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

A collaborative initiative by the three University of California campuses in Southern California (Los Angeles, San Diego, and Irvine) has been announced. UCLA, UCSD, and UCI are coming together for the first time to form a semantic Computing Consortium. The intent of the consortium will be to ally Semantics from both the Industry/Commercial and Academic Perspectives, not only to promote the technology, but also to create an infrastructure usable to all participants, in addition to stimulating the interest of this still nascent, but extremely powerful technology.

The existence of the Semantic Computing Center will undoubtedly have a powerful and positive impact on the Southern California community in general, as well as facilitate significant advancement and progress in the Arena of Semantic Computing, from both an academic and commercial prospective. Having such a powerful consortium here in Southern California is an extremely exciting prospect and will facilitate in defining/creating Southern California as a high tech strip with respect to Semantic Computing.

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SemTech 2011 Coverage

Barbara H. Starr

In Barbara Starr’s (Ontologica) session this week at Semtech 2011, San Francisco, she presented a detailed timeline outlining the adoption of RDFa and semantic search enhancements by the major search engines.  In addition to mentioning the rapid growth of the Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud, she showed a movement by the search engines, in particular Google, to support semantic search. The movement is going away from a web of documents with hyperlinks to a web of data and semantic links. Her timeline showed the evolution from search engine support for structured data formats such as Resource Description Framework-in-attributes (RDFa) through last week’s announcement of the Schema.org alliance.

In her talk, she demonstrated how the use of semantic technology in commercial searches can be accomplished by doing a query for “Barack Obama Birthday” on both Google and Bing.  Google returns answers from typical sources like answers.com and Wikipedia, as shown below in Fig. 1.0.

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