Vancouver Semantic Web Meetup Group to hold first meeting this evening

A new group aims to bring together Vancouverites who are interested in the Semantic Web.

The Vancouver Semantic Web Meetup Group will hold its first meeting this evening (April 23) at Waves Coffee House (1095 West Broadway), starting at 6 p.m.

Mélanie Courtot, a bioinformatics specialist at the B.C. Cancer Research Centre, and Mark Wilkinson, an assistant professor of medical genetics at the University of British Columbia, founded the group on April 8.

As of this morning, 39 people have joined the Meetup group. Eight members have confirmed they will attend the inaugural meeting.

In a West Broadway coffee shop, Courtot told the Georgia Straight that she hopes the group will help connect people interested in different aspects of the Semantic Web.

As an academic, Courtot would like to meet people working on commercial applications.

Jim Pick, the founder of the RDF Vancouver Semantic Web User Group, is encouraging linked-data enthusiasts to attend today’s meeting.

“Please, please, please come to the meetup if you are interested in doing any semantic web stuff in Vancouver,” Pick wrote in an April 18 post on his blog. “I know firsthand how difficult it is to organize a new semweb event — we need people to show up in order to build a community.”

According to the Web site of the World Wide Web Consortium’s Semantic Web activity, the Semantic Web is a “web of data”.

“The Semantic Web is about two things,” the site states. “It is about common formats for integration and combination of data drawn from diverse sources, where on the original Web mainly concentrated on the interchange of documents. It is also about language for recording how the data relates to real world objects.”

You can follow Stephen Hui on Twitter at twitter.com/stephenhui.