Some of my personal highlights (in no particular order):
- Semantic Maps as presented by Jeroen de Dauw. This was a bit of an eye-opener, as I had previously briefly thought about using something like this, but decided it wouldn't be worth the bother if it involved having to type in a lot of coordinates.
Well guess what, you don't have to: it provides full geocoding functionality, effectively allowing you just to type in a street address. It ties in with Google maps as well as Open StreetMaps, Yahoo maps and OpenLayers. Overall it looks just massively useful. - WikiTags by Jesse Wang: a very impressive demo on how to link the world of (semantic) wikis to the world of MS Office. Automated annotation of terms in MS Word, live links between Outlook and the wiki, quick and easy adding of e-mail messages to the wiki, etc. etc. The thought behind this effort appeals to me: don't rage against the machine but accept that MS Office tools are the daily working environment for many people and organisations, and cater to that.
- The Suite of Halo extensions presented by Daniel Hansch: although I was already aware of the Halo extensions I had not yet completely grokked the full range of features and improvements it encompasses. In particular its support for fine-grained access control is something that captured my attention. On the ToDo list to take for a test drive.
- SparqlExtension by Alfredas Chmieliauskas and Chris Davis: particularly impressive about this demo was the way in which this extension enables integration of (RDF) data from many different sources and creating all sorts of reportings on that data. Can't wait to tweak this one to talk to a Sesame server and start testing it on our internal group wiki.
- Rudi van Bavel and Michael Cariaso both showed very interesting stuff involving the creation, maintenance and use of SNPedia, a wiki containing huge amounts of human genetic data.
