I am in Atlanta for the Open Repositories 09 where I’ve joined the rest of the Scholarly Communications gang (Lee Dirks, Alex Wade, Pablo Fernicola, and of course Tony Hey).

Tony Hey just announced the general availability of Zentity v1.0 (download). It’s been a loooong but very rewarding road over the last 1 1/2 years. Lee and Alex have been absolutely fantastic to work with and the Persistent team have been amazing. MSR’s Santosh Balasubramanian was the driving force at the beginning and Anthony Hanses at the end. Even though I am naming Harsh “no issues” Thakur, “stay on track” Shailesh Nikam, and Sandeep “commando” Maurya in this post, there were many others who worked really hard to make Zentity v1.0 a reality today. Congratulations and many thanks to all of them.

While I am confident about the quality of the release, there are bound to be problems that we are going to fix. I am already seeing some interesting questions appearing on the Zentity twitter stream. Please go ahead and send me an email, tweet your questions, suggestions, feedback. We are all going to do our best to capture it and respond as soon as possible.

We are also holding a workshop on Thursday (Tools for Repositories – the Microsoft Research & the Scholarly Information Ecosystem). A large part of the Scholarly Communications effort (lead by Lee Dirks) will be presented there… the free tools and plugins and services we are making available, discussion of ideas, concepts, the future, etc! I am going to be there to discuss with the attendees the inner workings of Zentity, to show them how to use it as a development framework for interesting, data/semantics-driven applications. In addition to the reasoning examples I have shown in the past, I am going to demonstrate a brand new Silverlight-based sample from the museum domain. Along the way, we’ll utilize the great Microsoft tools and runtimes.

I want the workshop, and the Zentity session in particular, to be interactive and attendee-driven. So, tweet against the Zentity stream or email me with what you’d like to see during the workshop; send a challenge about what you’d like Zentity to do for you; talk about an application you’d love to see on top of repository/semantic store.

There is also an article-interview about Zentity with Lee, Alex, and myself over on the Microsoft Research site… Facilitating Semantic Research. I am going to be posting more information about the rest of the semantics-related work we’ve been doing and is steadily delivered.

(Photo by Kathleen Kennedy Knies)

Summary of links:

• Zentity twitter stream
• Zentity official page
• Zentity v1.0 download
• Zentity forum
• Open Repositories 09 workshop on Tools for Repositories – the Microsoft Research & the Scholarly Information Ecosystem
• Scholarly Communications feedback email

Links to some previous related entries:

• “The Age of Semantics”
• “Microsoft and “Research-Output” Repositories”
• “Research Output Repository Platform”
• “Relationships can have properties as well”
• “Merging data graphs – myExperiment & Resource-Output Repository Platform”
• “Extending Famulus using arbitrary data models”
• “Research-Output Repository Platform (Codename  Famulus’) Beta 1 is Live”
• Famulus and M – Added “symmetric” relation
• Building an MGrammar-based application for Famulus

More on this blog under the “Scholarly Communications” category.