I am sitting in Singapore Changi airport waiting to get on my flight to London. I will attending Drupalcon in Szeged Hungary along with my colleague Nicholas Roberts.

Here is a brief glimpse of what we will be up to:

With only 9 days on the ground, it will be fast paced tour through Europe. I am really looking forward to seeing mainland Europe as my only experience was half a day in Frankfurt whilst waiting for a late night flight back to Australia.

My first stop will be in Vienna to visit the Semantic Web Company. I have become friends with Andreas Blumauer through phone calls and online skype chats, but it will be lovely to finally meet him in person and see what amazing things his company is up to.

After that its straight to Szeged Hungary where Drupalcon 2008 is being held. It looks like a wonderful small town and I can't wait to spend a bit of time wondering around between sessions and in the evenings.

Drupalcon is the largest get together in the world for Drupal, an open source Content Management Platform. BoaB has been keenly using and watching this technology for the past 8 months and has started using it in a number of projects. At the conference we hope to catch up with the people who are building the coolest stuff and swap notes and see what we can bring back home. A big part of our interest in Drupal also stems from its Semantic Web integration. There are a few hooks in place now, but that is set to expand with the next release of the system.

When Drupalcon is over I am off to Ireland to visit DERI. This group in Galway is amazing, they have built up an arsenal of tools in social / collaborative frameworks; tied together with Semantic Web technology.  I will be meeting with John Breslin who will be arranging a few of the other wizards to free up some of their time to sit down with me. I almost met John in Beijing for WWW 2008, but for some reason we never crossed paths. Travelling half way around the world is a sure way of making sure that doesn't happen again :)

And last, but certainly not least I will be visiting Talis in the UK. I have met a number of the Talis folk at various conferences around the world, Ian, Sam, Tom, Chris, Nadeem, Rob and Paul. My first run in with a Talisian was Ian Davis early in 2007 at Semtech, San Jose. He was immediately friendly and very easy to talk to. Ian is CTO at Talis and has been a key figure in the Semantic Web space. Talis is creating a Semantic Web platform rightly dubbed "Talis Platform". This is the building blocks and a lot of nails and glue that can be used (and is being used) to build some amazing Web 3.0/Semantic Web/Linked Data apps.

It is going to be a cracker...