The Semantic Web has been a strong interest of mine over the last two years. When I came across RDF and OWL through a research project at IST back in 2008, a Web Standard no less, I'd somehow been completely oblivious to its existence.

If you've never heard of the Semantic Web, here's a quick intro video. I'll wait here.

Everybody back? Okay! The concepts behind OWL seemed to solve a few thorny design issues I'd come across in a decade of building relational databases-backed Web 1.0 apps, and do so in a really elegant way. Working with OWL fuses aspects of relational database modeling, information architecture, and object oriented design into a new set of technologies and techniques.

As I started talking to members of the developer community at Penn State about the Semantic Web, I got a lot of blank stares and misunderstandings ("Isn't that just XML?"). And yet, every graduate student in IST was exposed to ontologies and semantic modelling as a routine part of the curriculum. The research community had been working with ontologies for years. Clearly there was a large academic-practitioner gap here to be bridged.

So as I've done many times in the past with a new technology or concept, I started talking about the Semantic Web at user group meetings and conferences, and looking for ways to apply these technologies in low-risk venues.

Tonight is the latest in this series of speaking engagements, and possibly the most challenging thus far. I'll be presenting my talk "An Argument For Semantics" at the Portland Java User Group. I've been really impressed by the quality of home grown presenters at PJUG since I started attending. My talk will be very different - less code, more conceptual - than usual PJUG speakers, but I'm hoping the technical experience in the room can generate a good discussion on how and when it makes sense to employ Semantic Web technologies in real world applications.