Blog: A Trip To The Royal Society

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Last night I met The Subject Of My Talk outside THE ROYAL SOCIETY, where we were intending to go to a LECTURE. She'd seen Opening the information floodgates: the technologies and challenges of a web of linked data mentioned on Twitter and thought it looked interesting, so off we went.

I was amazed to find that ANYONE could go to the talk, and were all treated extremely well, gently shephered through the LOVELY old building down to a dead posh lecture hall. We were soon joined by my baby brother AKA The Artist Tom Smith just before Professor Nigel Shadbolt started up.

I thought it might be quite interesting but BY GOLLY it was INCREDIBLE! All SORTS of fascinating ideas, thoughts, predictions and analysis were thrown around about the development and FUTURE of The Semantic Web - I'll not explain it HERE because, to be honest, my BRANE hasn't calmed down enough to sort it all out properly, but it was BRILLIANT. Even the questions at the end were GRATE! You know how normally after a talk people get up and ask one of EITHER ask a stupid question which was answered in the first five minutes of the talk and every ten minutes thereafter OR basically say "I am very important and wish to stand up in front of everybody, at some length"? It wasn't like that at ALL! Nearly every question led the entire audience to go "OOH, good point!" and then Prof.Shadbolt to say "Aha! Very interesting!" and BE very interesting.

It was just brilliant, and a fantastic reminder of just HOW MANY exciting FREE things there are to do in That London. With our brains BUZZING the three of us went round the corner to a really REALLY nice pub where we found ourselves unexpectedly engaged in a LONG DISCUSSION about various highbrow topics. You know when you're a student and nearly every conversation involves SOMEONE saying "Well, of course, it was HEGEL that said it first"? It was like THAT, but with more LARFS and quite a lot of ACTUAL BEER.

By HECK but it was a delightful evening... and if there is a little bit of muddy headiness round here today it is at least HALF caused by a huge influx of new information. I think it's going to be available to STREAM from the website soon - have a look, it was GRATE!

posted 17/11/2010 by MJ Hibbett

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