Sun, Fun, and Search in Ibiza

Although the fabulous Spanish island of Ibiza may be better known for its beaches and disco sunrises, it was the backdrop last week for a different kind of party: Two gatherings of researchers and technologists discussed the future of Web search, with a focus on semantic search.

The first of these meetings, organized and sponsored by the Yahoo! Search team, was a part of the VoCamp series, which focuses on vocabularies for the Semantic Web and other practical questions related to semantic interoperability. At the VoCamp event, we reviewed the existing tools for creating and publishing vocabularies, discussed the applications of semantic tagging, and created a few small vocabularies ourselves (for example, to allow modeling the availability of resources such as representing the opening times of a restaurant). Additional VoCamps are coming up this year in Washington, D.C., New York, Sunnyvale, and Bristol, England.

The second event focusing on Semantic Search was part of the yearly Future of Web Search workshop series organized by Yahoo! Research. We brought together some of the brightest minds in Information Retrieval with people who are working daily with semantic Web and linked data technologies. Sessions included topics ranging from disambiguation and query interface to NLP and information extraction.

And of course, since we were in Ibiza, we didn’t forget to enjoy the beautiful island. Check out these photos from the Future of Web Search event. And, a big thank you to all the researchers and developers who joined us!

Peter Mika
Researcher and Data Architect, Yahoo!

Photo credit: tommyh