWC 2012. Organized by Christophe Guéret and Stefan Schlobach from VUA and Florent Pigout, from OLPC.

The workshop brought together a group of computer scientists, experts in Semantic Web technologies. Although the general trend is upscaling, here, the notion is of downscaling, decentralizing, even reducing the Web of Data, for a special reason. The need for data sharing in the developing world is an important topic, especially the case of rural areas in Africa, and of schools in developing countries. Another area is disaster management, also presented here. In disaster, the amount of data is especially the issue, when rescue teams have to take fast decisions in situations that concern life and death. Here, downscaling is especially necessary to reduce the amount of data, and keep only what is relevant… For developing countries, three topics were presented, where Linked Data can be applied: (i) Linked Market Data from rural communities in the Sahel, (ii) SemanticXO, linked data to share accross children's computers that don't have access to the internet, but still want to share data, and (iii) the Web of Radios, currently only a dream, but one that can become reality, positioning community radio an important future content provider in Africa. I met interesting people with loads of interesting new ideas. Combine all and you get really cool stuff. Unfortunately most of the people I know like to speak with people with the same background, the same hobby or the same interests. Although it is much nicer to get a large number of smart people, from different backgrounds, different areas of expertise, and make them all work on different aspects of one big interesting problem, and let them do this for a quite a while. It is likely that they find new and awesome solutions to complicated problems. I think this is the way to have a really big impact!