[Editor's Note: This article originally included an incorrect link. The correct link to view the 2013 "Top Semantic Start-Up Competition" is http://semtechbizsf2013.semanticweb.com/sessionPop.cfm?confid=70&proposalid=5265".]

The finalists of the 2013 “Top Semantic Start-Up Competition” have been announced. This year’s finalists represent a broad spectrum of entrepreneurship within the world of semantic technology. The announcement states, “At the 2013 Semantic Technology & Business Conference, SemanticWeb.com and WebMediaBrands will award one company the prize as ‘Top Semantic Technology Start-Up.’ At 12:30 pm Monday, June 3^rd, companies will have the opportunity to compete on stage as they deliver their pitches before a panel of expert judges! The companies competing will have met the following conditions: (1) Have a demonstrable product (at least in ‘beta’ stage) in the SemTech and or SemWeb space, (2) Have received no more than a Series B round of financing.”

The finalists are: Read more

It’s pretty common these days for people to hit the web in search of medication advice to deal with symptoms they’re experiencing.  The trouble is, most people don’t approach the process in a truly safe manner.

Semantic technology can help rectify the situation. In fact, it’s already doing so in France, where Olivier Curé, an associate professor in computer science at the University of Paris-Est in France, created a web application based on the book by pharmacology expert and educator Jean-Paul Giroud Médicaments sans ordonnance: Les bons et les mauvais!, of which he is a co-author with Catherine Cupillard. The app is made available to their consumers via three big insurance companies there, in order to help the companies save costs on reimbursing them for buying drugs that won’t actually help their condition, or direct them to the appropriate drugs at pharmacies with which the insurers may have relationships to supply them at lower costs. An iPhone version of the app was just released to accompany the web version.

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Next month’s Semantic Technology and Business Conference in San Francisco will include a number of panels featuring experts from virtually every facet of the evolving world of semantic web technologies. Experts from major companies and successful startups will share their knowledge on such topics as semantic video, search, financial data, and semantic Big Data. Early bird prices end at midnight tonight. Save $500 off on-site prices and register now!

SemTechBiz Panels

Beyond the Blob: Semantic Video’s Coming Of Age – TV and Video Metadata powers video search, discovery, personalization, and is increasingly used as the basis for targeted advertising and product placement. Join this panel as they explore and discuss advances made and challenges faced over the past year in semantic applications for video.

RDF as a Universal Healthcare Exchange Language – RDF offers a practical evolutionary pathway to semantic interoperability. It enables information to be readily linked and exchanged with full semantic fidelity while leveraging existing IT infrastructure investments. Being schema-flexible, RDF allows multiple evolving data models and vocabularies to peacefully co-exist in the same instance data, without loss of semantic fidelity. This panel will discuss the goal of adopting RDF/Linked Data as a universal healthcare exchange language. Read more

Gary Hamilton of GovHealthIT recently wrote, “Today, the acquisition of patient information for population health management is typically done through Continuity of Care Documents (CCDs). Although the exchange of health information is possible via CCDs, the amount of information they contain can be overwhelming. As such, poring over CCDs to find information relevant to patient populations can be unwieldy and time consuming. With providers challenged to manage information in just one CCD, how can they hope to use these documents to effectively influence care at the population level? The key is to look for ways to use technology to target specific patient information, pinpoint new and relevant information and alert both patients and providers when updated information is available.” Read more

Panels are always among the most exciting and informative events at the Semantic Technology and Business Conference, and the panels at next month’s conference in San Francisco will be no exception. One of the most anticipated panels will happen at 3:45 on Tuesday, June 4, at 3:45. Search Engine Marketing in a Semantic World will examine a number of questions, including:

• Does the semantic web represent the beginning of the end of search engine optimization as we know it, or does the search engines’ adoption of semantic web technologies only add an additional dimension to search marketing without significantly impacting the fundamentals of SEO?
• Does the search engines’ drive to encourage structured data uses put sites not employing it at a disadvantage, and how far should the search engines go to ensure the search visibility of valuable sites not employing semantic web technologies? Read more

The inaugural hackathon at the Semantic Technology & Business Conference, Semantic Hack, will now be held at Citizen Space, a membership-based, coworking space located in San Francisco, very near the conference hotel.

With plenty of flexible space, a relaxed environment, lots of experience hosting hackathons, and an impressive list of other amenities, Citizen Space promises to be a perfect location for developers and designers to gather for a fun day of coding!

