Monday, 5/21/2007
1:15 PM - 4:45 PM
Level: Technical - Intermediate

Although the Semantic Web (or Web 3.0) has generated a lot of excitement about a web in which search engines and active agents behave with human-like intelligence, the general consensus within the venture capital industry is that a commercially viable Semantic Web may still be 5-7 years away. In this tutorial we are going to explore how the standards that underpin Web 3.0 may be used today in implementing Web 2.0 applications. OWL is the key standard for defining the meaning of information in the Semantic Web. It reached full recommendation status within the W3C in 2004. It can be used both as a design language for the object classes that constitute a Web 2.0 application and as a schema definition language for the DBMS that stores the data and media used by the application.

This tutorial demonstrates an existing web application — a private database made available only to venture capitalists that contains information on all of the private financings done by venture capital firms. It might be used by a VC who led a first round in a firm to find a suitable second round co-investor, or to track companies (in, e.g., nanomaterials) that are coming up on a financing event. In this tutorial we will examine the application’s current old-tech implementation (Cold Fusion and DHTML), and then rebuild it two different ways: Lightweight Web 1.0 technology: DTML, Ruby on Rails, MySQL, Web 2.0 technology: AJAX, Rails, Web 3.0 OWL DBMS. We think you will find the Web 2.0 implementation both dramatically simpler, and dramatically more usable.

Mark Zerda wrote the applications we will be discussing. He is a member of the engineering team at Data-Grid. He also just came back from a 3-month bike ride through Mexico.

Tom Nora handles business development for Data-Grid. He has started and/or grown a dozen leading edge technology companies — in parallel computing, large database systems, object-oriented application development, digital music, and digital animation. He has participated in IPOs, merged, divested, acquired, and sold software businesses. He is the user of the applications we will be building.