The business side of the Semantic Tech and Business Conference was on display at the closing session today. Panelists shared their own takeaways, pointers, advice, observations and predictions about a number of semantic web issues about bringing semantic technology to the enterprise.

The panelists included  Craig D Hanson, Director, Innovation and Architecture Amdocs.; James Hendler, Professor, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Arnaud Le Hors, software standards architect at IBM; Dave McComb, President, Semantic Arts Inc; Marie Wallace
Social Analytics Strategist, IBM; Joe Devon, web developer and consultant; Christine Connors, Principal TriviumRLG LLC; and David Booth, an independent contractor and senior software architect at PanGenX.

Here’s an overview of what they had to say to – and for — the enterprise community:

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SemanticWeb.com and parent company WebMediaBrands recently announced a contest to earn the title of  “Top Semantic Technology Start-Up.” Today, we have two exciting announcements to make about the contest.

Deadline Extension

We have had several requests to extend the deadline, and are announcing today that we will now accept applications for the contest until April 30, 2012. We also learned of some applicants who encountered technical problems when trying to submit in the early days of the contest. We have fixed the code that caused these problems, and encourage all who experienced difficulties to try again.

Judges

We are also pleased to announce the panel of judges that will be at SemTechBiz evaluating the companies. It’s a great group, and we’re looking forward to a lively afternoon!

Left to Right, they are: Read more

Ten years (and change) since the publication of The Semantic Web article in Scientific American, co-author Jim Hendler says he is “very, very happy and optimistic about the state of semantic technologies and the Semantic Web.”

And, he notes, government has been an exciting partner in its progress.

Hendler, professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, home of the Tetherless World Constellation, will provide evidence of that in his presentation at the upcoming Semantic Tech & Business Conference in Washington D.C. this month. TWC works on opening and linking government data using Semantic Web technologies, and Hendler also freely provides his expertise to the U.S. data.gov project, through which he’s in contact with many other governments’ open data projects. Those attending Hendler’s keynote at the conference will get a look at TWC’s new International Open Government Dataset Search (IOGDS) app based on metadata extracted from some 400,000 government datasets on catalog websites. These were converted to RDF Linked Data and then republished via TWC’s LOGD SPARQL endpoint. “That proves we can use metadata to help people find the right data when there is so much available,” Hender says, and yield better visualizations of it, too.

Some 25 countries currently are represented, inclusive of datasets from the U.S., U.K., Singapore, Spain, Italy, Brazil, Kenya, and China. “What’s exciting to me is we see this happening all around the world,” Hendler says. “The extent to which the ecosystem is forming around this area is really surprising.” TWC features a few dozen demos here, which provide some insight into how much of a game-changer it is for government to couple open and Linked Data, providingthe ability to do things more quickly and in a more web-friendly way, and at lower costs. Hendler points to TWC’s creating infographic visualizations from several government datasets in hours, not months, and at a cost of pennies, not tens of thousands of dollars.

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The current stack of modeling languages for the web of data provide excellent mechanisms for capturing the static structure of data. SKOS can be used to describe concept hierarchies and vocabularies. RDF Schema and OWL can be used to define classes, properties and relationships between these conceptual entities. There is, however, a key set of application requirements these languages have not dealt with. Namely, the way to describe general computational behavior of objects.

These requirements are now addressed by an emerging standard that uses SPARQL to express rules for the Semantic Web. It is called SPARQL Inferencing Notation or SPIN. Because of its heavy use of SPARQL it is also known as SPARQL Rules. SPIN has recently been accepted by W3C as a member submission from TopQuadrant, OpenLink and RPI.

SPIN combines concepts from object oriented languages, query languages, and rule-based systems to describe object behavior on the web of data. Read more

Photo Courtesy: FlickR/elward-photography

There seems to be growing sentiment that 2011 is the year the Semantic Web really, truly happens (see here and here) – but not blindness to the challenges that exist around making it happen, not just on the web at large but within the enterprise community.

One gap to close: Growing the talent that will ease adoption by those enterprises and help them succeed in their desires to get more out of their data. The economic doldrums have fostered the desire to do just that, says Richard Stanton, a thought-leader and consultant for a number of businesses on the practical application of Semantic Web technologies and former CEO of the semantic web job/volunteer matchmaking site Bintro (which has ceased operations).

“The mission in tough economic times is to polish up assets,” he says, and what asset is more powerful or valuable than the data held by businesses ranging from e-commerce plays to highly specific industries such as health care to hosters of large content repositories of every stripe. “Anytime you have to take stock of your own inventory and use it more wisely is a time that you look for new solutions.”

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