Photo credit: Flickr/Hamed Parham

If your business hasn’t yet begun exploring how it can better understand and respond to the thoughts and opinions about it that consumers share with the world on social media, it may not be long before it does.

Gartner recently released its list of the top ten strategic technologies for 2011, and among the categories on that list was social analytics. The research firm describes social analytics as including techniques ranging from social filtering to social-network analysis to sentiment analysis and social-media analytics.

Those categories – or at least a fair number of the offerings falling into them – owe a lot of their existence to semantic web technologies and standards, from NLP to RDF. As Gartner sums it up, “social network analysis tools are useful for examining social structure and interdependencies” and “involves collecting data from multiple sources, identifying relationships, and evaluating the impact, quality or effectiveness of a relationship.”

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When I helped launch the Semantic Technology Conference and later the SemanticUniverse.com website, I also started watching the Semantic Technology Industry.  In the time since that first SemTech Conference in 2005, I have watched the technologies and the surrounding community grow significantly. Along the way, the business of the Semantic Web has also grown up.  Standards have been refined, tools developed, books written, partnerships formed, investments made, and companies have grown. Today, organizations have real-world implementations to show.  The case studies are robust, and are allowing companies to do things in ways they simply could not before.  Often, they are able to do so in less time and at a lower cost than before. There are companies that have built solid in-house, B2B and B2C semantic applications and tools.  There are startups and innovations.  There are creative semantic solutions to traditional data management issues and business concerns.

There is a lot going on in the world of Semantic Web business.  And yet, we have barely begun to scratch the surface.

In September, SemanticUniverse.com and the SemTech Conference were acquired by WebMediaBrands.  For more information about the acquisition, see the initial announcement  and Tony Shaw’s recent blog post .  I am absolutely thrilled about what this merger means for the community.  We will offer the same excellent multimedia content and live events you have come to expect from both organizations.  In coming days, weeks, and months, we will introduce new community tools and resources.  If you are new to the world of Semantic Web, Web 3.0, and Linked Data, we want to welcome you and offer a guiding hand, and we will be working hard to provide the platform for you to connect with other members of the community.

We have big plans. 

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The RDB2RDF Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of R2RML: RDB to RDF Mapping Language. R2RML is a language for describing how to put relational data on the Semantic Web. With R2RML, people express customized mappings from relational databases to RDF datasets, allowing them to view existing relational data in the RDF data model, expressed in their preferred structure and target vocabulary.