Bringing together academic staff and people from industry is the overall goal of the Semantic Web Meetup Alliance, a virtual fusion of interest groups which currently consists of 8 groups worldwide and over 3.600 members. Regional meetups are organized online and realized as an informal offline event with impulsive talks and open space discussions.
These communication channels are very popular in the US. Recently, the New York Semantic Web Meetup was organized together with the New York Times which presented their NYT Annotated Corpus.
Initiated by the Corporate Semantic Web project and workgroup, in joint cooperation with STI Berlin and other local industrial networks, we start this activity as a pioneer outside the US. The first meeting will be held on March 20th, 2009. The outline and location details will be announced soon on the Berlin Semantic Web Meetup page.
http://www.meetup.com/The-Berlin-Semantic-Web-Meetup-Group/
Please join the group and attend the first Berlin Semantic Web Meetup on March, 20th, 2009 !