Heading to Amsterdam for XTech 2006…

In about six hours I’ll be heading off to XTech 2006 with team-mates and fellow speakers Paul Hammond and Simon Willison. I’ll be doing probably my final run at Native to a Web of Data in public before I write it up finally and stick it on the internet. The pitch is as follows:

“The web is changing from connected pages to a web of interconnected data sources, and the consequences are likely to be enormous. A new ecosystem of dirty semantics and structure in the wild is emerging that rewards every entity within it both creatively and financially ‚Äì making the Aggregate web much more than the sum of its parts. But what are the architectural elements of the emerging web of data and how can you design and build services that thrive in this environment? What elements of our practice need to change and which ones need to return to the fundamental principles of the web? And how do we actually bring it all together to make something awesome?”

Paul’s going to be doing a talk called An open (data) can of worms which is a rather more pragmatic overview of some of the problems getting data out of organisations and into the hands of real people. And Simon’s all over the shop, talking about or chairing sessions on The Yahoo User Interface Library, Ajax Lightning Demos and Django: Web development on journalism deadlines. I can tell it’s going to be good by the way they’re both sitting opposite me at this moment, writing frantically and looking a bit tense.

And that’s just the start! There are all manner of people from my current and previous employers doing interesting talks. Mr Biddulph’s going to be doing an overview of his work putting up the BBC programme catalogue using Ruby on Rails, Jeffrey McManus (who heads up the Yahoo Developer’s Network) is going to be talking about building a participation platform and – most excitingly for me – Tristan Ferne’s going to be talking about The Annotatable Audio Project that we got started at the BBC [Read Original Post]. I’m really looking forward to seeing how far they’ve taken that one and whether it’s likely to get out in the open any time soon.