I attended the 2009 Semantic Technology Conference in San Jose, California where Linked Data was a huge topic. One of the current issues is “What to do with Linked Data”, and whenever I heard that comment, SQUIN would pop into my mind! Therefore, I took this time at SemTech to share with everybody the idea of querying the Web of Linked Data as if it were a database.
A Linked Data gathering took place on Wednesday afternoon and I gave a 5 min pitch of SQUIN. I showed the audience the Researchers Map demo (that won the Scripting Challenge at ESWC2009) and explained how SQUIN worked. Furthermore, I talked about the plans that I have with Turn2Live.com in which they will start to consume music Linked Data through SQUIN (and also start publishing Linked Data too!). After my 5 min pitch, somebody (his first name was Drew) had already downloaded SQUIN, started running it on his laptop and was querying the Web of Linked Data… all in less than 5 min!
On Thursday morning, Tony Shaw, the organizer of the Semantic Technology Conference told me that he heard a lot of people talking about SQUIN the night before and that knowing about SQUIN was the highlight of this conference. I was impressed! He immediately invited me to give a quick session on SQUIN. I gave a quick talk at 11am to a small crowd of people who had not seen SQUIN before and had just quickly heard about it the night before.
In summary, I believe that we need to offer tools that will allow to query, use, consume Linked Data in a very simple, easy and quick manner. That is the goal of SQUIN. I acknowledge that a lot of work needs to be done, but this is a start!
Juan
Tags: Demo, Presentation, Researchers Map