SemTechBiz is returning to San Francisco on June 3-7, and once again we plan to make it the biggest and most comprehensive educational conference on the business of semantic technologies. And that’s exactly where we are asking you to contribute please – by sharing the practical experience you have gained in your own semantic projects.

We’re looking for case studies big and small – whether you’re building the semantic infrastructure of the future, like the DoD Enterprise Web, or you’ve done semantic annotation on a local business web site, like Plush Beauty Bar. They’re all relevant, because the curiosity of the audience is so rich and diverse.

The Call for Presentations ends on January 16, 2012, so get your abstract together ASAP. All the information you need, and the links to submit your presentation proposal, are HERE.

Conference registration is also open. Register by February 17 and save with substantial early bird discounts.

If you have any questions, feel free to email me at Tony@SemanticWeb.com

Thanks,

Tony Shaw

New Primal Pages for Publishers leverages advanced semantic technology to make Web publishing and community engagement easier than ever

DEMO Fall 2010 – SANTA CLARA, CA, September 14, 2010 — Live today from the 2010 DEMO Fall Conference, Primal, a pioneer of Internet automation technology, officially launched an exciting new product.  Primal Pages for Publishers provides a simpler, more convenient way to assemble and publish Web content. With just a few clicks, Pages for Publishers automatically generates unique web pages based on the interests of individual people in the publisher’s audience. Following the launch of its semantic technology platform and thought networking products for consumers in June, Primal presents the company’s latest innovation at the world-renowned DEMO conference, taking place this week at the Silicon Valley Hyatt Regency in Santa Clara September 13 – 15, 2010.

Primal Pages for Publishers automates the entire publishing process, from identifying topics to provisioning content to organizing information. It also provides a dynamic and vibrant medium for engaging readers directly in the process. This not only saves publishers valuable time and money but also providers their audience with a more personalized and engaging online experience. For innovative publishers large and small, Primal Pages delivers increased revenue opportunities, more reader engagement, and reduced costs via a scalable, customizable platform.

“We recognized that individuals and organizations were really struggling to create online content, so we decided to provide people with a dead-simple way to get that job done,” said Primal’s Founder and Co-President Peter Sweeney. “We’re streamlining the management of even the broadest subject matter and tailoring the user experience to markets of one. With Primal Pages, the audience effortlessly personalizes their online experience, under the editorial guidance of the publisher, leading to a much richer experience for all.”

Pages for Publishers enables media outlets, independent publishers, and individuals to augment their online presence with fresh content from around the Web, driven by the specific interests of each individual reader. Pages can incorporate a range of content sources based on the requirements of the publisher, such as blogs, book recommendations, images, news and other reference material.

Primal technology allows their readers to imagine and architect content in real-time rather than placing the burden on the publishers to build it in advance. Further, by drawing upon information from the entire Web, Pages for Publishers offers the publisher’s audience a compelling reason to stay engaged.  By providing a scalable, customizable platform, Primal dramatically reduces the costs of maintaining large websites and communities. Primal plans to offer ad-supported and transactional pricing models to support publishers of all sizes.

 “Consumers are looking for instant gratification.  Primal now offers Web publishers a way to leverage the mass amount of content on the Web to provide a seamless, complete experience in one simple view.  We feel that this implementation of semantic technology will be a game changer for the industry,” said Matt Marshall, executive producer of DEMO.

Primal Pages is different from traditional approaches that utilize teams of people to search and seek out information on a specific topic. Primal applies a unique and patented semantic synthesis technology to completely automate the process, saving publishers significant time and money. Today, valuable pieces of information are scattered across the Internet requiring publishers to troll the Web, visiting various destinations to find the information they need. Now, with Primal Pages for Publishers, publishers can painlessly supplement their original content with dynamic, relevant, and valuable content from across the Internet.

Peter Sweeney, along with Robert Barlow-Busch, will be presenting Primal’s Pages for Publishers live from the DEMO stage on Wednesday, September 15 and will be located at Station #13 in the Pavilion.

Keep up with Primal news here:

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About Primal

Primal provides consumers, publishers and developers with Internet automation products based on its proprietary semantic technology platform. Primal enables a more convenient and productive online experience, driven by thoughts and intentions of individual users. To learn more about Primal and to experience its Internet automation products, please visit www.primal.com

About DEMO
Produced by the IDG Enterprise events group, the worldwide DEMO conferences focus on emerging technologies and new product innovations, which are hand selected from across the spectrum of the technology marketplace. The DEMO conferences have earned their reputation for consistently identifying cutting-edge technologies and helping entrepreneurs secure venture funding and establish critical business    For more information on the DEMO conferences, visit http://www.demo.com.

Now that we’ve published nearly 10,000 of our tags as Linked Open Data, you’re probably wondering what kind of cool applications you can build with this data. To help you get started (and since linked data applications are a little different from your average Web application), we thought we’d provide a sample application and detailed information about how we built it.

