Amy Guy

Raw Blog

Sunday, February 10, 2013

Week in review: Planning trips!

4th - 10th February

When helping to organise an event, it's impressive how much time sending emails, updating websites and spreadsheets, having meetings and generally coordinating things can take up.   So that's a lot of what I've done this week.  Not PhD, but related enough to be excusable... sort of... (Smart Data Hack and Open Data Day: Joined Up Edinburgh)

I have finally booked plane tickets to Serbia for Resonate new media festival, at which I'm hoping to make useful contacts with independent digital media producers, learn some stuff about big data visualisation at the workshops (my places at the ones I've applied to haven't been confirmed yet though), and generally learn more about the digital art scene (and figure out ways SW technologies can benefit people who are part of it).  And also to enjoy Belgrade, as I'll have a spare couple of days either side of the festival.  Because the flights were cheaper then!  Honest!  I actually lost an entire afternoon hunting for cheapest flights on websites that weren't obviously scams (Cheap-o-Airlines?  Really??  Ultimately booking through JAT directly was the best option), then negotiating cheapest trains to London in order to catch flights, then sending CouchSurfing requests, because why spend money on a hostel when you can meet wonderful new people and get tourist advice for free?

I also applied for a place at the Semantic Web Summer School in Spain in July.  It looks fantastic and educational and stuff.  And I applied for funding to help cover then 900EUR entry cost (a whole week, accommodation and meals included), and SICSA are providing £500, yay!

Two thirds of Ontologies with a View met this week, and we discussed BBC use of Linked Data.  I only managed to skim the paper, but knew the general principles from articles I'd read about their work before... I will read it properly at some point, though I think a more technical discussion of what they did might be useful.