Today was Saturday – a day for workshops and committee stuff. I had a workshop at 8:30, so I headed out for a Starbuck’s at 7. There is a coffee place in the hotel, and it does serve Starbuck’s, but I figured I would have a bigger healthier choice of breakfast breads at a real one. Silly me. Austin’s hopping 6th Street is abandoned and a bit seedy in the glare of a sunny early morning. Nonetheless, I did find the Starbuck’s.
My workshop was called “Thesaurus to Ontology”, and was about extending thesaural and other relationships into two XML schema – OWL and SKOS – both of which lend themselves to Semantic Web activity. If you take Subject Analysis (or maybe Information Organization) with me you may hear more about this.
After the workshop I took a free (!) city bus to the corporate headquarters and largest US store of Whole Foods. It is incredible – the best WF food court I have seen, a huge grocery store, and a kitchen store associated with the WF culinary institute. I stocked up on healthy breakfast and room snack stuff, and also purchased some “beverages” for the student party on Sunday night. I ran into Linnea on the way back, and saw Sheila Denn coming out of her workshop when I got back to the hotel.
The local LIS school, at University of Texas, threw a reception at a tavern called The Cedar Door, so a bunch of us headed down there. I saw a couple of Simmons students, had a beer, chatted with some friends (including former Simmons faculty member Gary Geisler, who says hi), and walked back with Edie Rasmussen (U British Columbia), next ASIST President.
Pictures from today can be found on the SIMMONS ASIST flickr site, in the ASIST 2006 set.