[Editor's Note: This guest post is from Antonia Bradford, who attended "ICT Days" in Trento Italy, and offered this report.]

Trento, Italy, hosted a technology conference ‘ICT Days 2013’ between 20th and 23rd March. Like all such events it was interesting, dynamic and informative, but it was also quite different from the normal conferences.

It broadcast a very loud message that Semantic Technology, Big Data, and the interconnectivity of things will – without any doubt – affect everything and everyone; that these technologies will change the way everyone interacts with public services, the way in which dwindling natural resources are distributed and managed, the way citizens interact with each other, the way in which public and private bodies cooperate to support the needs of the citizen and the way in which public bodies are monitored and held accountable to the people that elected them.

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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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Semantic technologies have made it to Gartner’s list of the top technology trends that will impact information infrastructure this year.

The research firm yesterday released the list of nine trends that it says will play key roles in modernizing information management and in making the role of information governance increasingly important. Semantic technologies come in at No.3 on the list – right behind closely-tied-to trends Big Data and modern information infrastructure.

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“If you don’t understand what your software engineers are talking about, perhaps it’s because they are using a vocabulary they invented for the problem they are solving.” This begins a white paper called, “The Business Value of Semantic Technology” by Chris Moran, CTO, Information Management Solutions Consultants, Inc.

Moran continues, “Engineers invent a vocabulary and data structure for each system they build and each problem they solve, and only the engineers who built the system understand this structure and vocabulary. Even other engineers must learn it in order to make the data usable. In most enterprises today, we have as many different ways to ask questions of our data as we have systems to store it. We have as many different vocabularies and data structures as we have systems. The problem is actually worse than it sounds….”

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A couple of years back, The Semantic Web Blog visited with Vijay Bulusu to gain some insight into how pharma giant Pfizer Inc. was moving forward with semantic technology (see article here). At last week’s Semantic Technology and Business Conference in New York City, Bulusu, director, informatics and innovation at Pfizer, provided additional perspective on the issue – first, during the presentation on Using Linked Semantic Data in Biomedical Research and Pharmaceuticals (see coverage of that here), and then in a follow-up conversation.

A struggle for pharma companies, Bulusu notes, sits in driving standards for data that exists across system silos, so it is broadly applicable across groups. A transaction like creating a batch of materials, doing analytical testing on it and enabling clinical trial releases is the work of multiple groups of people in departments like R&D entering data across different systems.

The foundational layer needed to support data aggregation in a persistent graph semantic database and visualization with collaborative, semantic knowledge maps “is all about data already in transactional, silo’d systems,” Bulusu says. “We want to make sure that across those systems, key data is entered consistently for entities.” That means limiting them to selecting via a drop-down list from a vocabulary that is consistently managed and published from a single source to all these transaction systems, so the same entity is called by the same name as it traverses systems to support analytics and other requirements. That, he says, “is where we directly impact the day-to-day operational work of users.”

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Law enforcement is turning to semantic technology for improved surveillance tools. G.W. Schulz writes, “Private tech firms have found a new market for their sophisticated software capable of analyzing vast segments of the Internet – local police departments looking for ways to pre-empt the next mass shooting or other headline-grabbing event… 3i-MIND [is] a Swiss company that last year prominently showcased Web surveillance products at a law enforcement conference in San Diego. There, it pitched OpenMIND, developed specifically for intelligence and law enforcement agencies, which ‘automatically finds suspicious patterns and behaviors’ across the Internet. It digs not just within social media, but also through blogs, online forums and the ‘deep Web,’ where many chat rooms exist… The company claims it can analyze text ‘according to its semantic meaning’ and show whether ‘C4′ is referring to explosives or something else.” Read more here. Read more

Attend the upcoming SemTech session that’s dubbed Using Semantic Technologies to Deliver Industrial Strength Healthcare Benefits Administration, and you’ll hear about how semantics- and model-driven computing is the future – and how it’s a future that’s already gotten underway at The Central Administrative Agency of the Netherlands (CAK).

First, a little bit about the bigger picture.  “What can happen when you go all the way to semantic, model-driven, knowledge computing [is that] … it changes the game for development,” says Mills Davis, managing director of Project 10X and one of the session’s presenters. “It enables new categories of capabilities and levels of user experience (think SIRI for the rest of us). It brings about quantum changes in all stages of lifecycle value. It enables cost-effective strategy-driven approaches to enterprise transformation. This last sentence is worth some reflection.”

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The Semantic Web journal has issued a special call for surveys on application areas of semantic technologies. According to the article, “Semantic Web technologies are currently in a transition from research to practice. The amount of progress made in different application areas, however, differs significantly, as do the challenges which lie ahead. The Semantic Web journal calls for survey papers on the state of the art in research, development, and deployment of Semantic Web technologies in specific application areas and domains. Surveys should focus on one specific application area and discuss in a comprehensive way (1) its importance, (2) the particular (past, present, and future) challenges faced in applying Semantic technologies in this area, and (3) the state of the art in developing foundational principles and practical solutions related to this area.” Read more

In the dying weeks of Britain’s last government, then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown promised a new Institute of Web Science. But the new government cancelled it. Then, late last month, that same government gave the idea a polish, a new name, and unveiled it once again as the Open Data Institute. W3C’s Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Southampton’s Professor Nigel Shadbolt are still in charge. Semantic stuff, and open data stuff, and government transparency are still the point. Millions of pounds are still on the table. But something has changed. Partly it’s the name, but it’s also a (welcome) shift in emphasis; away from the technology and towards the value. Others could learn the lesson that government appears to have learned, and focus far more on what their technology or product offers and far less on the technical intricacies of how it works. Read more

Elsevier has acquired Ariadne Genomics, a company providing pathway analysis tools and semantic technologies to life science researchers. According to Alexander van Boetzelaer of Elsevier, “Ariadne Genomics’ pathway analysis tools and semantic technologies integrate research findings from across multiple content sources providing a deeper understanding of biological pathways and disease progression. Ariadne’s products improve research productivity and outcomes for life science researchers by delivering new insights for potential interventions, therapies and cures… Ariadne brings to Elsevier an information offering in the biology domain and a passionate and dedicated team of life science professionals. Ariadne’s team and offerings are a powerful complement to our chemistry, pre-clinical and clinical workflow solutions.” Read more