Brian Sletten

Forward Leaning Software Engineer

Brian Sletten
 

Brian Sletten is a liberal arts-educated software engineer with a focus on forward-leaning technologies. His experience has spanned many industries including retail, banking, online games, defense, finance, hospitality and health care. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from the College of William and Mary and lives in Auburn, CA. He focuses on web architecture, resource-oriented computing, social networking, the Semantic Web, data science, 3D graphics, visualization, scalable systems, security consulting and other technologies of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. He is also a rabid reader, devoted foodie and has excellent taste in music. If pressed, he might tell you about his International Pop Recording career.

Presentations

Semantic Web Workshop

Tue 9:00 AM

The Web is changing faster than you can imagine and it is going to continue to do so. Rather than starting over from scratch each time, it builds on what has succeeded already. Webs of Documents are giving way to machine-processable Webs of Information. We no longer care about data containers, we only care about data and how it connects to what we already know.

Roughly 25% of the Web is semantically marked up now and the search engines are indexing this information, enriching their knowledge graphs and rewarding you for providing them with this information.

In the past we had to try to convince developers to adopt new data models, storage engines, encoding schemes, etc. Now we no longer have to worry about that. Rich, reusable interface elements like Web Components can be built using Semantic Web technologies in ways that intermediate developers don’t have to understand but end users can still benefit from. Embedded JSON-LD now allows disparate organizations to communicate complex data sets of arbitrary information through documents without collaboration.

Perhaps the concepts of the Semantic Web initiative are new to you. Or perhaps you have been hearing for years how great technologies like RDF, SPARQL, SKOS and OWL are and have yet to see anything real come out of it.

Whether you are jazzed or jaded, this workshop will blow your mind and provide you with the understanding of a technological shift that is already upon us.

In this workshop, we will:

Explain the Web and Web architecture at a deeper level
Apply Web and Semantic Web technologies in the Enterprise and make them work together
Integrate structured and unstructured information
Create good, long-lived logical names (URIs) for information and services
Use the Resource Description Framework (RDF) to integrate documents, services and databases
Use popular RDF vocabularies such as Dublin Core, FOAF
Query RDF and non-RDF datastores with the SPARQL query language
Encode data in documents using RDFa and JSON-LD
Create self-describing, semantic Web Components
Model and use inferencing with the Web Ontology Language (OWL)

Web Security Workshop

Wed 3:15 PM

If you’re not terrified, you’re not paying attention.

Publishing information on the Web does not require us to just give it away. We have a series of tools and techniques for managing identity, authentication, authorization and encryption so we only share content with those we trust.

Before we tackle Web Security, however, we need to figure out what we mean by Security. We will pull from the worlds of Security Engineering and Software Security to lay the foundation for technical approaches to protecting our web resources. We will also discuss the assault on encryption, web security features and emerging technologies that will hopefully help strengthen our ability to protect what we hold dear.

Topics include:

  • Security Engineering
  • Software Security
  • Encryption
  • Authentication and Authorization Mechanisms
  • Emerging Web Security Technologies

Web Security Workshop

Wed 5:00 PM

If you’re not terrified, you’re not paying attention.

Publishing information on the Web does not require us to just give it away. We have a series of tools and techniques for managing identity, authentication, authorization and encryption so we only share content with those we trust.

Before we tackle Web Security, however, we need to figure out what we mean by Security. We will pull from the worlds of Security Engineering and Software Security to lay the foundation for technical approaches to protecting our web resources. We will also discuss the assault on encryption, web security features and emerging technologies that will hopefully help strengthen our ability to protect what we hold dear.

Topics include:

  • Security Engineering
  • Software Security
  • Encryption
  • Authentication and Authorization Mechanisms
  • Emerging Web Security Technologies

OSG.js : 3D Scene Graphs in the Browser

Wed 8:00 PM

As powerful as WebGL is, it is a low-level toolkit. Trying to build sophisticated worlds with it is difficult and time-consuming. One way to solve the problem is to use a scene graph-based framework that does a lot of the heavy lifting for you. OSG.js is just such a framework that uses WebGL under the hood and is based upon OpenSceneGraph, the widely-used open source 3D scene graph system.

This talk will introduce you to the basics of scene graphs and provide several jaw-dropping examples of OSG.js in action.

Web Components

Thu 11:00 AM

Enough with the darn JavaScript frameworks already! There’s nothing wrong with a judicious use of this ubiquitous programming language, but it’s gotten a little out of hand. What if there were an evolvable future state of declarative and encapsulated user interface elements that was available today in most modern browsers?

The Web Components standards are bringing the ability to create custom, reusable components with appropriate encapsulation and protection from overzealous application CSS.

This is a two-part talk that will cover:

  • The Web Components standards
  • The Polymer Project that lays down a common foundation across all modern browsers and provides components, tools and frameworks for building modern, flexible applications for the Web
  • Mixing Web Components with other powerful new technologies like RDFa, JSON-LD and WebGL

Web Components

Thu 1:30 PM

Enough with the darn JavaScript frameworks already! There’s nothing wrong with a judicious use of this ubiquitous programming language, but it’s gotten a little out of hand. What if there were an evolvable future state of declarative and encapsulated user interface elements that was available today in most modern browsers?

