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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Philip Fennell of O’Reilly recently commented on Tom Koulopoulos’s keynote speech at the recent MarkLogic World conference. Fennell writes, “Although he did not mention Linked Data explicitly, Tom Koulopoulos’ presentation drew attention to the importance of ‘connections’ – links between data and the value that has both within an organisation’s data and outside to externally held data and he chose to underline this by likening it to the neural connections within the brain.” Read more

A new article reports, “The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the DoD progenitors of revolutionary tech like passive radar and the Internet, is calling for research applications of social media to strategic communication. According to an agency announcement (PDF), DARPA is looking to shell out $42 million in funding for ‘innovative approaches that enable revolutionary advances in science, devices, or systems.’ The general goal of the Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program is to develop a new science of social networks built on an emerging technology base.” This push toward the innovative social technology is hardly new territory for DARPA – the agency has been at the forefront of the semantic web for years with initiatives like DAML, the US flagship R&D program in semantic web. Read more

“The Secretary of Defense is responsible for a half-trillion dollar enterprise that is roughly an order of magnitude larger than any commercial corporation that has ever existed. DoD estimates that business support activities—the Defense Agencies and the business support operations within the Military Departments—comprise 53% of the DoD enterprise.”

This was one of the realities put forward by Dennis Wisnosky, CTO and Chief Architect, Business Mission Area, U.S. Department of Defense, during his Keynote at the 2011 Semantic Technology Conference San Francisco. Mr. Wisnosky was speaking about how the US DoD leverages Semantic Technology across systems to meet the goal of having an “executable, integrated, consumable, solution architecture.” In particular, he spoke about using the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) standard by OMG for their Business Process Modeling efforts, in conjunction with systems built on RDF, OWL, and SPARQL.
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The Cogito blog concluded its coverage of last week’s Semantic Technology Conference with a recap of Laura Campbell’s closing keynote address. Campbell is the director of strategic initiatives at the Library of Congress. Her keynote was entitled Semantic Technology at the Library of Congress: “Campbell began her presentation by explaining that one of the most pressing problems in wanting to ensure the acquisition and preservation of the largest collection of knowledge and easy access to the best examples of American creativity (strategic objectives of the Library of Congress), is management of our changing connections to available content.” Read more

According to a recent article, “The Library of Congress has announced that it is going to undertake a major reevaluation of bibliographic control in a move that could lead to a gradual transition away from the 40-year-old MARC 21 standard in which billions of metadata records are presently encoded. ‘It’s a ten,’ said Sally McCallum without hesitation when asked to rank the project’s scope and importance on a scale of one to ten. McCallum is chief of the Network Development and MARC Standards Office at LOC.” Read more

According to a recent article, “The BBC’s R&D department unveiled an interesting take on the traditional electronic programming guide (EPG) this week that allows viewers to search for people, places and things across tens of thousands of movies and TV show episodes. Channelography is based on captions of close to 170,000 pieces of programming shown across the BBC’s nine U.K.-wide TV networks, which can be searched for close to 100,000 data entities.” Read more