The 2009 Semantic Technology Conference (SemTech) took place June 14-18, 2009 in San Jose, California. SemTech is produced by Semantic Universe and brings together the entire marketplace of semantic technology vendors, developers, researchers, start-ups, investors and customers. Here is a small sample of the hundreds of companies who signed up to attend:

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Peer39: Interview with Amiad Solomon

Founded in 2006 by an innovative group of scientists and engineers, Peer39 was voted by MIT’s Technology Review as one of the Top Ten Web Startups to Watch in 2008.  Semantic Universe editor Tony Shaw recently spoke with Founder and CEO Amiad Solomon about the company’s innovations, the FTC and what we may expect in the future.

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You’ll noitice that Semantic Universe looks different today than it did yesterday.  That’s because we’ve moved to a new publishing template – one of the OpenPublish formats developed by OpenCalais and Phase 2 Technologies.  We’ve done this for two main reasons:

Read more

Industry Veteran Will Help Meet Growing Enterprise Demand, Support Existing Client Base

Cambridge, Mass., November 30, 2009 — Cambridge Semantics, the leading provider of semantic middleware and user-driven tools, today announced that Michael Anthony has joined its management team as its vice president of sales.  Anthony will lead Cambridge Semantics’ efforts to execute a worldwide sales strategy to bring semantic solutions to enterprises across all industries.

Mr. Anthony joins Cambridge Semantics after spending the past 21 years as director of the Software, Electronic Equipment and Services business group of PRTM, a management consulting firm located in Waltham, Mass., where he also led the firm’s intellectual property strategy and licensing practice. Anthony brings to Cambridge Semantics over two decades of experience working with high-technology companies, and has extensive experience in assisting companies in everything from product strategy, new product development and portfolio management to technology strategy and market analysis.

Anthony is the co-author of Product and Cycle-Time Excellence for High-Technology Companies, a product strategy guide book written specifically for the 21st century high-tech industry.  He has contributed to countless articles in product development-focused trade magazines. He is also the Vice Chairman of the Board of Trustees for Wentworth Institute of Technology.

Prior to joining PRTM, Anthony worked in the semi-conductor equipment and computer industries. Anthony received his Masters in Business Administration from Boston University and holds a Bachelors of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Wentworth Institute of technology in Boston.

 "Michael is an important addition to our team. His in-depth knowledge of the high-tech industry and extensive sales experience will be invaluable in developing key customer relationships for Cambridge Semantics’ transformational software as it continues to gain momentum in the enterprise technology space,” said Michael Cataldo, Cambridge Semantics Chief Executive Officer.

The Anzo Suite
The Anzo Suite includes three components: Anzo for Excel, Anzo for the Web and The Anzo Data Collaboration Server.  Using the suite, organizations of any size can deploy an enterprise-wide semantic fabric in just days, allowing users to quickly link internal and external data sources such as databases and spreadsheets, making the combined data easy to manipulate and cross reference, and eliminating time-consuming and repetitive data gathering tasks.

About Cambridge Semantics
From its inception in 2007, Cambridge Semantics has worked to leverage semantic technology to make any data accessible to and consumable by, any application that needs it. Cambridge Semantics’ Anzo product suite enables even non-technical users to liberate data from proprietary applications, relational databases or Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, allowing it to be exchanged freely and in real-time. Cambridge Semantics’ fully scalable, enterprise-wide solutions are developed and deployed in a matter of days allowing users instant access to a semantic solution that solves an array of chronic data collection, aggregation, and integration challenges.

http://www.cambridgesemantics.com/

Microsoft and Wolfram|Alpha both announced today (via their blogs) that Microsoft’s Bing decision engine is one of the first Wolfram|Alpha Webservice API customers.
 
From Wolfram’s site…"Starting today, Wolfram|Alpha’s knowledge, computed from expertly curated data, will enrich Bing’s results in select areas across nutrition, health, and advanced mathematics."  The full post can be found here:

Wolfram Blog Post

From Microsoft’s site…"we‘ll be providing access to Wolfram|Alpha’s advanced algorithms and expertly curated data within the Bing experience. This new and exciting work is completely aligned with our broader goal of enabling faster, more informed decisions. Specifically, we will bring nutritional information and tools into Bing’s search results, as well as some straight up hard math and homework help." The full post can be found here:

Microsoft Blog Post

TopQuadrant Publishes Government Ontologies to Create Standard Data Exchange

International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) 2009 – WASHINGTON, D.C. – October 27, 2009 – TopQuadrant™, the global leader in Semantic Web application development technology, today announced oeGOV, an initiative for creating an open, W3C Semantic Web standards-based set of ontology models to encourage and facilitate the use of linked government data. The overarching goal of oeGOV is to make the vision of Semantically Linked Open Data a reality throughout the government sector, with an initial focus on U.S. government civil branches, agencies, departments, offices and state government.

“The Semantic Web offers a unique opportunity to increase citizen access to information about published government activities and data,” said Ralph Hodgson, CTO of TopQuadrant. “We expect the oeGOV initiative to improve the accountability of policy making by improving government transparency. By publishing ontologies for eGovernment, we will improve the distribution, navigation, integrity, interpretation and interoperability of published government data.”

