Microsoft recently hosted SemGrail an invitation only workshop focused on the Semantic Web near their headquarters in Seattle. As can be seen in the picture the workshop invitees were comprised of a small number of prominent figures in the Semantic Web arena including: Jim Hendler, Amit Sheth, Frank van Harmelen, Tim Finnin and Natasha Noy. Danny Weitzner of W3C also attended and Microsoft participants included Jonathon Grudin. I was the KMi representative. The overall goal of the workshop was to enable Microsoft to understand in general the state of the art in Semantic Web research and in particular how one can create and use semantics at Internet scale and how semantics can be utilised to support confidentiality. Naturally, given the attendees listed above the workshop proved to be very interesting and stimulating. However, for me, most interesting is the fact that this event may herald Microsoft joining the Semantic Web community. Watch this space.