Dr. Hendler is director of Semantic Web and Agents Research at the Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Laboratory. He gave two presentations: "The Semantic Web - Bringing Meaning to the World Wide Web" and "Dynamic Service Choreography on the Semantic Web."

These presentations made a convincing case that the technologies necessary to make the semantic web a practical reality are now in place. In particular the W3C have approved OWL as the W3C standard for representing ontologies and providing a more rigorous semantic markup for documents and Web services. Dr. Hendler presented a number of real world applications that he and his students had built, based on these and other web based standards, which vividly demonstrated the potential of the semantic web.

For example, he showed a tool that allowed a relatively novice developer to discover, compose and execute a series of published Web services into a usable application based on the fact that the elements for their WSDL interfaces were semantically associated with a common set of ontologies represented in OWL. The semantic markup of these interfaces needed to be performed by Dr. Hendler's team, illustrating the fact that although the technology and ontologies are there to allow these type of applications to be built, what is missing is the necessary tagging of Web services and documents with those ontologies. Dr. Hendler expects that the semantic web will benefit from a network effect similar to that which drove the original web, that will accelerate this semantic markup process.

What distinguished this lecture from others on the semantic web we've seen is the presentation of a number of working solutions that took advantage of the current standards and technology to solve non-trivial problems.

Most of these example tools and applications were developed on an open source and are available at one of two web sites:

http://www.cs.umd.edu/~hendler
http://owl.mindswap.org

The sites also include slides from his presentations.