Here’s what I dreamed last night. (True!)
This is a scene from a James Bond movie. One of the old ones, starring, maybe, Roger Moore as 007 and Gert Fröbe as the Goldfinger-like villain. This is towards the middle of the movie. Mr Villain has invited our charismatic top spy to his luxury boat and just welcomes him on board. The two well-mannered cosmopolitan gentlemen exchange pleasentries. We know, of course, that Mr Bond has a hidden agenda: He wants to find out how Mr V. plans to destroy the world.
Mr V., however, is preoccupied: His henchmen, a disorganized group of misfits and dimwits (but well-dressed), don’t seem quite up to the job of running business aboard the ship. There’s supposed to be dinner, but no one knows where and if it’s ready. Mr V. is annoyed.
Here, my point of view changes from an uninvolved observer to that of one of the henchmen. While the boss and his English guest continue to plod along the script, I’m hurrying through the belly of the ship, trying to find out who’s in charge and what I’m supposed to do. No one seems to know though. Just like me, everybody has just been recruited. It’s quite a diverse bunch — I meet some English, Spaniards, Italians, French, Germans, and a handful of eastern Europeans.
Word has it that there will be a team meeting in the ship’s spacious bar area. Slowly people start to arrive. All are twenty- or thirtysomethings, some women. I actually know a few folks, they are fellow Semantic Web hackers I’ve met over the years. As we and the new people introduce each other, which is not easy as not everybody speaks English, it turn out that all of us are youngish researchers, developers and students who have bet their carreers on the success of the Semantic Web.
Unfortunately, before I or Mr Bond can figure out why a supervillain would hire a ragtag band of ex RDF hackers, the story drifts away on a tangent about newspaper Berliner Zeitung defending the freedom of the press by reporting on an effort of the German Secret Service to suppress publishing of unflattering photographs of the new German chancellor Angela Merkel.
Weird.