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

As Linked Data matures across the web – courtesy of efforts such as that underway by the Linked Data Platform Working Group to mandate publishing data in RDF and to use the HTTP protocol, (see our story here) – anyone running a website is going to need to know how to manage it. That, says Geoffrey Bock, principal at strategic marketing and insight services firm  Bock & Company, is going to make the popular Drupal platform for managing web content even more important.

Drupal 7 brought to the platform the ability to manage semantic metadata by incorporating RDF as a core capability, in a module that outputs RDFa. From the end user’s point of view the task of managing the metadata is made very easy through the familiar editing environment, says Bock. He will be co-hosting the session, How Drupal 7 Manages Linked Data for Smart Web Experiences, at the SemTechBiz conference in San Francisco in June. He’ll be joined by Stéphane Corlosquet, software enginner at Acquia Inc., the company co-founded by Drupal creator Dries Buytaert, which provides cloud, SaaS, and other services to organizations building websites on Drupal. Corlosquet was a critical force in bringing semantic web capabilities to Drupal’s core, with roles including being the maintainer of the RDF module in Drupal 7 a member of the Drupal security team.

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Gary Hamilton of GovHealthIT recently wrote, “Today, the acquisition of patient information for population health management is typically done through Continuity of Care Documents (CCDs). Although the exchange of health information is possible via CCDs, the amount of information they contain can be overwhelming. As such, poring over CCDs to find information relevant to patient populations can be unwieldy and time consuming. With providers challenged to manage information in just one CCD, how can they hope to use these documents to effectively influence care at the population level? The key is to look for ways to use technology to target specific patient information, pinpoint new and relevant information and alert both patients and providers when updated information is available.” Read more

Panels are always among the most exciting and informative events at the Semantic Technology and Business Conference, and the panels at next month’s conference in San Francisco will be no exception. One of the most anticipated panels will happen at 3:45 on Tuesday, June 4, at 3:45. Search Engine Marketing in a Semantic World will examine a number of questions, including:

• Does the semantic web represent the beginning of the end of search engine optimization as we know it, or does the search engines’ adoption of semantic web technologies only add an additional dimension to search marketing without significantly impacting the fundamentals of SEO?
• Does the search engines’ drive to encourage structured data uses put sites not employing it at a disadvantage, and how far should the search engines go to ensure the search visibility of valuable sites not employing semantic web technologies? Read more

It’s time to get real with Linked Data. The World Wide Web Consortium’s Linked Data Platform Working Group, convened almost a year ago, is on the case, with expectations by June to publish a last call working draft of the specification, and to have a final recommendation, the last stage of the W3C’s standards process, by early next year.

“The Linked Data Platform is expanding on the concept [originally] put forward by Tim Berners-Lee on his web site, to turn it into a specification,” says Arnaud J. Le Hors, co-chair of the working group and IBM’s Linked Data Standards Lead. He will address the work at this session during next month’s SemTechBiz conference in San Francisco.

Why the need to formalize Linked Data?  While there is a fairly significant list of W3C standards around the Semantic Web, the more loosely-defined Linked Data has led to an environment where interoperability suffers. That’s because people are left to solve the same problems, such as those around publishing and retrieving data, over and over again, and they take different paths to get there, Le Hors says. The guides that are out there are just that, guides, with people free to use or ignore them, if they can even find them – which in itself isn’t easy to do for those who aren’t well-informed members of the community, he says.

The Linked Data Platform extends the model to provide the industry with a formal definition for read-write access to Linked Data; it mandates publishing data in a standard format, RDF, and using a standard protocol, HTTP, “which is completely symmetrical with the way the web works today, with HTML and HTTP,” Le Hors says.

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Image Courtesy: Flickr/Patrick Hoesly

The financial services industry is taking to semantic tech in an important way, and that’s in the form of the Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO), which aims to standardize the language used to precisely define the terms, conditions, and characteristics of financial instruments; the legal and relationship structure of business entities; the content and time dimensions of market data; and the legal obligations and process aspects of corporate actions. Attendees at SemTech Biz in San Francisco will get a deep dive on the how’s and why’s, at this session, while the FIBO Technology Summit invitation event will present an opportunity for working collaboratively to continue advancing the effort that has its roots in The Enterprise Data Management Council and communities of interests.

Leading that event will be Dennis E. Wisnosky, founder of Wizdom Systems, Inc. and former CTO and Chief Architect of the DoD Business Mission Area, who was recently named to provide technical strategy and operational guidance to help the Council finalize and implement FIBO standards, and David S. Newman, SVP & Strategic Planning Manager Enterprise Architecture at Wells Fargo, and Chair of the EDM Council’s Semantics Program. (Newman, with Enterprise Data Management Council Head of Semantics and Standards Mike Bennett, will also host the SemTech FIBO session.)  Speaking of the upcoming event, Wisnosky explains that a goal is to cast a wide net to find the new tech ideas and developments that both can bring benefits to FIBO in the short term and influence the longer-term research agenda to help the financial industry.

As FIBO stands now, in June the second draft of the FIBO Foundations ontology and the conceptual FIBO Business Entities ontology will be presented at a meeting of the Object Management Group in Berlin. By year’s end it is expected that the OMG will have ratified these as formal standards. “We are on the path to turn the corner from thinking of what FIBO will be to delivering it,” says Wisnosky. 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

Walldorf, Germany (PRWEB) April 22, 2013 — fluid Operations (fluidOps), leading provider of cloud and data management solutions based on semantic technologies, today announced its participation in this year’s Semantic Technology & Business Conference (SemTechBiz) taking place June 2 to 5 in San Francisco, USA. SemTechBiz brings together today’s industry thought leaders and practitioners to explore the challenges and opportunities jointly impacting both corporate business leaders and technologists.

During the event, fluid Operations representatives will be presenting and demonstrating the Information Workbench, a platform for cloud-based data management that capitalizes on Linked Data, semantic technologies, cloud and virtualization technologies, and allows partners and customers to build innovative Linked Data applications and customized solutions. Read more

This June’s SemTechBiz Conference in San Francisco will bring something new to the table: a full-day tutorial on Building Enterprise Semantic Applications. This highly anticipated tutorial will happen on Sunday, June 2, and it is already filling up quickly. Seating is limited, so be sure to register today in order to reserve your spot.

The tutorial will be taught by Hector M. Perez-Urbina, Senior Research Scientist at Clark & Parsia; Brian Sletten, President at Bosatsu Consulting; and Edgar H. Rodriguez-Diaz, Software Engineer at Clark & Parsia. Read more