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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SemTechBiz is Less Than 2 Weeks Away

The Semantic Tech & Business Conference (SemTechBiz) is coming to San Francisco on June 3-7! Join us for case studies, innovative panels, tutorials, and keynotes that will provide you with practical advice, hands-on guidance, and breakthrough approaches to solving business problems with semantic technology. Passes go up $200 at the door. Sign up now and save !

The news of Facebook’s acquisition of mobile photo-sharing service Instagram for $1 billion this week may be fueling the dreams of tech start-ups of every stripe, including those in the semantic tech community. In fact, they may have even greater reason to be inspired: A recent  report has it that Instagram has been slowly rolling out an Open Graph integration for the app accomplished in collaboration with Facebook for seamlessly publishing photos to users’ Timelines in what may be the first of similar partner-deals down the road.

Other startups infused with semantic tech smarts may be on high lookout for funding opportunities as an important part of making those dreams come true. Thomson Reuters and The National Venture Capital Association this week released funding stats for the first quarter of 2012 that could put a bit of a damper on things: It found a 35 percent decrease by dollar commitments and a 9 percent decline by number of funds, compared to the first quarter of 2011. But, according to a statement by Mark Heesen, president of the NVCA, venture firms “appear to be more optimistic about the fundraising environment in 2012.”

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This very cold day in Berlin finds me in the large glass emporium known as the Seminaris CampusHotel Berlin, built on the campus of the Freie Universität Berlin.  I am here with an expected 150 delegates, 50 plus speakers, and 6 exhibitors for the first Semantic Tech & Business Conference in Berlin.  Hopefully I can over the next few paragraphs give you a feel for some of what I experienced on day one.  Obviously with a twin track program I could only experience part of the day, but here we go anyway….

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A wide array of products, applications, and other advances in the world of semantic technology were announced at last week’s Semantic Technology Conference. Announcements came from such industry heavy-hitters as Franz, Revelytix, and Expert System. Below are a collection of announcements from event sponsors who used the forum of SemTech to reveal their latest updates. Read more

The Cogito blog concluded its coverage of last week’s Semantic Technology Conference with a recap of Laura Campbell’s closing keynote address. Campbell is the director of strategic initiatives at the Library of Congress. Her keynote was entitled Semantic Technology at the Library of Congress: “Campbell began her presentation by explaining that one of the most pressing problems in wanting to ensure the acquisition and preservation of the largest collection of knowledge and easy access to the best examples of American creativity (strategic objectives of the Library of Congress), is management of our changing connections to available content.” Read more

The Cogito blog has been reporting some of the highlights at the Semantic Technology Conference this week. Recently the writers at Cogito shone the spotlight on several presentations from the financial track. The blogger writes, “The speech that was the most interesting to me was that of Wells Fargo’s David Newman. Newman argues that traditional information management systems are no longer sufficient to effectively manage the continuously growing flow of data. The reasons are varied, and include the fact that the increasing amount of information, without an intelligent filtering system, can lead to higher, unsustainable infrastructure costs.” Read more

One of the many innovative semantic solutions that was presented at this week’s SemTech conference is Callimachus, a linked data management system that “allows Web authors to quickly and easily create semantically-enabled Web applications with a minimal knowledge of Semantic Web principles.” According to Bernadette Hyland, Callimachus is the first system of its kind. Read more

Eric Hoffer recently shared some advice for attendees at this week’s Semantic Technology Conference. Hoffer writes, “I’ll mention a few of the points made during the Semantic-Link live podcast on Sunday, an opening sessions that I was part of.  In particular, I wanted to touch on the ‘Advice to new attendees’ (who represented a surprisingly massive portion of those who had already checked in for the week).” Read more

The web is ablaze with chatter from this week’s Semantic Technology Conference. One article states, “That semantic technologies are no longer purely niche is proven not only by the increasing number of diverse companies present, and by the rich number of case studies that crowd the agenda (pharmaceutical and financial markets for now are the leaders) but also by the fact that the San Francisco event is just one of three editions of the conference this year. The first European edition will be held in London in September, followed by the Washington D.C. event in October, focusing on applications devoted to government organizations.” Read more

Marc Hadfield, Chief Technology Officer of Inform will be at SemTech 2011 to present the Inform Service. According to the article, “Inform Technologies provides semantic services that deliver the rich metadata used for selecting content and ads for publisher customers including CNN, CBS Interactive, and the New York Daily News. Inform is also applied to user-generated content, such as the Yuku network of sites, which includes over 40,000 forums, 10 million registered users, and more than 1 billion pieces of short-form content.” Read more