The Semantic Technology Conference, San Jose, June.09
The Semantic Technology Conference in San Jose, 14-18.June.2009, was probably the most exciting and most rewarding conference I’ve ever been to. I’ll be devoting several posts to discussing the contents.
For now: The Fairmont Hotel is beautiful in that elegant and slightly oldish-modern way. The facilities functioned really well – except for the slightly-deficient Internet access. I guess that they weren’t ready for that many geeks madly typing and browsing and blogging and tweeting away. There were two lunch tables devoted to tweeters.
The New York Times had two hot-shots there, telling the story that NYT has been “semantic” for a century and will escalate now: Semantic web service soon. It looks very real.
The Wolfram-Alpha representative sometimes had to say “Steve sometimes says things like that,” with ensuing technical discussion of the Wolfram methods. Bit hit at the conference.
I would name this The Year of the Semantic Web Service: NYC, Wolfram, Ontos, Expert Systems, DBpedia, OpenCalais, Freebase. And more. I’ll try to blog on each of them.
Of course, there were many discussions of ontologies, RDFa, controlled vocabularies. Semantics in the Enterprise. Text analysis – in very great depth and sophistication.
Yes, re: “probably the most exciting and most rewarding conference I’ve ever been to”, Semantic Universe (Wilshire) does a great job, and they make their conferences about your getting what you came for.
Looking forward to reading your upcoming additional posts on the conference!