This year’s Semantic Technology & Business Conference in San Francisco (#SemTechBiz) will feature some of the best and brightest minds in the world of semantic web technology. The conference — which will run June 3-7 at the Hilton San Francisco in Union Square — will start off strong with a welcome session presented by Tony Shaw, SemTechBiz co-chair and CEO of Dataversity, and Dave McComb, President of Semantic Arts, Inc.

Read more

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 initial agenda for the educational conference at the 2011 Semantic Technology Conference (SemTech 2011) has just been published and is available here:

SemTech 2011 Full Agenda

I hope you can join us.

Tony Shaw
Program Co-Chair

PS: Discounted early registration rates expire on March 9.

Any day now we will be announcing the Call for Presentations for the 2011 Semantic Technology Conference.  It’s the first step in an annual cycle that involves reviewing hundreds of speaking proposals from individuals in all corners of the globe.  Frankly it’s a fabulous vantage point from which to see what’s happening in terms of semantic development and deployment.

Despite this fortunate position, we want more.  Even though we’re in touch with lots of semantic case studies and advanced technology projects, I’m certain there are many more great stories out there that should be told at SemTech but aren’t, because we never hear about them, or we learn about them too late for inclusion on the program.   For that reason I am now asking for your assistance. Read more

When I helped launch the Semantic Technology Conference and later the SemanticUniverse.com website, I also started watching the Semantic Technology Industry.  In the time since that first SemTech Conference in 2005, I have watched the technologies and the surrounding community grow significantly. Along the way, the business of the Semantic Web has also grown up.  Standards have been refined, tools developed, books written, partnerships formed, investments made, and companies have grown. Today, organizations have real-world implementations to show.  The case studies are robust, and are allowing companies to do things in ways they simply could not before.  Often, they are able to do so in less time and at a lower cost than before. There are companies that have built solid in-house, B2B and B2C semantic applications and tools.  There are startups and innovations.  There are creative semantic solutions to traditional data management issues and business concerns.

There is a lot going on in the world of Semantic Web business.  And yet, we have barely begun to scratch the surface.

In September, SemanticUniverse.com and the SemTech Conference were acquired by WebMediaBrands.  For more information about the acquisition, see the initial announcement  and Tony Shaw’s recent blog post .  I am absolutely thrilled about what this merger means for the community.  We will offer the same excellent multimedia content and live events you have come to expect from both organizations.  In coming days, weeks, and months, we will introduce new community tools and resources.  If you are new to the world of Semantic Web, Web 3.0, and Linked Data, we want to welcome you and offer a guiding hand, and we will be working hard to provide the platform for you to connect with other members of the community.

We have big plans. 

Read more

A little over a month ago, Dave McComb and I announced that we had sold the Semantic Technology Conference, as well as the SemanticUniverse.com web site, to WebMediaBrands. Lots of people sent congratulatory messages, which was gratifying and much appreciated. Thank you again to all of you who have wished us well.

Of course people also ask questions like:

• Did you do well out of the deal?
• Why did you sell?
• What’s going to happen with the show in future?

Read more

WebMediaBrands Announces the Acquisition of the Semantic Technology Conference … MarketWatch (press release) SemTech is the largest conference in the world dedicated to the rapidly growing topic of the Semantic Web and Linked Data. Tony Shaw and Dave McComb, … and more »

David Recordon, Senior Open Programs Manager of Facebook and best-selling Author, David Siegel will keynote the conference.

San Francisco, CA (June 24, 2010) — SemTech 2010 is currently taking place at the San Francisco Hilton in Union Square. Web Day 3.0 will be held Thursday, June 24, and will include a number of informative presentations by industry experts. Attendees can expect to see demos of leading semantic search engines and products, hear experts discuss the technology and its impact in the industry, meet the world’s leading developers of Web 3.0, and understand how Web 3.0 technologies are changing web development.

Presented by co-chairs Tony Shaw and Dave McComb, this year’s program is the most extensive to date. Over 1,200 attendees are expected, including industry experts, researchers, analysts, content providers, developers, and technology enthusiasts.

