Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

Damon Oehlman – HTML5 API Soup

Photo of Damon OehlmanIn this session we will explore ways you can implement and combine HTML APIs such as websockets, web workers, local storage, and geolocation to make awesome web apps.

Paul Hagon – Enriching large data sets

Paul Hagon PortraitLibraries contain masses of beautifully structured data collected over many years. But these records may have their flaws and might now want to be used in ways, such as location based services, that weren’t imagined 30 years ago. How can we use existing API’s and web services to enrich this data to enable it to be used in a variety of ways. This data also needs to be exposed for others to use and build upon. With the recent release of the Government response to the Web 2.0 taskforce, how can institutions comply with these recommendations by providing their data in usable forms for the public. What’s involved in building an API into our resources and how can our data be given more meaning through semantic linkages like RDFa?

David Peterson – Semantic web for distributed social networks

Web Directions South 2008, Sydney Convention Centre, September 26 2.40pm.

David Peterson PortraitHear how Drupal, Semantic MediaWiki and other bleeding edge tech were enlisted along with pixie dust, FOAF, RDF, OWL, SPARQL, Linked Data (basically all the Semantic Web stuff) to build a distributed social network. The focus will be not on evangelism (I don’t really care about that) but how disparate open source platforms can talk and work together. This stuff actually works and makes development more fluid. These technologies make local development easier, but when it is time to broaden your scope, classic search is still king. How can you leverage this? Newcomers such as Yahoo Searchmonkey can play an important role in the creation of a truly distributed information system.

Jenny Telford – Opening up government data

A presentation given at Web Directions Government, Old Parliament House, Canberra, May 19 2008.

Jenny Telford PortraitMapping and other mashups have taken the web world by storm – driving innovation in business and government alike. While much of the focus has been on the actual mashup applications, without the data to mashup, we have no mashups. Government, from local to Federal level, collect and manage a significant amount of data, across a very broad range of areas. But giving access to this data to web application developers has technical, policy and legal challenges. In this presentation, Jenny Telford of the ABS looks at these issues from their experience of opening up data from the Australian Census.

Kaitlin Sherwood & Steffen Meschkat – The Business and Technology of Mashups

A presentation given at at Web Directions North, Vancouver, February 8, 2007.

Mashups are the hottest web development topic today. Hear about the front-end, back-end, and business issues of mashups with these two experts who know more about them than just about anyone.

Kaitlin Sherwood: Overview of Maps Mashup Technologies

In the past two years, there has been an explosion of tools for conveying geographic information to the masses. In this talk, Kaitlin Duck Sherwood will introduce major concepts and issues, and discuss the pros and cons of each of the major mashup frameworks. Attendees will gain an appreciation for their mapping options, and information to help them better choose between them based on their particular needs.

Steffen Meschkat

A central topic of “Web 2.0” is browser-side web application programming interfaces (APIs) and the specific type of web application they give rise to: mashups.

Using the Google Maps API as an example, I put this development into a perspective that allows one to appreciate how this, on the one hand, is a natural and coherent evolution of the Web that, on the other hand, significantly alters the ways of organizing the world’s information that the Web makes possible. I also discuss the specific technologies that web APIs for mashups are based upon, and their sometimes challenging idiosyncrasies.

Craig Saila & Adrian Holovaty – Old Media, New Technology

A presentation given at at Web Directions North, Vancouver, February 8, 2007.

Web based distribution is changing the nature of established authorities like newsprint and television.

As traditional media declines, the relevance of their online brands continues to grow in both revenue and traffic. All of this is leading to a radical restructuring of how the mainstream media sees itself, and how it operates. From the surprisingly quick adoption of blogs, RSS, and other technologies that fall under the “Web 2.0” label, there are many discussion points about what is working, and what isn’t.

In this session, two experts working at the intersection of the web and newsprint will discuss how this change is occurring. They will be looking at the fallacies built into online advertising and traditional metrics which don’t map to how the new Web operates.

They’ll also explore the maturing online landscape and how traditional media now face a fragmented market, populated by strong Web brands that offer genuine competition through their innovation and nimbleness.

Raul Vera – Mashups, web apps and APIs

A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 27 2007.

Raul Vera PortraitHear all about the exciting possibilities created by these technologies from Google Australia.

delivering year round learning for front end and full stack professionals

Learn more about us

Web Directions South is the must-attend event of the year for anyone serious about web development

Phil Whitehouse General Manager, DT Sydney