7 May 2007
W3C Advisory Committee (Banff, Alberta, Canada)
I have to admit I am impressed by the setting for the W3C Advisory Committee (AC) meeting this week in the Fairmont Hotel, Banff National Park, Alberta, Canada.
We're just gathering now in the 8am-9am coffee/breakfast/registration slot and there's a good good buzz about the place. Having seen the range of the discussions on the agenda I'm looking forward to a productive meeting.
Phase 1 of my involvement in web technologies began when I first heard about the web at the NSC92 conference (Network Services Conference) November 1992 in Pisa, Italy, and went back to University College Galway (UCG), now called NUI Galway, where I worked in computer services, very enthused. Within a year I had my own webserver and I was the webmaster for UCG's first website. I was very happy when the front page image from the website, a picture of the old quadrangle in UCG, was featured in the Irish Times in an article about the emerging web with the title "The West's Awake" (a reference to a famous Irish rebel song), I think it was around 1994. At the time we would email some guys in UCD in Dublin running a server called Slarti (a reference to the Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy character), where a list and a map of active Irish websites was maintained - my personal server and the UCG server are still listed in this list as are the servers of other UCG web-heads many still active including Joe Desbonet and John Breslin. I ended up getting really into Perl and CGI programming a published some books on this as well as being a webmaster in the first iteration of the web.
Phase 2 of my engagement in web technologies began when I moved to Waterford Institute of Technology back in 1996, and got involved in some EU funded projects linked to the Telecommunications Software & Systems Group (TSSG) there. I became really enthused by the whole content aggregation technology suite, with the early versions of RSS from Netscape in the late 1990s, and later with weblogging/blogging, and the first version of this blog (Greymatter then MovableType).
The third phase of my web technology engagement has been via the telecommunications management work in the TSSG, based on the use of emerging semantic modelling techniques, in particular OWL-based solutions, and on applying these to the telecommunications network and service management space in the TeleManagement Forum ((TM Forum) and in the new Autonomic Communications Forum (ACF) linked to our research programme on Autonomic Management of Communications of Networks and Services.
So coming to the W3C for the first time is a bit like coming home for me, even though the TSSG only joined the W3C very recently, and this is my first AC meeting.
The Advisory Committee meeting is co-located with the WWW2007 conference, and I'll be staying on for two days of that before returning to Ireland.
http://www.autonomic-communication-forum.org/
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