Out with the old, in with the new. We’ve covered (here and here) the year past for the semantic web. So now let’s see what might be in store for the year ahead.

Also, don’t forget to listen to our podcast here for more insights into what 2012 may hold.

• Interest in sentiment analysis exploded with the growth of the social Web, although its reputation suffered due to the prevalence of low-grade Twitter-sentiment toys, simplistic, wildly inaccurate systems that misled many into criticism of the concept where it was the cheap implementations they’d tried that were faulty.  In 2012, sentiment analysis will come into its own: Automated (and crowd-sourced!) mining of attitudes, opinions, emotions, and intent from social and enterprise sources, at the “feature” level, linked to real-world profiles and transactional data. — Seth Grimes, founder, Alta Plana Corp

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Announcing Semantic Tech & Business Conference - San Francisco 2012

Semantic Tech & Business Conference is returning to San Francisco in June! Join us from June 3-7 for complete coverage of Big Data, Linked Data, Extreme Information Management, and Semantic Web. From breakthrough approaches to solving business problems to the big data implications of fast–evolving technologies, SemTechBiz provides you with an unparalleled interactive experience and delivers tangible business value. We're offering a special early rate when you register by February 17. Sign up now!

We recently rounded up some thought leaders’ perspectives on the big semantic trends of 2011 – most (if not all) of them positive. Here’s some further perspective about where hopes and expectations fell a little short of reality:

• The biggest lost possibility was not rethinking the whole RDF stack. Instead of actually reducing complexity, it seems the direction is hiding complexity. This makes its proposition unattractive for web developers. – Andraž Tori, Founder and Director, Zemanta

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To accompany our recent podcast looking back on 2011, we’ve accumulated some additional perspectives from thought leaders in the next-wave Web space on the year that’s quickly passing us by.

Some highlights follow. You’ll see respondents hit on some common themes throughout, such as Big Data, sentiment analytics, specific vertical industry adoption, and the standards space:

 

• SKOS has become an increasingly popular entry point for organizations that want to use semantic technology in practical applications without worrying about the more complicated aspects of semantic web technology. – Bob  DuCharme, solutions architect, TopQuadrant

 

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A recent article reports, “The Real Story Group just released a new Advisory Paper: ‘Taxonomy Management Tools: A Comparative Evaluation.’ Taxonomy management tools have become a key player in end-to-end architectures for tackling content organization challenges, but the tools vary substantially in approach, and the marketplace as a whole remains somewhat immature, according to The Real Story Group, an independent analyst firm that evaluates web and enterprise technologies.” Read more

If you missed the excellent live webcast introduction to SKOS by Bob DuCharme (of TopQuadrant and the recently released Learning SPARQL), the recorded webcast is now available.

You will probably find this webcast useful if: Read more

If you missed last week’s excellent introduction to SPARQL by Bob DuCharme of TopQuadrant and the recently released Learning SPARQL, the recorded webcast is now available.  In this presentation, Bob shows how to create and run SPARQL queries. He also talks about the role that the query language can play in application development. Lastly, he looks at the range of uses people are finding for SPARQL above and beyond querying of RDF data, such as querying relational data, defining rules to enhance data quality, and more…

Watch the webcast here:

http://mediabistro.adobeconnect.com/p8mwns7kdgx/

There were some questions we did not get to during the hour, and Bob has been kind enough to answer these offline.

BONUS Q&A with Bob DuCharme:

Q: Can sparql engines integrate reasoners and reason over the data on the fly? Read more

The Exploration & Production Information Management (EPIM) Association has awarded its “multi-year ReportingHub contract to TopQuadrant, a leading semantic data integration company. For the past four years, EPIM has been working with the industry solving its problem of collecting, normalizing, validating, analyzing and reporting data about activities of the North Sea oil and gas drillers. Through its multi-year analysis of available technologies and a competitive procurement process, it chose TopQuadrant‘s TopBraid solution because of its ability to combine and semantically align large amounts of disparate, changing data in an intelligent, flexible and efficient way.” Read more

Date:	Thursday, August 25, 2011
Time:	2:00pm ET / 11:00am PT
Cost:	FREE
[NOTE: The first block of tickets for this webcast sold out within 24 hours. A new block is now available, but going fast! Additionally, the webcast will be recorded and archived here at SemanticWeb.com]

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Description:
Semantic web and linked data technologies are built around a simple data model that makes it easy to share and combine data from disparate sources across the public internet or across silos on a private intranet. SPARQL is the query language standard from the W3C (the same standards body that brought us HTML, CSS, and XML) for querying this data. A variety of free and commercial software implementations have made it easy for people to get started with SPARQL and to incorporate it into applications that take advantage of the growing availability of linked data on the web.
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The TopQuadrant blog recently compared Spin with RIF. According to the post, “Since SPIN (SPARQL Inferencing Notation) aka SPARQL Rules became W3C
member submission,we find ourselves responding to the growing interest to it. With this, a question some may ask is how SPIN is different from or similar to RIF – W3C’s standard for rules interchange. While I have heard this asked a couple of times, I was pleasantly surprised that it was is not a very common question. Pleasantly, because a certain level of confusion is to be expected about new things and, both, SPIN and RIF are relatively new. Read more

There are great conversations and education taking place at SemTech 2011 San Francisco this week. Tonight, we will feature the “Lightning Sessions,” five minute talks. There are two concurrent tracks: a business-focused track and a technology-focused track. We will be covering both simultaneously. Whether you are here at SemTech or joining us remotely, we hope to see you here tonight at 4:45pm PST.