Jeni's Musings

Roughly ten years ago, I was attending KAW’98. I remember that conference as one of the best weeks of my life. I had great company. I saw scenery like I’d never seen before. I presented my PhD work for the first time to people who were (at least politely) interested in it. And I learned a lot, both from the presentations and less formal discussions.

(I remember driving back to Nottingham when we returned; a rainbow appeared in front of us, seeming to arch over our destination in a perfect finale.)

Looking back at that paper is like looking at my past generally is: much of it makes me cringe, but parts of it are surprisingly good. What’s interesting is that if you swap a few terms for modern buzzwords, it’s still a pretty neat idea. It’s also amazing how far we’ve come — how much has become common-place — in just ten years.

On Thursday morning, I was down to chair the first session in the “Core Technologies” track. Two interesting papers: one on XForms and one on Google Base. Then I snuck on to the “Applications” track to hear about scientific Wikis and the trials of managing schema repositories.