The Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon

I should have known that such a thing as IT Conversations existed. Net radio interviews of, by, and for geeks (a.k.a. “IT professionals”), which is to say that it’s awesome. A bunch of the interviewees are people whose blogs I follow regularly, such as Tim Bray, Dan Bricklin, and, of course, Elias Torres, with whom I work at Big Blue. Elias was recently interviewed by IT Conversations about his work on the W3C working group for the SPARQL query language for the semantic web, though they did spend time discussing the semantic web in general.

The interview starts off on a humerous note (for me) with the interviewer’s pronunciation of “www” as “dub dub dub,” but it’s definitely a good introduction to the semantic web for those who are not very familiar with the technology. The interviewer does a great job asking pertinent questions that echo those asked frequently in the industry; why not XML? is it secure? and why invent SPARQL when XPath exists? Elias, to his credit, does a great job fielding those questions in a convincing manner without getting too technical. Maybe I’ll send the link to my dad as it may help him understand what I’ve been up to the last couple years, especially because the interviewee has a nice hispanic accent (for the record, my dad’s Cuban).