Conference Reception

cruise1
Originally uploaded by Wasting Moments.

The conference has officially begun. My free time now becomes much much less.

Yesterday say the opening ceremony, including the DCMI Reports and Intro by Makx Dekkers and an interesting Keynote by Zhang Xiaolin of the Library of Chinese Academy of Sciences. The paper he was speaking from was excellent.

There were also 3 other papers, the best of which was "Maintaining a Vocabulary: Practices, policies and models around Dublin Core, presented by Thomas Baker. It focused on aspects of the DCMI community other than the element set itself, looking instead about how the initiative works, data models around metadata in general and, perhaps most importantly, work going on around the edges. The relationships of DC to other metadata standards, developments in the area of interoperability and cross-walking, and best practice for documenting terms, dealing with namespaces, etc. This is an area where DCMI is a bit ahead of the curve, and can provide other projects & initiatives with excellent insights.

I also attended an interesting Semantic Web special session, with representatives from both DCMI and the W3C, although I slipped out for a few minutes to check things out at the Collection Description Working Group meeting.

I'm sure you all care immensly about all of this. Please don't stop reading. If you must, just skip to the end of upcoming posts, where I'll try to have info about evenings and responses comments.

Definitely have no pictures of textiles, although there are some photos of really old looms in museums, and there is a picture of a woman weaving a silk rug. Haven't posted them, but may eventually. Either that, or just show them when I get back. Music has been good, when I've seen traditional music. I've heard way to much modern chinese pop music being played far too loudly out of storefronts. Haven't purchased any music yet.

And, yes: I'm a thoughtless jerk. Sorry, but there's too much to see here. One of the nice things about being a complete egotist is it allows one to focus entirely on oneself at all times.

Lunch was Dim Sum. The reception was definitely a dinner cruise down the Huangpu river. Beer was free, conversation was excellent, and the view was magnificient.