The 2013 Semantic Technology and Business Conference in San Francisco is fast approaching. The conference, which will run June 2-5, will combine innovative panels, case studies, tutorials, roundtables, keynotes, and lightning sessions that will give you an unparalleled interactive experience. Starting things off with a splash, the opening keynotes will feature speakers from WalmartLabs and Viacom.

Opening Keynotes:

How to Connect People and Products Using Big, Fast, and Heterogeneous Data with Abhishek Gattani, Senior Director, Distinguished Architect – WalmartLabs

With over 200 million people walking into stores each week, 43+ million unique visitors per month online, and access to the full twitter fire-hose (i.e. 200 million tweets per day), WalmartLabs is processing large amounts of data to help connect people to products and also provide unexpected insights to merchants. How do we turn this data into insights? How do we combine data internal to an enterprise with social data such as tweets and data from the “traditional” Web such as Wikipedia? When is social and web data useful? These are key questions when building any Big Data system. In this talk, Abhishek will discuss WalmartLabs’ work in this area and give examples of where social and web data was used to solve some key challenges faced when building the eCommerce search engine of the world’s largest retailer. Read more

The highly-anticipated program for the Semantic Technology and Business Conference (#SemTechBiz), June 2-5, 2013 in San Francisco has been announced. The conference returns to the Hilton Union Square for four comprehensive days of fresh insight and immersive learning from global experts. #SemTechBiz brings together today’s industry thought leaders and practitioners to explore the challenges and opportunities  impacting both corporate business leaders and technologists.

When asked about the program, Conference Co-Chair Eric Franzon said, “When we launched this conference in 2005, the discussion focused around a question: ‘We have this marvelous set of technologies. How can we use them practically?’ Today, we are in a very different place. With impressive case studies demonstrating cost savings, new revenues, and practical implementations, Semantic Technologies have become an important thing for technologists, executives, marketing experts, data professionals, investors, and other stakeholders to pay very close attention to.”

“In June, we will learn from the experience of those who have leveraged Semantic Technologies to make money, save money, gain more value from existing business assets, shorten development times, and solve very real problems. We will hear about how Semantic Technologies are being used to glean insight from ‘Big Data.’ ”

View the program here

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Bart van Leeuwen, software executive (netage.nl) and firefighter (Amsterdam Fire Department), has a story of practical application of Semantic Web technologies that we have covered before here at SemanticWeb.com and in our Semantic Technology & Business Conference series. Below, we offer the video of the keynote address he delivered in June at the San Francisco event.

His, like many of the most successful Semantic Web case studies, is a story of iterative growth and agile development, a mixing of technical and cultural challenges and solutions. Even since Bart’s keynote at the recent London SemTechBiz conference, there have been developments, and we caught up with him to hear the latest (video after the jump).

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Daniel Tunkelang, principal data scientist at LinkedIn has shared the slides from his SemTechBiz SF presentation: Scale, Structure, and Semantics. He prefaces the presentation, “[Friday] morning I had the pleasure to present a keynote address at the Semantic Technology & Business Conference (SemTechBiz). I’ve had a long and warm relationship with the semantic technology community — especially with Marco Neumann and the New York Semantic Web Meetup. But I’m not exactly a fanboy of the semantic web, and I wasn’t sure how the audience would respond to some of my more provocative assertions. Fortunately the reception was very positive. Several people approached me afterwards to thank me for presenting a balanced argument for combining big data with structured representations and for raising HCIR issues.” Read more

Anthony Myers of CMS Wire reports, “Core ideas about a more structured Internet, vis a vis the semantic Web, are quickly approaching mainstream consciousness. When Wikipedia, the sixth most popular Web site in the world, debuts its Wikidata platform later this year, it will be a major step in this direction. ’Wikidata is going to blow everything else out of the water,’ Joe Devon of Startup Devs said during the closing panel of the 2012 Semantic Technology & Business Conference. Devon is also on the advisory board, but Dave McComb, who co-founded the SemTech Conference, also asserted his belief in how huge Wikidata is going to be.” Read more

Anthony Myers of CMS Wire recently shared a few highlights from SemTechBiz SF. He writes, “Semantic Web technology is slowly changing the way people use the Internet, and SemTech 2012 is a prime showcase for the best minds in linked data, enterprise solutions and interactive Web experiences. That’s because semantic technology is approaching widestream adoption, and Google’s recent launch of the Knowledge Graph platform is one such manifestation of the technology’s mainstream appeal. At day three of the SemTech 2012 Conference in San Francisco, companies such as Google, Microsoft, NASA, the BBC and the New York Times gathered to present their visions on Web standards of the future. Specifically, many presenters focused on how they are using linked data to better locate, relate and translate content for the best possible Web experience.” Read more

Ivan Herman, Semantic Web Activity Lead for the W3C, made the announcement from the podium of the Schema.org panel at SemTechBiz SF that RDFa 1.1, RDFa Lite and XHTML+RDFa have been published as candidate recommendations by the W3C. He writes, “Together, these documents outline the vision for RDFa in a variety of XML and HTML-based Web markup languages. RDFa Core 1.1 specifies the core syntax and processing rules for RDFa 1.1 and how the language is intended to be used in XML documents. RDFa Lite 1.1 provides a simple subset of RDFa for novice web authors. XHTML+RDFa 1.1 specifies the usage of RDFa in the XHTML markup language.” Read more

Algebraix Data has announced that CTO Christopher Piedmonte and Product Manager Arthur Keen will be presenting Algebra Unlocks SPARQL Performance at the SemTechBiz Conference in San Francisco. According to the article, “Mr. Piedmonte and Dr. Keen will provide a technical presentation to attendees that will show how Algebraix® Technology can unlock SPARQL performance. Algebraix technology leverages newly developed data algebra to dynamically re-factor queries as algebraic expressions of prior result fragments and optimally order queries to improve result re-use.” Read more

SemTechBiz San Francisco is set to begin this Sunday, June 3. The conference will feature over 130 presentations and over 160 speakers covering such topics as linked data, social networks, content management, open government, semantic wikis, and much more. The already full agenda has been made even better with the late addition of a new presentation, Tangible Semantics, a case study to be presented by Christian Doegel, Founder and CEO of Uma Information Technology GmbH. Read more

SemanticWeb.com and parent company WebMediaBrands recently announced a contest to earn the title of  “Top Semantic Technology Start-Up.” Today, we have two exciting announcements to make about the contest.

Deadline Extension

We have had several requests to extend the deadline, and are announcing today that we will now accept applications for the contest until April 30, 2012. We also learned of some applicants who encountered technical problems when trying to submit in the early days of the contest. We have fixed the code that caused these problems, and encourage all who experienced difficulties to try again.

Judges

We are also pleased to announce the panel of judges that will be at SemTechBiz evaluating the companies. It’s a great group, and we’re looking forward to a lively afternoon!

Left to Right, they are: Read more