[foaf-dev] [Fwd: Eduserv Research Grants Call 2008]

[Dan Brickley]

Paul Scott wrote:
> On Mon, 2008-01-28 at 17:06 +0000, Dan Brickley wrote:
>> Modest but well targeted funding available in *.ac.uk, for online 
>> identity, open social graph, and mobile/ubiquitious apps.
>>
> 
> Any chance of projects of this nature coming along that are specifically
> targeted at African development? 

Offhand, I don't know of anything. But I do encourage listmembers to use 
the SWIG and FOAF lists to share relevant information about funding 
opportunities that could get such work done. A slogan for 2008, "The 
Semantic Web is a project, not a field", ie. we're here to get something 
built. Sometimes I fear people slip into treating SW as a vague and 
scholarly research topic, alongside "intelligent agents" or "distributed 
objects", "information retrieval" in bullet-pointed  conference 
announcements. It isn't, although conferences are important. The 
Semantic Web, as far as I'm concerned, is a global collaboration to 
improve the Web for real people. And global collaborations benefit from 
funding sometimes! Anyway, ... I would love to see a funding call that 
supported this kind of work in Africa.

 > We (AVOIR) are doing some pretty
> innovative stuff in this area, and seeing as though we survive purely on
> funded projects, something like that would be wonderful!

Excuse my ignorance, but can EU (eg. IST) research funding support 
African projects? (eg. with European partners too).

> At the same time, it will give us an opportunity to further show the world what we
> can do.

Talking of cool projects, and getting offtopic for this thread, I see 
you have some PHP/PostGIS work,
http://gforge2.uwc.ac.za/projects/postgis/ ... I was wondering if you or 
others had ever looked into possibility of integrating this with SPARQL 
for querying. I asked Richard Cyganiak about this recently, eg. idea of 
taking D2RQ, and improving it to have knowledge of POSTGIS SQL 
extensions. D2RQ can rewrite SPARQL queries into SQL, so I was wondering 
if things like http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/ontology/ and 
http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/geo/
http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/geo/XGR-geo-20071023/
http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/geo/XGR-geo-ont-20071023/ ... could 
benefit from this as an implementation technique? Any thoughts? Am just 
thinking out of loud here. Richard didn't know of any work in this 
direction, but I reckon it's worth exploring.

cheers,

Dan

-- 
http://danbri.org/