Yesterday, Paul Walsh (Segala CEO) was over in Yahoo! to present “How to enable trust/better search” armed with a can of beans.

The event was hosted by Yahoo! at Yahoo!’s Mission College Campus, Santa Clara, California.

The purpose of the event was to present the new technology with real world applications that begin to show what POWDER can do.

POWDER and us

POWDER (The Protocol for Web Description Resources) is a new technology from the W3C that bridges the gap between the traditional Web and the Semantic Web. It’s simple, easy to use and can fit into existing publishing work flows with minimal development effort.

To the end user POWDER delivers more of what you asked for and less of what you don’t want, allows you to judge the trustworthiness of information found on the Web and brings the best of the Web to your browser.

For Publisher’s, POWDER is an easy and inexpensive way to describe lots of things at once (such as everything on a Web site). Is open to authentication so that others know they can trust your data and opens up your data to the Semantic Web.

For Service Provider’s, POWDER supports real-time content personalization, makes discovering relevant & trustworthy content easier and identifies online resources that meet criteria that are not solely based on popularity.

The Agenda

• Welcome, Anne Toth, Yahoo!
• Introduction to POWDER. Phil Archer, Family Online Safety Institute, POWDER Working Group Chair
• The Semantic View, Jeremy Carroll, Top Quadrant
• The QUATRO Project — Authenticated, Machine Readable Trustmarks, Kostas Chandrinos, i-sieve Technologies
• POWDER in your Browser, Phillip Grønvold, Opera Software.
• A commercial view of POWDER, Paul Walsh, Segala
• Tying in with other standards, Matt Womer, W3C
• Comments and discussion from the floor

It’s still early hours in San Franciso so I’ve not had the opportunity to speak with Paul and find out how the event went. But, Paul did manage to drip feed the rest of us via Twitter.

Phil Archer, FOSI, CTO is up first. Talking about POWDER.

I’ve just presented technology that a 10 year old would get. Next guy up is talking about what’s under it – way too technical. But he’s good.

Matt Womer from W3C is up. I like matt.

Opera is now up. But I’m not permitted to tell you what they’re doing.