Earlier this month Gartner named semantic technologies to its top ten trends list (see our story here). Recently, we caught up with Gartner vp and distinguished analyst Debra Logan, the lead author on the semantic technologies section of the Top 10 Technology Trends Impacting Information Infrastructure, 2013, to learn more about sem tech’s earning a place on the list.

One interesting point Logan made is that the top ten trends list actually is a reflection of inquiries Gartner sees from its end-user clients. So, semantic technologies’ spot on the list would seem to indicate a bubbling-up of real-world, enterprise interest. As Logan sees it, it’s very much about information overload, about minimizing the risk and maximizing the value of the data on their hands, and about the availability now from providers like Amazon and Google of infrastructures for analyzing Big Data sets.

“If we could get the same meaning from data, we might actually know what is going on, because we sure don’t now,” says Logan, of the quandary facing enterprise IT leaders. “They are struggling with definition issues and reconciliation because of the proliferation of different IT systems.”

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On Tuesday the E&P Information Management Association (EPIM) launched EPIM ReportingHub (ERH), an interesting semantic technology project in the field of oil and gas. According to the project website, ERH is “a very flexible knowledgebase for receiving, validating (using NPD’s Fact Pages and PCA RDL), storing, analysing, and transmitting reports. The operators shall send XML schemas for DDR, DPR and MPR to ERH and ERH sends DDR and MPR as XML schemas to the NPD/PSA and all three reports as PDF to EPIM’s License2Share (L2S). The partners may download all three reports and/or any data from one or more reports through flexible queries. Some parts of ERH will be in operation already in November 2011 and the rest as soon as the authorities and the industry are ready for it. ERH is owned and operated by EPIM.” Read more

The Exploration & Production Information Management (EPIM) Association has awarded its “multi-year ReportingHub contract to TopQuadrant, a leading semantic data integration company. For the past four years, EPIM has been working with the industry solving its problem of collecting, normalizing, validating, analyzing and reporting data about activities of the North Sea oil and gas drillers. Through its multi-year analysis of available technologies and a competitive procurement process, it chose TopQuadrant‘s TopBraid solution because of its ability to combine and semantically align large amounts of disparate, changing data in an intelligent, flexible and efficient way.” Read more