"Interest in semantic technology is on the rise," Shaw said. "Early numbers indicate a 30% increase in conference attendance. The world wants to understand where the Web is going and semantics play an imperative role in that."

Highlights of Web Day 3.0 will include:

• Keynote by David Siegel, author of Power of Pull, Pull: The Business Shift Behind the Web
• Keynote by David Recordon of Facebook on their new Open Graph protocol
• Real-Time SemanticWeb with Twitter Annotations, Joshua Shinaview of RPI – Tetherless World Constellation and Jans Aasman of Franz
• Building Web 3.0 Web Sites, Mark Windholtz of AgileDNA, John Walker of Semantic Clarity, and Mark Birbeck of Backplane, Ltd.
• Applying Semantic Extensions and New Service to Drupal, Daniel Hladky of Ontos AG
• Comprehensive Validation: Pragmatically Joing the “Web of Data”, the Easy Supported Way, Giovanni Tummarello of Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI)
• Drupal and the Semantic Web: from RDF to Whitehouse.gov, Jeff Walpole of Phase2 Technology
• Semantic Web Tools for Video and Social Change, Hannah Eaves of ViewChange.org
• Google Rich Snippets, Kavi Goel and Pravir Gupta of Google
• The Personal Data Locker, David Boardman of Atigeo, David Siegel author of The Power of Pull, Von Wright of AT&T, Drummond Reed of International Card Foundation & Open Identity Exchange, Chris Messina of Google, and Kaliya Hamlin of Identity Commons
• Search Day – featuring a dozen search sessions
• PitchSlam – Startups pitch their ideas to VCs and analysts
• Mergers and Acquisitions panel with VCs, acquirers, and acquired companies
• Exhibits open all day

SemTech represents a full spectrum of business, government, and consumer activity taking place within the field of semantic technology and brings together the most practical and advanced solutions in the industry.

To register for the conference and to see a full schedule, visit http://semtech2010.semanticuniverse.com To register for press credentials, visit http://semtech2010.semanticuniverse.com/press.htm

About SemTech
SemTech is the world's largest conference on semantic technologies. It is the only event focused on the commercialization of semantic technologies, bringing the most recognized names, knowledge, leadership, and innovation in the semantic community together at one location. SemTech is owned and operated by Semantic Universe–the semantic community’s trusted information resource. For more information please visit SemanticUniverse.com, email info@semanticuniverse.com, or call (310) 337-2616.

— TONY SHAW, OLIVER (OLLY) DOWNS

Tony Shaw: Hi Olly, so to get us started, could you give me a high-level overview of what Atigeo does?

Olly Downs: Absolutely. Atigeo’s platform, xPatterns, enables enterprises to derive insights from large, disparate sources of unstructured data. In doing so, we’ve taken two approaches toward how our platform is productized. The first approach is around aspects of our core technology, which allows us to build simple ontologies for domains of unstructured data and then act upon the understanding of the data – in response to queries or profiles of entities, for example. The second aspect of our product enables enterprises to provide customers the ability to access and manage their profile or persona.

Read more

— DR. JANS AASMAN, ROBERT STANLEY

Semantic Universe editor Tony Shaw recently spoke with Jans Aasman, CEO of Franz Inc., and Robert Stanley, President & CEO of IO Informatics, about the announcement of their new strategic partnership to deliver 'fit for purpose' applications created by an innovative Semantic application framework. Their partnership has already seen success with the Pfizer IDEA pilot, which serves as a real-world example of using a semantic application in the pharma industry. This pilot was used to integrate data for compound purity verification and drug product stability analysis. The IDEA project was originally expected to take four to six months to produce results, but by using the AllegroGraph-Sentient framework, it was completed in only six weeks.

Read more

XBRL, the New Language of Financial Reporting, Slated to be Included in the … PR Web (press release) SemTech program chairman Tony Shaw said, “the program is designed so that both business and IT management can understand the benefits of semantic technology …