First, let me be clear that this is not a post about a Second Life for database hackers.

I just heard an interesting talk by AnHai Doan at an information integration workshop. His talk, on Best effort data integration (presentation slides), was built around the problem of doing data collection and integration for web communities, such as database researchers. One result is DBLife — a very nice prototype of a dynamic portal of current information for the database research community. The systems automatically discovers and revisits web pages and resources for the community, extracts information from them, and integrates it to present a unified view of people, organizations, papers, talks, etc. It also summarizes the interesting new facts for the day, such as new papers, conferences, or projects.

See Community Information Management, AnHai Doan et al., Bulletin of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Data Engineering, 29(1), 2006 for a longer overview of their project and DBLife.

This project takes a database approach, but the Semantic Web could offer a lot to enhance it. There should be an AILife, IRLife, GraphicsLife, etc. The underlying semantic models for this will have a lot in common, so they could be supported by a set of common shared ontologies. Moreover, many of the instances — people, conferences, projects — will show up in several portals. Finally, RDF and SPARQL would be the ideal interchange languages when portals want to import or export data.

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