This year’s SemTechBiz Conference in San Francisco is already drawing experts using and developing semantic technologies in business, health care, the financial sector, public services, and beyond. But even if you’re completely new to Semantic Technologies, The Semantic Technology & Business Conference has sessions for you including an excellent tutorial by Lee Feigenbaum, co-creator of Semantic University.

Lee Feigenbaum is a leading expert in Semantic Web technologies and their applicability to enterprise IT challenges. As VP of Marketing & Technology at Cambridge Semantics, Lee helps ensure that the Anzo product suite continues to address customers’ ever-changing and diverse data challenges. Lee is an active member of the W3C Semantic Web standards community, currently serving as the Co-Chair of the W3C’s SPARQL Working Group, leading the design of SPARQL, the Semantic Web query language. Lee authored “The Semantic Web in Action,” a 2007 article in Scientific American. Read more

Lee Feigenbaum of Cambridge Semantics recently wrote, “The best thing about the Big Data hype in pharma is how effectively it’s shed light on all of the Small Data problems the industry is facing. The roots of the Big Data movement in pharma were innocent enough: challenges in storage, data access, and data analytics that organizations started seeing with shifts toward high-throughput screening and massive genomics data sets. But as Big Data became more and more mainstream, the range of business challenges that got slapped with the “Big Data” label started ranging further and further afield. Industry analysts noticed this quickly, redefining Big Data in terms of the three (or four) Vs–not just volume but also variety, velocity, and variability. Others have been quick to follow. At a recent conference on data-driven drug development, speaker after speaker stood up to talk about their approach to Big Data, and each speaker immediately qualified that they were speaking about the variety of data, rather than the volume of data.” Read more

The W3C has announced that eleven specifications of SPARQL 1.1 have been published as recommendations. SPARQL is the Semantic Web query language.  We caught up with Lee Feigenbaum, VP Marketing & Technology at Cambridge Semantics Inc. to discuss the significance of this announcement. Feigenbaum is a SPARQL expert who currently serves as the Co-Chair of the W3C’s SPARQL Working Group, leading the design of SPARQL.

Feigenbaum says, “SPARQL 1.1 is a huge leap forward in providing a standard way to access and update Semantic Web data. By reaching W3C Recommendation status, Semantic Web developers, vendors, publishers and consumers have a stable, well-vetted, and interoperable set of standards they can rely on for the foreseeable future.”

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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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Is it time for the enterprise to lose the idea of the holy grail of a central repository of multi-sourced data?

Experts in the semantic web space think that’s the case. At the recent Semantic Web Technology and Business Conference in New York City, a few weighed in on the issue.

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Courtesy: Flickr/epSos.de

At the Semantic Technology and Business Conference in New York City last week, attendees got to hear a lot about how semantic technology is influencing various sectors, such as government (see our stories here and here) and media (see this article and this one). Another prominent one on display: pharmaceuticals.

Pharma, for example, was the driving use case for the update to Callimachus that focuses on helping users deal with data that’s external to the framework for data-driven applications, David Wood, CTO of Callimachus project sponsor 3 Round Stones, told The Semantic Web Blog at the event. (To learn more about the update, see our story here.)

A session on Tuesday last week saw Lee Feigenbaum, vp of marketing at Cambridge Semantics, which makes the Anzo express and Anzo Enterprise solutions,  put forth a case for semantic tech as being key to data integration and interoperability in the sector, as well. “Can semantic web technologies break down enterprise data silos just as they break down document silos on the web?” he said. “The answer to the question is, “Of course.” Compared to the web, the data silo challenges of even the largest pharmaceuticals organization is relatively minor.”

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Lee Feigenbaum of CMSWire has written an article discussing the “what” and “why” of semantic web technologies. He writes, “In my first article on The Semantic Web and the Modern Enterprise, I introduced the vision of the Semantic Web. I also discussed how the progress made while working towards that vision provides a strong foundation to help enterprises better deal with their information management challenges. In this article, we’ll take a high-level look at what the core Semantic Web technologies are, why they’re different from conventional technology approaches and how they deliver tangible benefits for enterprise information management.” Read more

Lee Feigenbaum has written an article for CMS Wire arguing that the Semantic Web is the “technology of choice” for the modern enterprise. He writes, “For over a decade the Semantic Web has been maligned, misconstrued and misunderstood. It’s been overhyped by its supporters while its critics have hung the albatross of artificial intelligence around its neck. Even its successes have been understated, often coming with little fanfare and without the mindshare and hype surrounding other trends such as Web 2.0, NoSQL or Big Data. So I wouldn’t fault you in the slightest if you were surprised, confused or downright skeptical when I claim that the Semantic Web is emerging as the technology of choice for tackling some of today’s most pressing challenges in enterprise information management. This article is the first in a series that will introduce and explain Semantic Web technologies and their role in enterprise information management today.” Read more

On Friday, May 11, a group of Semantic Technology 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 Semantics in the Financial Services Industry, and “the Linkers” were joined by special guest, Lee Feigenbaum, VP Marketing & Technology at Cambridge Semantics. Lee shared insights gained over many years working in the semantic technology field and with numerous customers in the financial services industry.
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This year was the 21st World Wide Web Conference located in Lyon, France. This conference is a unique forum for discussion about how the Web is evolving. There were hundreds of talks over 3 days. Let me summarize some Semantic Web presentations I was able to attend.

NautiLOD

Programmers daily use the wget tool to specify and retrieve data on the Web. However, wget is limited since it cannot dig into the semantics of Web data to do the job. What if you were to add semantics to wget? This is the question that Valeria Fionda, Claudio Gutierrez and Giuseppe Pirró asked themselves. They took that question to the next level: imagine a semantic wget on top of Linked Data. They wanted to create a language to declaratively specify portions of the Web of Data, define routes and instruct agents that can do things for you on the Web. All this by exploiting the semantics of information (RDF data) found in online data sources. For example, find all the Wikipedia pages of directors that have been influenced by Stanley Kubrick and send them to my email; retrieving information about David Lynch from different information providers only gives a hint of what can be done. The researchers developed a simple, generic declarative language, NautiLOD and implemented it in swget (semantic wget). swget comes in two flavors: a simple command line tool (to give the Web back to users) and a GUI. This is not a fantasy anymore. Check it our for yourself (http://swget.wordpress.com).

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