Semantic Hack is a day-long coding event that asks “What could you build if the entire web was your database?” — and then challenges participants to do it!

Semantic Hack brings together developers and designers to work with advanced web-page extraction technologies, RDF, OWL, SPARQL, linked data, sentiment analysis, newly available datasets, and other semantic technologies that help make the web more readable, accessible and dynamic for humans and more interpretable by machines. PLUS, you don’t have to know anything about semantics to attend. If you do, great!  But if not, this will be a great way to get started exploring.

Teams will compete to create the most intriguing and innovative apps atop these technologies, driving to win prizes and — who knows? — even help to usher in the next phase of the web.

There is no cost to sign up, and sponsorship opportunities are available. For more details, visit the Semantic Hack site.

Barbara Starr of Search Engine Land reports, “In a June 2010 Semantic Web Meetup in San Diego, Peter Mika of Yahoo!’s research division gave a presentation entitled, ‘The future face of Search is Semantic for Facebook, Google and Yahoo!’ As the title suggests, the presentation focused on the ever-growing use of semantic markup as a means for helping computers parse and understand content. The talk focused on what was then the current state of the Semantic Web, as well as upcoming formats/technologies in development and the research being done in the field of semantic search.” Read more

Image Courtesy: Flickr/Patrick Hoesly

The financial services industry is taking to semantic tech in an important way, and that’s in the form of the Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO), which aims to standardize the language used to precisely define the terms, conditions, and characteristics of financial instruments; the legal and relationship structure of business entities; the content and time dimensions of market data; and the legal obligations and process aspects of corporate actions. Attendees at SemTech Biz in San Francisco will get a deep dive on the how’s and why’s, at this session, while the FIBO Technology Summit invitation event will present an opportunity for working collaboratively to continue advancing the effort that has its roots in The Enterprise Data Management Council and communities of interests.

Leading that event will be Dennis E. Wisnosky, founder of Wizdom Systems, Inc. and former CTO and Chief Architect of the DoD Business Mission Area, who was recently named to provide technical strategy and operational guidance to help the Council finalize and implement FIBO standards, and David S. Newman, SVP & Strategic Planning Manager Enterprise Architecture at Wells Fargo, and Chair of the EDM Council’s Semantics Program. (Newman, with Enterprise Data Management Council Head of Semantics and Standards Mike Bennett, will also host the SemTech FIBO session.)  Speaking of the upcoming event, Wisnosky explains that a goal is to cast a wide net to find the new tech ideas and developments that both can bring benefits to FIBO in the short term and influence the longer-term research agenda to help the financial industry.

As FIBO stands now, in June the second draft of the FIBO Foundations ontology and the conceptual FIBO Business Entities ontology will be presented at a meeting of the Object Management Group in Berlin. By year’s end it is expected that the OMG will have ratified these as formal standards. “We are on the path to turn the corner from thinking of what FIBO will be to delivering it,” says Wisnosky. Read more

This year’s SemTechBiz Conference in San Francisco is already drawing experts using and developing semantic technologies in business, health care, the financial sector, public services, and beyond. But even if you’re completely new to Semantic Technologies, The Semantic Technology & Business Conference has sessions for you including an excellent tutorial by Lee Feigenbaum, co-creator of Semantic University.

Lee Feigenbaum is a leading expert in Semantic Web technologies and their applicability to enterprise IT challenges. As VP of Marketing & Technology at Cambridge Semantics, Lee helps ensure that the Anzo product suite continues to address customers’ ever-changing and diverse data challenges. Lee is an active member of the W3C Semantic Web standards community, currently serving as the Co-Chair of the W3C’s SPARQL Working Group, leading the design of SPARQL, the Semantic Web query language. Lee authored “The Semantic Web in Action,” a 2007 article in Scientific American. Read more

Walldorf, Germany (PRWEB) April 22, 2013 — fluid Operations (fluidOps), leading provider of cloud and data management solutions based on semantic technologies, today announced its participation in this year’s Semantic Technology & Business Conference (SemTechBiz) taking place June 2 to 5 in San Francisco, USA. SemTechBiz brings together today’s industry thought leaders and practitioners to explore the challenges and opportunities jointly impacting both corporate business leaders and technologists.

During the event, fluid Operations representatives will be presenting and demonstrating the Information Workbench, a platform for cloud-based data management that capitalizes on Linked Data, semantic technologies, cloud and virtualization technologies, and allows partners and customers to build innovative Linked Data applications and customized solutions. Read more