I have been asked many times recently about materials regarding Semantic Digital Libraries but could not really point to just one location. Yes, there are all my papers at http://library.deri.ie (which happens to be down quite often ever since I left the institute), and many of my presentations are on slideshare, and than there is my book, and my thesis, and my tutorials … I realized that there has to be (finally) a place where I can gather and reference all of that.

And here it is: http://semdl.info/. At the moment you will find there all major presentations I did related to the topic, archive information about tutorials we gave (together with complete slides from most of them), and references to two of my books on Semantic Digital Libraries. Most likely I will use our infrastructure to set up a JeromeDL with all the papers on the subject and reference them there.

But, it’s not the end: I do not want it to be a one-man show. I hope that all other people that are interested in the subject will help me to fill in the site with more materials and make it alive (someone already suggested a blog ). Please let me know if you want to join the effort.

I was invited by the organizers of the International Conference for the Semantic Web and Digital Libraries (ICSD’09) to give a full-day tutorial on Semantic Digital Libraries.

The key goal of this conference is to bring together researchers and practitioners working on solutions that span together these two worlds: Semantic Web and Digital Libraries. Even though these two research lines have so much in common, getting a joint mind set proved to be quite bit of a problem.

I have been promoting the idea of Semantic Digital Libraries for 7 years, which is almost as long as any attempts where made in that subject. No wonder, this conference was an important milestone in my research (and evangelization) agenda. Together with my team, I built one of the first (if not the first) prototypes of a semantic digital libraries – the JeromeDL system, gathered a small community around it, presented a series of tutorials on the subject and eventually, published a book on Semantic Digital Libraries. Invitation to this conference was a very nice closure to my PhD research, an important period in the life of each researcher.

I am very pleased with the overall outcome of this edition of my tutorial:

• The turnout for both sessions (presentation and hands-on) was quite nice.
• The questions were very interesting and encouraging.
• I was surprised how smootly the hands-on session went: usually we had all sorts of problems trying to set up JeromeDL/BRICKS/Fedora in such a short time.

I wish there was a video recorded (maybe next time ?), but I hope the slides will do.

Tutorial on Semantic Digital Libraries at ICSD’09