Conference Websites

Today I’m in the very early planning phases of a website for the Web Science 2010 Conference.

What I’m hoping to do is combine

• What I learned running the WWW2006 Website with
• Best practice based on advise from the Semantic Web Conference Guys with
• The nifty back end I’ve built for the Web Science website, specifically the CMS which allows our admin staff to update records and pages without needing to get a sysprog. involved, and the nice RDFness.

What I’m hoping to have is a site that other people can lift good practice from. The organisation side is being done with Easy chair, and I assume the actual papers will end up in an updated version of http://journal.webscience.org/

At the very least I’m going to want to model:

• People (organisers, speakers, authors, maybe attendees)
• Sessions (events basically)
• Organisations (people’s affiliations, sponsors)
• Locations (people’s home cities, session locations)
• Documents (Slides, Posters, Papers)
• Presentations (Invited, papers etc.)
• Maybe tracks, if there’s some themed tracks.

I don’t have any faith in ontologies being used for mapping, so I provisionally plan to use Tom Heath’s ontology, but also provide more generic semantic relationships right there in the data. Also iCal.

I’m thinking how to arrange smart, but non-technical, staff so they can find URI’s for people, organisations and cities. I’m thinking for the 2nd two of asking for the Wikipedia URL and mapping that to dbpedia. It’s a reasonable task to ask someone to achieve. Speakers should just be expected to submit URIs as part of their data.

Ideally I’ll write a site that’s generic enough that we can reuse it later.