At the recent SemTech conference in NYC, The Semantic Web Blog had an opportunity to ask some leaders in the field about where semantic technology has been, and where it’s going.

David Wood, CTO, 3RoundStones:

The short take: Hiring has been on in a big way at semantic tech players as enterprises are moving in greater numbers to buy semantic software, recognizing their traditional vendors won’t solve their interoperability issues. Sem tech vendors should have a happy 2013 as semantics continues going mainstream.

The full take:

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Every day New York City is getting closer to being the Digital City of the Future. It’s a long journey, though, and one that the semantic web community can lend a hand with.

At this week’s Semantic Technology & Business Conference in NYC, Andrew Nicklin of the Office of Strategic Technology and Development, NYC Department of Information Technology & Telecommunications (DoITT) provided a look at what has been accomplished so far, and what’s on the to-do roadmap. Recent months have seen accomplishments including the passage of Local Law 11 of 2012 – the “most progressive legislation in the U.S. as far as cities being mandated to open data,” Nicklin said in an interview with The Semantic Web Blog before his keynote address at SemTech. “It ensures permanency for our program past any administrative changes….The whole notion of open data doesn’t go way because it is written into law.”

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On Friday, October 12, a group of Semantic thought leaders from around the globe met with their host and colleague, Paul Miller, for the latest installment of the Semantic Link, a monthly podcast covering the world of Semantic Technologies. This episode includes a discussion about various approaches to building semantic systems, and “the Linkers” were joined by two special guests: Hadley Beeman, expert in Government Linked Data and Open Data; and Joel Natividad, CEO & Co-Founder, Ontodia.
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Six months ago, Ontodia’s NYCFacets walked away with the win at New York City’s BigApps 3.0 conference. In the months since, the Smart Open Data Exchange that catalogs all the NYC-related data sources (which we first covered here) has been busy expanding its team, moving into the NYU-Poly hosted incubator, and getting ready to launch its Smart City platform for general use next year.

A preview of that platform will take place at the upcoming Semantic Technology & Business Conference in NYC. “We are going to our original mission of really creating that data exchange using semantic technology,” says Ontodia co-founder Joel Natividad. It’s putting the focus not on raw data or learning new technologies, but on being a linked answers marketplace – converting raw data to answers rather than just linking raw data.

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“What we have found with this project is… the capacity to take value out of open data is very limited.”

With the abatement of the media buzz surrounding open data since the first International Open Government Data Conference (IOGDC) was held in November 2011, it would be easy to believe that the task of opening up government data for public consumption is a fait accompli.  Most of the discussion at this year’s IOGDC conference, held July 10-12, centered on the advantages and roadblocks to creating an open data ecosystem within government, and the need to establish the right mix of policies to promote a culture of openness and sharing both within and between government agencies and externally with journalists, civil society, and the public at large.   According to these metrics the open government data movement has much to celebrate:  1,022,787 datasets from 192 catalogs in 24 languages representing 43 countries and international organizations.

The looming questions about the utility of open government data make it clear, however, that the movement is still in its early stages.    Much remains to be done to to provide usable, reliable, machine-readable and valuable government data to the public.

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Semantic tech startup Ontodia took the grand prize at New York City’s BigApps 3.0 contest on Tuesday. As covered in this article, Ontodia’s NYCFacets is a Smart Open Data Exchange for the developer community that catalogs all the NYC-related data sources already present in the New York City Open Data Catalogue.

“Now that we’ve gotten this validation, we’ll charge full-steam ahead with our bigger vision for pragmatic Linked Big Open Data in NYC,” says Ontodia co-founder Joel Natividad.

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Last week the New York City Council gave its nod of approval to legislation that would require city agencies to publish public data sets in a common format on an online portal for the public’s use. Mayor Bloomberg just signed off on it, with the Open Data Bill legislation to be phased in over six years.

But semantic tech startup Ontodia hopes to help speed up the development of the Big Apple as the Digital City of the Future with NYCFacets, a Smart Open Data Exchange for the developer community just released that catalogs all the NYC-related data sources already present in the New York City Open Data Catalogue.

“There are about 900 data sets in the New York City Open Data Catalogue,” says Ontodia co-founder Joel Natividad. Last year, while at TCG Software Services, he was part of a team that won the Large Organization Recognition Award at BigApps 2.0 – the city-sponsored contest for developers to use NYC Open Data – for participating in creating NYC Data Web, which integrates the NYC.gov data sets into a single web of data for developers. The team also included Revelytix and Spry. “Now that the Open Data Bill just passed, there will be a tsunami of data,” he says.

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