The Web Components standards are bringing the ability to create custom, reusable components with appropriate encapsulation and protection from overzealous application CSS.

This is a two-part talk that will cover:

  • The Web Components standards
  • The Polymer Project that lays down a common foundation across all modern browsers and provides components, tools and frameworks for building modern, flexible applications for the Web
  • Mixing Web Components with other powerful new technologies like RDFa, JSON-LD and WebGL

WebGL

Thu 8:00 PM

HTML 5 has introduced us to the Canvas API, 2D graphics and the pleasures of plugin-free video and audio playback. One of the next hurdles we will face is native support for 3D graphics for simulations, visualizations and games.

WebGL is an exciting browser-based, plugin-free, hardware accelerated 3D that is starting to show up in games, data visualization, interactive websites and more.

This will be an example-driven talk that will cover the basics of 3D graphics, WebGL and how it is being used on the Web.

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Fri 9:00 AM

Encryption is a powerful tool for privacy. At least that is what we’re meant to think.

If you consider encryption to be a black box of magic, you should probably attend this talk.
If you think encryption will protect your secrets, you should probably attend this talk.
If you have (or haven’t) been following the news, you should probably attend this talk.

The truth is, encryption can be an effective way of making it harder for people to steal your secrets. But it isn’t magical, it isn’t fool proof and, depending on how you are using it, may be completely useless. It is a hard topic that we’ll only touch the surface on, but there are very few topics that are more crucial for our industry and profession to understand better than encryption. You don’t have to understand the math (although that will help), but you do have to understand what it will and won’t do for you*.

*and how implementations of it may have been intentionally compromised

Polymer: Shadow DOMS, Custom Components and the Future of Web

Fri 10:45 AM

Enough with the darn JavaScript frameworks already! There’s nothing wrong with a judicious use of this ubiquitous programming language, but it’s gotten a little out of hand. What if there were an evolvable future state of declarative and encapsulated user interface elements that was available today in most modern browsers?

There is! The Polymer Project is a young but impressive glimpse into where things should go.

It’s goals are:

  • Use the platform
  • Everything is an element
  • Eliminate boilerplate

This talk will introduce you to:

  • The Polymer Project
  • The strategy for supporting today’s browsers with tomorrow’s technologies
  • Application frameworks that build upon these core technologies
  • Custom visual and non-visual elements
  • The underlying W3C Specifications that engender all of this

WebRTC : Peer to Peer Communication on the Web

Fri 1:30 PM

Instant messaging, video conferencing, online audio calls and file sharing have become a crucial part of every day life. Until recently, this required the use of a centralized service. Now, with the WebRTC Standard from the W3C, we have the ability to communicate through our browsers without relying on third parties or plugins.

This talk will introduce you to the WebRTC standards from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). This includes:

  • establishing connections and sessions between peers
  • making video calls
  • making audio calls
  • instant messaging
  • file-sharing
  • security and privacy issues

Resource-Oriented Architecture Patterns for Webs of Data

Fri 3:15 PM

The surge of interest in the REpresentational State Transfer (REST) architectural style, the Semantic Web, and Linked Data has resulted in the development of innovative, flexible, and powerful systems that embrace one or more of these compatible technologies. However, most developers, architects, Information Technology managers, and platform owners have only been exposed to the basics of resource-oriented architectures.

This talk, based upon Brian Sletten’s book of the same name, is an attempt to catalog and elucidate several reusable solutions that have been seen in the wild in the now increasingly familiar “patterns” style. These are not turn key implementations, but rather, useful strategies for solving certain problems in the development of modern, resource-oriented systems, both on the public Web and within an organization’s firewalls.

Blog

SmartData Webinar: JSON-LD

Posted Monday, August 17, 2015

SmartData Webinar: JSON-LD To view just the slides from this presentation, click HERE>> About the Webinar The Semantic Web and its related technologies provide an incredibly powerful model for driving the cost of data integration down to nearly zemore »

SmartData Webinar Slides: JSON-LD

Posted Monday, August 17, 2015

SmartData Webinar Slides JSON-LD from DATAVERSITY To view the On Demand recording of the presentation, click HERE>> About the Webinar The Semantic Web and its related technologies provide an incredibly powerful model for driving the cost of data imore »

Aug 13 Smart Data Webinar: JSON-LD

Posted Saturday, July 11, 2015

DATE: August 13, 2015 TIME: 2 PM Eastern / 11 AM Pacific PRICE: Free to all attendees THIS WEBINAR HAS PASSED. The recorded session and slides will be posted within two business days. About the Webinar The Semantic Web and its related technologies provmore »

Web Components: Even Better With Semantic Markup

Posted Thursday, November 20, 2014

by Jennifer Zaino The W3C’s Web Components model is positioned to solve many of the problems that beset web developers today. “Developers are longing for the ability to have reusable, declarative, expressive components,” says Brian Sletten, a specialist imore »
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