We at SemanticWeb.com are very excited to add another outstanding keynote to the lineup for the Semantic Technology and Business Conference next week in San Francisco. What Google is Doing with Structured Data will be presented by Jason Douglas, Group Product Manager of Knowledge Graph at Google at 4:45 on Tuesday, June 4. As Douglas explains, “With smartphones and ubiquitous computing, the Internet is becoming more integral to users’ everyday lives and information needs far more contextual. Addressing these needs requires understanding how information from the Web and elsewhere relates to each user’s world — the people, places and things they care about. In this briefing we’ll review how Google’s Knowledge Graph and structured data generally are making this possible across a wide variety of Google services.” Read more

The upcoming Semantic Technology and Business Conference in San Francisco (June 2-5) will feature a number of sessions, panels, and keynotes focused on semantic web start-ups. The Start-Up Competition will highlight some of the most promising new companies in the world of semantic technology today, and other events will expound the strengths and successes of companies that have made it past the term “start-up” to full-fledged “competitors.” Read more

Our discussion of Big Data at SemTechBiz, begun here, continues:

The Enterprise Linked Data Cloud Needs Semantics, And More

Another exploration of Big Data’s intersection with semantic technology will take place at this session, where Dr. Giovanni Tummarello, senior research fellow at DERI and CTO of SindiceTech, will talk about the former becoming an enabler for the latter to be really useful in enterprises. “A lot of people say it’s via Big Data that semantic technologies like RDF will see a coming of age and clear applications in certain industries,” he says. There’s value to adding data first and understanding it later, and to that end, “semantic technologies give you the most agile tool to deal with data you don’t know, where there’s a lot of diversity, and you don’t know what of it particularly will be useful.”

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A new panel has been added to the lineup for next week’s Semantic Technology and Business Conference in San Francisco. Incubating and Investing in Semantic Startups will give attendees the opportunity to meet entrepreneurs who have recently raised millions in venture funding for their startups. Attendees will also:

• Learn from the leader behind the technology transfer program that was the birthplace of Siri and is now incubating Tempo, Desti and Trapit.
• Learn from the experience of people responsible for evaluating startups as targets for potential investment, incubation, and/or acquisition.
• Learn about the do’s and don’ts for positioning your idea for incubation and venture for funding. Read more

There will be a lot of Big Data talk at the upcoming SemTechBiz event in San Francisco.

The opening keynote, for example, will be given by Abhishek Gattani, senior director at Walmart in the WalmartLabs. In a conversation in advance of the event, Gattani told The Semantic Web Blog that he’ll be focusing on the idea that businesses should embrace the mindset of using external data – social and web data – to solve internal problems. “This is what happens when you run an enterprise – external factors influence your market,” he says, whether that’s a new product being launched or a lower-priced competitor coming into play or a natural disaster or economic event taking place. The data about those things exist outside your own company’s realm, but combining your information with that could lead to interesting prospects and extraordinary results.

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[Editor's Note: This article originally included an incorrect link. The correct link to view the 2013 "Top Semantic Start-Up Competition" is http://semtechbizsf2013.semanticweb.com/sessionPop.cfm?confid=70&proposalid=5265".]

The finalists of the 2013 “Top Semantic Start-Up Competition” have been announced. This year’s finalists represent a broad spectrum of entrepreneurship within the world of semantic technology. The announcement states, “At the 2013 Semantic Technology & Business Conference, SemanticWeb.com and WebMediaBrands will award one company the prize as ‘Top Semantic Technology Start-Up.’ At 12:30 pm Monday, June 3^rd, companies will have the opportunity to compete on stage as they deliver their pitches before a panel of expert judges! The companies competing will have met the following conditions: (1) Have a demonstrable product (at least in ‘beta’ stage) in the SemTech and or SemWeb space, (2) Have received no more than a Series B round of financing.”

The finalists are: Read more

Next month’s Semantic Technology and Business Conference in San Francisco will include a number of panels featuring experts from virtually every facet of the evolving world of semantic web technologies. Experts from major companies and successful startups will share their knowledge on such topics as semantic video, search, financial data, and semantic Big Data. Early bird prices end at midnight tonight. Save $500 off on-site prices and register now!

SemTechBiz Panels

Beyond the Blob: Semantic Video’s Coming Of Age – TV and Video Metadata powers video search, discovery, personalization, and is increasingly used as the basis for targeted advertising and product placement. Join this panel as they explore and discuss advances made and challenges faced over the past year in semantic applications for video.

RDF as a Universal Healthcare Exchange Language – RDF offers a practical evolutionary pathway to semantic interoperability. It enables information to be readily linked and exchanged with full semantic fidelity while leveraging existing IT infrastructure investments. Being schema-flexible, RDF allows multiple evolving data models and vocabularies to peacefully co-exist in the same instance data, without loss of semantic fidelity. This panel will discuss the goal of adopting RDF/Linked Data as a universal healthcare exchange language. Read more

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

[UPDATED: April 18, 2013, 11:46am]

The upcoming Semantic Technology and Business Conference in San Francisco is set to host a thought-provoking panel on RDF as a Universal Healthcare Language. The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) identified the need for a universal healthcare exchange language as a key enabler in addressing this problem by improving healthcare data portability. Many familiar with Semantic Web technology have recognized that RDF / Linked Data would be an excellent candidate to meet this need, for both technical and strategic reasons. Although RDF is not yet well known in conventional healthcare IT, it has been beneficially used in a wide variety of applications over the past ten years — including medical and biotech applications — and would exceed all of the requirements outlined in the PCAST report. Read more

Michael Dunn, CTO of Hearst Media has been quoted saying, “Video, in its native form, is a blob of content… and it’s hard to extract data from it.” Thankfully, semantic technologies are starting to take video “beyond the blob,” and that is precisely what panelists at the upcoming Semantic Technology and Business Conference in San Francisco will discuss.

The panel discussion Beyond the Blob: Semantic Video’s Coming of Age is set to begin at 2:25 on Monday, June 3 at SemTechBiz and will feature a panel of semantic web professionals with a broad range of experience regarding semantic video. The panel will be moderated by Kristen Milhollin, Project Lead & Founder of GoodSpeaks.org, an organization aimed at creating a nonprofit media and data distribution network that increases public awareness and support of the work done by nonprofit and other charitable organizations.  Read more