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At this month's St. Louis Interaction Design Group meet up, we will be treated to a presentation on The Semantic Web (abstract forthcoming) by Micah Herstand hosted by Habenaro in Downtown St. Louis. This is an exciting topic as the Semantic Web becomes more pervasive and accessible in our everyday lives. We hope you can join us and if you have any questions please let me know Event Details: When: 6:00 -7:30 June 23, 2009 Where: 712 N. Second St, Suite 200, St. Louis, MO‎ Host: Habanero Presenter: Micah Herstand Topic: The Role of Design on the Semantic Web The Semantic Web is the next evolution of the World Wide Web. Instead of relying on linked documents - webpages - it relies on "Linked Data." While this new paradigm will help people find information and make decisions on the Internet more efficiently, it provides a questionable future for the web design community. It could mean a smaller focus on design (both the IxDA and IA kind), and more of a focus on large, interconnected databases with a few general purpose applications for aggregation. However, I believe the Semantic Web should instead be encouraging to the design community. It allows us to return to the fundamentals of design and remember why humans will always prefer the presentation over the spreadsheet: Design tells us the story behind the information we seek. My aim is to describe design's distinctive purpose in the future of the Internet, and how the Semantic Web's focus on data, instead of documents, will help this purpose to succeed. Following the meeting if there is interest we can go to one of the nearby restaurants for food, drinks, and follow up conversations.