Topic: The Internet and the World Wide Web

Mike Liebhold believes that significant portions of the data in our world eventually should, and will, be geocoded. He envisions a day when you can walk down the street, pull out a tricorder-like device (a la Star Trek), and have instant access to all of the cultural, social, historical, and geographical information related to your current location. In his keynote address, Liebhold makes a compelling call to action, for all concerned, to take the next steps toward the difficult, yet highly rewarding, development of a Geospatial Web.

What are content audits and content maps, and why should they matter to companies who publish information on the Web? Chiara Fox, a senior information architect for Adaptive Path, defines the art of Content Analysis in the scope of web application design and migration. She identifies several milestones and key deliverables that most companies can use on their next (re)design project.

Usama Fayyad, Chief Data Officer at Yahoo! believes that if the Internet is going to continue to grow, it will require a dedication to scientific excellence and the ongoing development of new scientific foundations. Many of the concepts and technologies upon which the Internet is based are still in the infancy stage, and display a lack of substance when challenged scientifically. Yahoo! has built a world-class team of scientists dedicated to the task of building this new science for the next generation Internet.

Skype, the breakout peer-to-peer voice-over-IP network, is one of the best known names in internet telephony. By offering inexpensive, worldwide calling and feature-rich software, the company has become a major player on the telecommunications landscape. Skype's purchase by eBay has raised many questions about the company's future in an ever more competitive market. In this talk, Phil Wolff of Skype Journal profiles the company's metrics, and gives us a glimpse into the forces driving one the world's best known brands.

This panel discussion, also referred to as Web 2.0 Meets the Enterprise, takes on the tough questions about innovating in large, established companies. Drawing on experiences with firms and in fields where change doesn't necessarily come easily, Sanford, Polese and Park offer valuable insights into the many factors involved in innovation, including culture, pace, communication, business process, and intellectual property. Find out their perspectives on aiming for the right balance when it was time to introduce innovation in the traditional enterprise.

As a co-founder of Netscape and co-author of Mosaic, Marc Andreessen has a unique view of the development of web programming. In his keynote address, he briefly reviews the history of the computer industry and how programming has moved from being machine dependent and complicated to become a dynamic and easy-to-learn process. In combination with the meteoric drop in hardware and network costs, more powerful applications are becoming much easier to develop through worldwide collaboration.

Next generation web applications will be built by business owners, managers, and users who do not consider themselves to be software developers. IBM's Rod Smith explains how technically savvy users can "scratch their own itch," using technologies, such as PHP and wikis, to develop their own business applications.

On-line communities built on social software let people connect, share, create and communicate. How different are these virtual gatherings from collaboration in the real-world? Can users be trusted? This thoughtful panel delivers company perspectives on successful community building through mail, messaging, blogs, wikis and telephony. The panelists find the web is transformative in some ways, but still often parallels real life; success lies in harnessing the positive creativity of the majority while moderating the harmful tendencies of a few.

SPARQL is the query language of the Web, it doesn't discriminate between data sources, and it's ready for use! So says Elias Torres, Senior Software Engineer at IBM and member of the RDF and the SPARQL working groups at W3C. In an interview with Phil Windley, Torres explains his view of the Semantic Web and how it will be enhanced by RDF and SPARQL, once the two standards gain widespread adoption.

RSS is the most successful application of XML to date. So why change a good thing? At the O'Reilly's 2006 Emerging Technology conference Tim Bray, Director of Web Technologies at Sun Microsystems, explains the why, how and what of the Atom web syndication format. Bray indicates that the current RSS format is troubled by technical issues, showing there is a need for a new syndication format. Bray outlines the technical and people problems currently associated with the RSS 2.0 specification, and the work that has gone into the creation of the Atom syndication format.