Announcing Semantic Tech & Business Conference - San Francisco 2012

Semantic Tech & Business Conference is returning to San Francisco in June! Join us from June 3-7 for complete coverage of Big Data, Linked Data, Extreme Information Management, and Semantic Web. From breakthrough approaches to solving business problems to the big data implications of fast–evolving technologies, SemTechBiz provides you with an unparalleled interactive experience and delivers tangible business value. We're offering a special early rate when you register by February 17. Sign up now!

The Semantic Technology and Business Conference is headed to Berlin, Germany, in 2012 for the very first time. SemTechBiz Berlin will be held February 6-7, 2012 at the Seminaris Campus Hotel. Packed with case studies and real-world perspectives, SemTechBiz Berlin offers two comprehensive days of fresh insight and immersive learning from global experts in technology, financial services, insurance, healthcare, publishing, government, automotive and enterprise data.

The highly anticipated conference will feature an array of speakers at the forefront of semantic web technologies in business applications. These speakers will discuss how semantic technologies are being used in organizations today to make money, save money, leverage existing resources, and solve problems in innovative ways.  In coming weeks, we will focus on several of these stories. Read more

Wikimedia Germany has multiple openings for semantic web professionals in Berlin, Germany. The post states, “Wikimedia Germany is a non-profit organization committed to promoting open knowledge. We support projects for the creation, promotion and distribution of free content. One of the most important projects is Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia. Wikimedia Germany has a rapidly growing office in Berlin, with currently 19 employees.” Read more

The Institute for Web Science and Technologies (WeST) is looking for Researchers as well as a Managing Director at the University of Koblenz in Germany. Responsibilities will include “Research in EU projects Live+Gov or SocialSensor involving mobile sensing & data mining, semantic web and HCI. The managing director is responsible for public relations, project acquisition and management, events and own scientific work.” Read more

Axonic Informationssysteme GmbH of Germany has released click.to Twick.it, a free service that “provides short, fast, and under 140 character long explanations which everyone can understand… The merger of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia and the 140-character short message service Twitter, at first glance, doesn’t work well together. But Twick.it delivers short, handy explanations for terms that are gathered from the user-based community. Click.to compliments the service by allowing short, quick routes to the explanations regardless of which application the term comes from. Behind both services is the idea of making information easily accessible.” Read more

The SemTechBiz family of events continues to grow. The latest addition is a two-day event in Berlin from February 6-7, 2012. According to the announcement, “The Berlin Semantic Tech & Business Conference is two days of presentations, panels, case studies and conversations. The conference is designed for business and technology executives who need to learn what semantic technologies are and how to take advantage of semantics in their enterprise and web-based systems. Attendees will further their technical understanding in introductory sessions and learn from our expert Keynote speakers how to integrate the technology into their organizations and how to benefit from it. Discovering all the latest tools while providing an unprecedented opportunity to network, talk shop, and share ideas among like-minded industry peers and influencers is what the conference is all about.”

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Harald Sack, a senior researcher at the Hasso-Plattner Institute at the University of Potsdam in Germany, recently posted a semantic web game that can be played on Facebook. The game, WhoKnows? is a quiz game based on the DBpedia dataset. According to a paper about the game, “With the Linking Open Data (LOD) initiative large resources of publicly available structured data from various domains have been turned into interlinked RDF(S) facts to constitute the so-called ‘Web of Data’. But, this Web of Data is by no means a perfect world of
consistent and valid facts. One of the major problems that we experienced working with LOD was the lack of any relevance ranking for the represented facts. Read more

A recent article reports, “Draft version 0.5 of rNews, a standard model for embedding machine-readable metadata in online news, was approved at the International Press Telecommunications Council’s [IPTC] Annual General Meeting in Berlin, Germany. This version clarifies, simplifies and expands the rNews model and incorporates much of the feedback that the IPTC has received about the first draft. The IPTC is also releasing the recommended RDFa implementation for rNews 0.5 and plans to provide mappings to other markup mechanisms, such as HTML5 microdata and JSON. This will give publishers a choice of how to implement the model, using the technologies that best meet their needs.” Read more