NEASIS&;T will be hosting its annual awards dinner on Thursday, June 12th at MIT.

Join us to honor colleagues in the New England chapter of ASIS&T. Guest speaker, Robert Wolfe from MIT will be speaking after dinner about the future of semantic web technologies for libraries, and showing a few demonstrations of his favorite semantic web applications.

The Semantic Library: RDF in Practice

 

Skepticism appears to be a popular sentiment regarding the endlessly imminent arrival of the Semantic Web.  It is fashionable to doubt the return on investment of producing a whole mess of complicated RDF data about one's data.  This presentation will demonstrate the real, actual applications of Semantic Web techniques in real, actual library information organizations.  Surprise!  The Semantic Web is already here, having sneaked in the back door while our attentions were on XML and other information technologies.  The presentation will also show that RDF is no less cost effective than our current metadata production efforts and enables much richer, more attractive information delivery mechanisms.  Of all the classes of web users, RDF and the Semantic Web ought to be most attractive to librarians.  Its data model most closely mimics the way we think about and structure information.  It is no surprise that some of the best, earliest Semantic Web applications are being developed by your neighborhood academic library.

 

ROBERT WOLFE is a professional librarian and information architect who has worked in the field of educational technology since 1999.  He received his MLIS from the Simmons Graduate School of Library and Information Science in 2001.  He is currently the Head of the Metadata Services Unit at the MIT Libraries.  Metadata Services is a cost recovery consultancy that offers information organization services to the education community.  These services are: /information architecture/ including data modeling,  taxonomy development, and user experience design; /metadata systems design /including metadata storage, serialization, and production workflow solutions; and /project management/ including metadata production training, production management, and quality assessment

Join us for a fun and informative evening.

Cost:
$55.00 for Non-members
$35.00 for ASIST members and their significant others
$25.00 for students or retired ASIST members

Registration is now open! Please respond by June 7th.  Seating is limited. 

Register at: http://www.neasist.org/pc/programs/20080612.html