Sunday Discussions and Workshops

workshops

Build Your Solopreneur Roadmap: A Workshop for Data Professionals (2 hour workshop)

Clair Sullivan

In this workshop we'll discuss the real stuff people need to figure out when thinking about going solo. I will walk participants through an actual calculation of what they presently make an hour, exploring how this compares to typical hourly rates for contractors from large contracting companies. This exercise will demonstrate that individuals working in a solopreneur capacity are much more competitive than they realize in this market. This will then be the basis for an exercise on setting rates, where a lot of people get stuck. From there we will discuss the nuts and bolts of setting up a business such as legal structures, taxes, and contracts. This will include practical, from-the-trenches advice for getting started. Finally, we will discuss strategies for landing your first client, following the philosophy that it is easier to land your first client than your next job.

discussions

“AI-Ready Data”: Switch, Spectrum, or Just Buzzword?)

Jean-George Perrin

Everyone claims to have AI-ready data — but what does that even mean? Is it about perfect pipelines, labeled datasets, or governance frameworks? Or is “AI-ready” just the new “data-driven” — a shiny phrase that hides more than it reveals?

In this unconference session led by Jean-Georges “jgp” Perrin, chair of the Bitol project at the Linux Foundation, we’ll put the concept of AI readiness under the microscope. Through an open, collaborative debate, we’ll explore questions like:
• Is AI readiness a switch you flip or a maturity model you evolve through?
• Who defines readiness — data engineers, data scientists, compliance teams, or the AI itself?
• What role do semantic layers, ontologies, and knowledge graphs really play in achieving AI readiness? Are they enablers of understanding or just another abstraction layer with good PR?
• Can open standards like ODCS (Open Data Contract Standard) and ODPS (Open Data Product Standard) help transform “AI-ready” from a marketing slogan into something measurable, testable, and trustworthy?

We’ll take inspiration from the community-driven success of Defining Data Products: A Community Effort — a reminder that shared understanding doesn’t come from ivory towers, but from practitioners challenging each other’s assumptions.
Expect sharp insights, respectful arguments, and perhaps a few existential moments about what “readiness” actually means in the age of AI. No slides. No scripts. Just truth-seeking.

Letter from a fish: Computing, objectivity and the limits of AI. A response to Bill Inmon

Ole Olesen-Bagneux

The fundamental binary logic of computing - 1 or 0 - sets very hard boundaries for what technology can achieve, in the field of semantics.
The groundbreaking work of the Scottish mathematician George Boole combined Aristotelian logic with equational expressions to demonstrate that formal reasoning was possible to think of through a mathematical lens. That turned into Boolean Logic.
Ultimately, Boole’s thinking ended up defining the logical ports that make up circuits in computer hardware.
All bits in all computers travel through this logic, and as such, the Boolean logic is the physical limit of how data can be processed. And therefore, the very infrastructure through which we process semantics technologically, is hardwired to formal reasoning.
That is the boundary.
In his 2025 talk at Data Day Texas, computer scientist and author Bill Inmon applied his thinking on data to the world of text. As a figure of speech, Bill called himself a human that lived on land - the world of data. The world of text, however, was water, and he could not express his thinking as if he was a fish, he had to express himself as a human of data. And that’s how the textual warehouse came into being - a surprising, functional evolution of the data warehouse.
But what happens, when the world of text approaches the world of data? If fish suddenly should make their way onto land, to the world of data? What will they see, what will they say?
This is a letter from a fish.
It’s a story of how we have used technology to push text itself forward, as an enormous splash of semantic ambiguity beyond the Boolean Logic, told through three of the absolute pioneers in Library and Information Science, Suzanne Briet, Henriette Avram and Elaine Svenonius.