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

Cambridge Semantics continues to add new lessons at Semantic University. Some of the latest tutorials include:

What is Linked Data? – “This lesson is a short video lecture from Manu Sporny. He forgoes PowerPoint for whimsical, hand-drawn pieces of paper and hand gestures to introduce the subject of Linked Data for non-technical people. This lessons is more approachable than the longer, more in-depth Introduction to Linked Data, which you should visit after watching the video.” Read more

Cambridge Semantics has a new way for users to get access to its Anzo solutions: Next week at the Semantic Technology & Business Conference in San Francisco it will announce a packaging of the technology, dubbed the Anzo Express Starter Edition, that can be downloaded for free by anyone. “This lets anyone really easily start with semantics without having to invest a lot of time and without learning every fundamental detail,” says Rob Gonzalez, Director of Product Management & Marketing and a frequent contributor to this blog.

The full Anzo semantic suite is a complete enterprise data management solution with the ability to pull data in and out of relational databases for integration, to connect data within unstructured documents, and to provide analytics and enterprise security, for heavy-duty enterprise use. The Starter Edition is a trimmed-down version that’s more suitable for small groups, such as users in academia or others engaged in research,  that need a basic server and Excel integration for spreadsheet data sharing to get started.

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Cambridge Semantics has added a number of new lessons to their Semantic University. Some of the latest topics include the following:

SPARQL 101: “SPARQL (pronounced “sparkle”) is the query language for the Semantic Web. Along with RDF and OWL, it is one of the three core technologies of the Semantic Web. This lesson introduces the SPARQL query language, starting with simple queries. Future lessons will build on this material with more advanced SPARQL concepts.” Read more

As part of their Semantic University, Cambridge Semantics has published a number of helpful “lessons” covering concepts related to the Semantic Web. Since we last checked in with this excellent tutorial series, they have added several lessons:

Semantic Web vs. Semantic Technologies – “That Semantic Web technologies and semantic technologiesboth start with semantic is often a source of confusion. This short lesson clarifies the relationship between Semantic Web technologies and semantic technologies.” Read more

What does the compliance lifecycle look like at your company? In globally-operating industries such as finance, there’s likely a herd of people charged with monitoring rules and regulations across countries, drafting policies and procedures for individual geographies or business units, and working to ensure controls are in place to prevent and detect violations. And that herd of individuals in some respects may be trying to herd cats, given how often aspects of compliance regulations change.

The situation presents the ideal use case for semantic technology, says Cambridge Semantics’ co-founder and VP of Technology and Client Services Lee Feigenbaum: There’s data to consider from a wealth of sources, from internal documents and control databases describing what is necessary to enforce policy at different areas and levels of the business and what reports are needed to ascertain compliance, to regulatory information published on governing bodies’ web sites or RSS feeds; people are working cross-organizationally within the company and in conjunction with the regulatory organizations; and the rules regularly change. At yesterday’s Demystifying Financial Services Semantics conference in New York City, it demonstrated its just-released Compliance Information Management Solution Accelerator, based on its Anzo semantic technology, to deliver information integration across multiple data sources, as well as an editor workplace where compliance officers or others managing these tasks can contribute and track content changes and workflow, and then seamlessly bring together the compliance content applicable to particular business units or geographies.

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