It’s probably safe to say that people want their firefighters, EMT, law enforcement and other emergency responders to be as best-equipped for their jobs as possible, so that they can be successful and well-protected, too.

Semantic technology can have a hand in making sure that happens. Deborah McGuinness, Tetherless World Senior Constellation Professor and Director of Web Science Operations John Erickson. both of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) , are spearheading an effort, thanks to some funding from the National Institute of Standards and Technology(NIST) under program manager William G. Billotte, to use semantic technology and social media to help that organization better understand what requirements should be for these heroes.

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Bart van Leeuwen, software executive (netage.nl) and firefighter (Amsterdam Fire Department), has a story of practical application of Semantic Web technologies that we have covered before here at SemanticWeb.com and in our Semantic Technology & Business Conference series. Below, we offer the video of the keynote address he delivered in June at the San Francisco event.

His, like many of the most successful Semantic Web case studies, is a story of iterative growth and agile development, a mixing of technical and cultural challenges and solutions. Even since Bart’s keynote at the recent London SemTechBiz conference, there have been developments, and we caught up with him to hear the latest (video after the jump).

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The Semantic Technology & Business Conference has been underway since Sunday, with tutorials and lightning sessions catching audience interest. The conference presentations get underway today, most of them following on the heels of the opening keynotes given by Bart van Leeuwen, firefighter and architect at netage.nl; Jay Myers, web architect at Best Buy; and Steve Harris, CTO of Garlik, a part of Experian.

Best Buy, as readers of this blog know, has been diving deep into the semantic web waters under Myers’ direction for a few years now, and he shared that journey with the audience at SemTech.

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If you missed last week’s excellent discussion with Bart van Leeuwen and Adrian Gschwend of netlabs.org, the recorded webcast is now available.  In this webcast, Adrian and Bart talk about the exciting work they are doing using Semantic Technology to help fire fighters get to incidents faster.

NOTE: This webcast is presented here in three parts.

The slides used in the presentation are available here: http://ktk.netlabs.org/misc/SemanticWeb-Webcast.pdf

Part 1:

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With everything that races through a fire team’s mind when needing to get to a fire, “how do we get there?” is a question that they need to answer — FAST.

Fire trucks operate under different rules than other vehicles (e.g. they do not have to stop for red lights), but they also have different limitations (e.g. their size). Join us for this webcast in which we will hear about how, in the city of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Fire Teams are leveraging Semantic Technologies to improve response time.

In this webcast, Bart van Leeuwen, firefighter and co-founder of netlabs.org, joins with his colleague, Adrian Gschwend, founder of netlabs.org, to tell us about the exciting work they are doing using Semantic Technology to solve very serious “real world” problems.

LIVE WEBCAST *
Date:	Friday, December 10, 2010
Time:	2:00pm ET / 11:00am PT
Cost:	FREE
* The webcast will be recorded and archived here at SemanticWeb.com

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