4 December 2004: Chair

Well, it's supposed to be embargoed until Monday, but the ECS website is already reporting it and I even heard it on Wave 105 yesterday: Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web and the daddy of HTML, HTTP and no doubt other things beginning with HT, is to join Southampton University as Chair of Computer Science in January. This is in addition to his ongoing work with the W3C and MIT, so he won't be here all the time, but apparently he wants to do a bit of work with us on the whole Semantic Web thing. I do have one fear: I'm concerned as to whether he will get a real chair as part of this appointment, one he can actually sit on. At last Monday's meeting Wendy had to search around to find one, because our group has got rather large now. And she's the Head of School.

But back to the Semantic Web, and I'm pleased to note I actually got some decent work done this week, which partly explains the shortage of blogs. A working WUN AKTive Space demo was handed to Nigel on Wednesday evening, along with the prospect of being able to add data to it in the usual Triplestore way - make a relevant RDF file, chuck it in 3Store, and AKTive Space picks it up and strings it all together. A good demo of what the Semantic Web is about would probably show how easy it is to add information to AKTive Space: just chuck the data in there, and the application does the rest. It was a bit of a pain moving the whole thing across to a new server and getting the different pieces all working together, but I got there in the end, and on Wednesday evening I went to sleep, which made a nice change.

Finally, it's good to see BBC TV are making the most of the live football they're able to show these days: tomorrow's 'Match Of The Day Live' features the big clash of the weekend: Hinckley United verses Brentford. Who says the best sport is all on Sky?

*Sigh*

Only seventeen weeks until the baseball season starts. Roll on the steroid boys and the wonderful MLB.TV, which is quite easily the best current use of Professor Chair Sir Tim's World Wide Web. Maybe I should start making 'Semantic MLB.TV'?