TopQuadrant is spearheading the project by publishing the first set of ontologies at oeGOV.org, which include OWL representations of about 500 U.S. government civil bodies, models of the Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA), developed with GSA and the QUDT ontologies for units of measure, developed with NASA ARC. TopQuadrant invites others, particularly U.S. government agencies, to participate in the oeGOV effort. Interested parties can subscribe to the oeGOV blog at www.oegov.us/blog/.

The oeGOV initiative intends to interpret government data through precise semantics and controlled vocabularies, including geospatial and temporal aspects. Correlations and comparisons of data will be possible through the standardization of neutral models for data exchange, units of measure and transformation, along with an ontology for units of measure.

“There is government information that belongs in the hands of the governed,” said Dean Allemang, Chief Scientist at TopQuadrant. “But until very recently, most of this data had been published in idiosyncratic, disconnected forms. Semantic Web technologies provide an unparalleled capability for making public data genuinely available to the general populace. With new policies for information sharing in place, there is a wide appreciation of the need for sharable, connectable government information.”

oeGOV is a continuation of TopQuadrant’s commitment to eGovernment. In 2003, TopQuadrant co-organized the first Semantic Web technology conference for eGovernment at the White House Conference Center, which focused on the importance of sharing of data using the web infrastructure. Since then TopQuadrant has supported ontology development at a number of government agencies, including NASA and GSA. Several of these ontologies will be available through the oeGOV initiative.

For those interested in hands-on training for creating applications using government information published on linked data sites, TopQuadrant’s Dean Allemang will lead a course at ISWC entitled, ‘Building Semantic Web Applications for Government.’ This half-day tutorial draws on information-sharing projects such as the Federal Enterprise Architecture and resources at open government web sites such as oegov.org to provide attendees with a taste of real Semantic Web government. Attendees will learn the basics of the Semantic Web, as well as proven methods for accessing and combining existing information sources (e.g., spreadsheets, XML feeds and databases).

About TopQuadrant
TopQuadrant is the global leader in Semantic Web application development technology, solution services and training programs. Established in 2001 with the mission to enable enterprises to be agile through practical application of Semantic Web technologies, TopQuadrant offers TopBraid Suite, the only Semantic Web platform with a graphical application assembly toolkit and end-user customizable tools to discover, explore and visualize relevant data without programming. TopQuadrant’s Semantic Web applications enable enterprises to master the challenges of the global marketplace by becoming more agile, reducing costs and creating competitive business processes that easily adapt to change. The company’s customers include Fortune 1000 corporations in retail, pharmaceutical, financial services, medical/healthcare, manufacturing, and energy industries as well as government agencies in the areas of defense, intelligence and airspace. For more information, visit www.topquadrant.com.

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TopQuadrant, TopBraid, TopBraid Suite, TopBraid Ensemble, TopBraid Live, TopBraid Composer, TopBraid Composer Maestro Edition, SPARQLMotion, the TopQuadrant logo, and “Composing the Semantic Web” are trademarks of TopQuadrant Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
 

Updated interface allows executives, ad operations and sales teams to gather relevant data

NEW YORK – Online semantic advertising company Peer39 (www.Peer39.com) has upgraded its semantic advertising platform interface to provide clients with a dashboard that specifically addresses the information needs of executives, ad operations and sales teams.  The interface provides graphs, statistical breakdowns, suggestions and predictive functions related to content categories to which ads can be matched. The new dashboard also includes a post-campaign reporting feature.  
In the “Executives” tab, an overview of content categories and ad placement is presented in the form of pie charts. The information provided allows executives to clearly see high-yielding content categories along with those that are not performing well.
The ad operations section  drills down further into each content category and offers the opportunity to project the amount of content that will be created for a given category. This information is valuable for making predictions about revenue for a particular ad campaign.  The Dashboard also provides an overview of content that has been moved to premium advertising channels, providing teams with a detailed understanding of the increased performance of advertisers’ campaigns.
Sales teams have access to post-campaign reporting functions, which break down campaign results by conversions, clicks and volume. They can also add and block content categories depending on advertisers’ needs. This function is ideal for creating brand-safe environments on publishers’ Web sites, as certain advertisers do not want their ads appearing alongside certain content.
“Peer39’s new dashboard interface places a wealth of information at our clients’ fingertips,” said Amiad Solomon, CEO, Peer39. “We expect that it will give them a better understanding of, and the ability to take further advantage of, our platform’s capabilities.”

About Peer39:
Founded in 2006, Peer39 is creating the next generation online advertising and content monetization platform. Based on natural language processing and machine learning, its patented algorithms increase the value of online content by understanding page meaning and sentiment, matching the most relevant/effective brand safe display and text advertising. Headquartered in New York City, Peer39 maintains an R&D center in Israel, conducting primary research in semantic web technologies. Peer39 was named by MIT’s Technology Review as one of “Ten Web Startups to Watch” and included on AlwaysOn East 100 Top Private Companies List in 2009. For more information, please visit www.Peer39.com.