The Semantic Technology and Business Conference – UK took place in London last week at the Millennium Goucester Hotel, and a number of themes emerged from the two-day event. A few of the sessions are highlighted below, but first, let us turn to some of the attendees to share some of their favorite insights and takeaways:

Public Sector Semantics

There was a lot of interest in the Public Sector work. One of the presentations that highlighted the Open Data movement was Nigel Shadbolt‘s Keynote presentation about the recently launched Open Data Institute. We have covered the ODI here, and Professor Shadbolt shared some exciting insights and perspectives on the Open Data economy. In his presentation, he referred to a report on which he collaborated that was published by Deloitte Analytics. This free white paper is available for download.

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Jamie Beach recently interviewed Marina Kalkanis, Head of Media Services at the BBC regarding the BBC’s online coverage of the Olympics. Kalkanis stated, “For the UK audience the 2012 Olympics online offering changed the way our audience engage with digital media. We shattered previous records for consumption across desktops, mobiles, tablets and TVs. We found that TV and mobile usage grew by orders of magnitude and we’ve seen sustained growth afterwards. With 24 live streams and 2500 hours of VOD available across all these devices, our challenge was to ensure that audiences could find the events they wanted to watch. With the Olympics we introduced the Interactive Video Player (IVP) with the chapter markings and event switching.” Read more

The Open Data Institute has announced that Jeni Tennison will take the role of Technical Director at the Institute and Gavin Starks will take the role of CEO. The announcement states, “Created by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt, the ODI will open its doors this autumn and is a world-first, dedicated to incubating and nurturing new and existing businesses that want to use open data to create economic growth… The new hires will be based at the ODI’s Shoreditch HQ, which will open its doors later this year and will become a focal point for entrepreneurs and developers, start-ups and established corporates, technologists and creatives to meet, share ideas and drive growth.” Shadbolt will give a keynote address at next week’s SemTechBiz UK Conference in London. Read more

Next month’s SemTechBiz UK in London will explore how Semantic Technologies have moved well beyond the theoretical to practical applications that allow users to interact with semantic systems in tangible ways. The conference will be held 19-20 September in London and will feature real-world case studies, dynamic presentations, and innovative keynotes from some of the most forward-thinking minds in the world of Semantic Technology.

Early bird rates end tomorrow, so register today and save.

Featured Presentations

Tangible Semantics with Christian Doegl, CEO & Founder – Uma Information Technology GmbH

Uma is the marriage of semantic technology with interactive signage and multi-touch displays, RFID technology, audience metrics, and social media integration. Uma has its own semantic content curator engine that can contextualize data from additional repositories, such as a vendor’s internal product database, to deliver appropriate accompanying information. This presentation will demonstrate UMA touchscreen displays and show the power of a very easy to use interface where users can simply connect different databases or social channels, the content gets aggregated and semantically annotated, and then is brought into context and presented automatically on the wall. From there users approaching the display wall can touch their way through the content.

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On Friday, July 13, a group of Semantic thought leaders from around the globe met with their host and colleague, Paul Miller, for the latest installment of the Semantic Link, a monthly podcast covering the world of Semantic Technologies.

This episode includes a discussion with Nick Holzherr, finalist on the BBC One Television Series, “The Apprentice,” and founder of Whisk, a recipe planning idea based on big data and semantic analysis. He was named ‘emerging entrepreneur of the year’ by Insider Magazine in 2010, and Birmingham Young Personality of the Year (Entrepreneurship) in 2011.
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The Semantic Technology and Business Conference is coming back to London in just a few short months. With the conference quickly approaching, we’re happy to announce that the ever-growing event will be opened with a keynote by Nick Holzherr, star of the BBC’s Apprentice. Holzherr’s keynote, How Does it Know That? Customizing the Consumer Shopping Experience will focus on his post-Apprentice company, Whisk.

According to a release about the event, “Whisk is a new service that will allow customers to convert recipes automatically into shopping lists within online supermarkets. In his opening keynote presentation, Holzherr will explain from a business and functionality point of view what Whisk offers to the user, the data it will analyse and how the company will extract commercial value from this information. Read more

Rising Media and WebMediaBrands, producers of the Semantic Technology and Business Conference – UK (#SemTechBiz), have announced details of this year’s event, the foremost conference series on semantic technologies.

This year’s line-up of speakers includes Professor Nigel Shadbolt, Co-Director, Open Data Institute. A former President of the British Computer Society, Professor Shadbolt has been involved in a wide range of entrepreneurial activities.  In 2009, together with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, he was appointed as information advisor by the Prime Minister to help transform public access to Government information. Professor Shadbolt will be delivering a keynote presentation on day 1 of the conference.

The 2012 Semantic Technology and Business Conference – UK will be held on 19-20 September at The Millennium Gloucester Hotel, 4-18 Harrington Gardens, London SW7 4HL.

Semantic Technology and Business Conference – UK brings together today’s industry thought leaders and practitioners to explore the challenges and opportunities impacting both corporate business leaders and technologists. The two day conference is packed with case studies and real-world perspectives, with insight and learning from global experts in technology, financial services, insurance, healthcare, publishing, government, automotive and enterprise data.

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The Expert System team participated in a panel at the recent SemTechBiz conference in London and came back with some positive insights about where semantic technologies are making a difference. First off, semantic technologies are “Improving processing of anaphora, which are used commonly in social media communications, such as posts on blogs, Facebook, Google+ or Twitter. The interpretation of anaphora is important for a correct analysis of sentiment among several posts, or even in the same post where information is not always explicitly expressed. Correct processing of anaphora allows you to almost double the collection of opinions and sentiment expressed online (i.e., ‘I love the new iPhone’ and, a few posts later ‘But I don’t love it any more’ where the person is still talking about the iPhone).” Read more

You’ve probably read a couple of hundred remembrances and memorials to Steve Jobs in the last day. Don’t worry – this little blog isn’t going to rehash each of his amazing achievements.

Rather, perhaps the sad news of his passing might provide an opportunity to reflect on what it means to innovate, and what it means to be an innovator. Apple’s well-known mantra – Jobs’ coaxing of his fans to “think different” – isn’t just something we’ve seen played out in the design of that company’s products, or in the sheer genius Jobs had for tapping into the zeitgeist, turning it around, and building a business model out of it.

Certainly those are the most obvious fruits to most people. But the work the Semantic Web community is doing exemplifies the “think different” attitude every day. That’s true of products like Apple’s Siri that bring some (now) in-house semantic smarts to Jobs’ creations, as well as a host of others whose creators hope to harness new opportunities from Jobs’ tablet revolution.

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Franz’s NoSQL database, AllegroGraph has become the first NoSQL database to load over one trillion RDF Triples, a feat that is being called “a major step forward in scalability for the Semantic Web.” According to the article, “A trillion RDF Statements eclipses the current state of the art for the Semantic Web data management but is a primary interest for companies like Amdocs that use triples to represent real-time knowledge about telecom customers. Per-customer, Amdocs uses about 4,000 triples, so a large telecom like China Mobile would easily need 2 trillion triples to have detailed knowledge about each single customer.” Read more