The day began at a session titled: The Future of Social Networks: The Need for Semantics. Unfortunately, it didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. I understand SNSs, and I understand that they don’t talk to each other, and I understand that people get tired of logging on to multiple places with multiple passwords. The stuff that was interesting was interesting for the developers because it demonstrated the workings of a doohickey called “SIOC” (Semantically Interlinked Online Communities). That is what the presenters were pushing, and I will eagerly add it to the list of things to check out.
I left this one at the break in favor of something that promised to be less technically taxing. Web 3.0 / Semantic Wave Market Outlook; it did not give me much to take away other than “The semantic web is coming; there’s lots of opportunities coming your way. Are you ready?” No. I’m not. I need a “How To Take Advantage of Those Opportunities.”
The afternoon session was great, especially for a State CPA Society employee. The ins and outs of XBRL.
While not too sure how to incorporate this into a website, there were lots of tools presented and contacts made that can be leveraged to get CalCPA member more in tuned with the XBRL revolution.
For example, the SEC places examples of XBRL usage on its site: http://www.sec.gov/spotlight/xbrl/xbrlwebapp.shtm.
One of the session leaders was a representative of the XBRL International Consortium (Eric Cohen), a tremendous speaker, and a great contact. I also met Brand Niemann, who with MSU’s Bill McCarthy has been working on what they’re calling an “Accounting Ontology.” This is what I’ve been talking about since I got on board with Semantics, so I’m very excited to see where this leads and how CalCPA can get more involved.
The day finished with a very philosophical session on categorization and prototypes and hierarchies of knowledge systems. Basically, What goes in to calling something what it is? It makes more sense for the lecturer, whose business it is to catalog screws, paint, and office supplies, but what if you catalog educational courses. A horse is a horse of course, but a 4-hour CPE class on subtrusts is many other things. I found his answer unsatisfactory (academically sound, but not particularly helpful to simply label my courses “courses”), but it led to a contact from http://jisc.cetis.ac.uk whom I will seek out tomorrow).
