From Grid to Cloud ...

WWW2006

The Annual W3C conference WWW2006 took place in Edinburgh, beginning Monday, May 22nd. With NeSC based colleagues, Gillian Law and Dave Berry, the GCN! team was well represented at this conference and you will see several pieces of commentary and reporting emerging on the site. The major theme of the conference was Semantic Web and the event was put together by the team from Southampton University, Professors Nigel Shadbolt; Wendy Hall and GCN! Competition Judge, David DeRoure.
It was a large conference attended by 1200 folks from all around the world and featured the great and the good from the field of the Web and Computing including: Sir Tim Berners-Lee; Professor Tony Hey, another friend of GCN!, now Senior VP for Technical Computing at Microsoft; and many others. There were several interesting sessions featuring Grid, Security, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Healthcare and so on. My key takeaways from the conference lay mainly on the importance of semantics in navigating the future web; the nature of collaboration between knowledge workers and how important it will become to define context (ontologies, taxonomies and semantics) if we are to be able to work together; the pervasiveness of security issues in the internet world - especially the newly discovered commercial antics of hackers (your money or your site's dead!) and the huge potential for web services if we can crack the code and allow discovery; governance and payment schemes to work. Take a look at the site for more.

posted by Ian Osborne, Grid Man Now! @ 9:08 AM