The last day of the Semantic Technology Conference has a few morning panels, a closing keynote, and then some afternoon seminars. But the day is really about saying goodbye to everyone, finally introducing yourself to a few of the people you’ve been crossing paths with for the past week, and making that annual trip to Koo-ki Sushi. Well, that’s what it’s about for me, anyway.
Tag: Semantic Technology Conference
STC 2008 – Day 3
Started out the day with my own presentation – Survey of Taxonomy Tools (follow the link to view the slides). It seemed to be pretty well received, for the most part. I included some time for discussion, and several people contributed interesting comments and questions. I was pretty happy with the turnout considering that this session was first thing in the morning.
After that I was so relieved, I’m surprised I could do anything, but I jumped right back into some interesting presentations, including a panel on Developing Semantic Web Applications, a talk on Calais, and a keynote that included several of the Rising Stars of the Semantic Web. Then I ended the day on the speaking side of the table again.
STC 2008 – Day 2
Started the day out with keynote speeches by Nova Spivack (Radar Networks) & Eric Miller (Zepheira). This was followed by presentations, of which my favorites were on Persistent Identifiers, Blue Organizer, and Bringing Semantics to Mainstream Markets. I closed the day out by going to the vendor exhibits.
Semantic Technology Conference 2008 – Day 1
It occurred to me, towards the end of day one of this conference, that I’ve been making my panel choices based on the speaker more than the on the topic. Now that I know more about who is doing what, this seems to be a better indicator of whether I’ll find the presentation interesting. Of course, I still take the topic into consideration, but my knowledge of the speaker will carry equal weight and will certainly come into play as a tie breaker.
So, today I went to one tutorial by some guys from DERI and one by some guys from Metaweb (makers of Freebase), and then a presentation by Tom Ilube, of Garlik. All three were just as excellant as I’d hoped.
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Semantic Technology Conference 2008
Heading out to San Jose tomorrow for STC 2008. In addition to my presentation, Surveying Taxonomy Building Tools (Wednesday, May 21, 8:30-9:30AM), I’ll also be participating in a late addition panel called How to Internally Market Semantic Web Technologies in Large Enterprises (Wednesday, May 21, 5:30-6:30PM). Hope to see you there!
Semantic Technology Conference 2007 Recap
I suppose it’s very old news, but I recently stumbled across this short recap I wrote of STC07 last summer. I didn’t publish it here at the time because I thought it was going to be used elsewhere. Since that doesn’t look like it’s going to happen, I figured I’d post it now in honor of those submitting proposals for Semantic Technology Conference 2008. Due date for proposal submission was today.
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Representing Taxonomy
I’ve been meaning to write about my presentation at the Semantic Technology Conference last month. It was called Representing Taxonomy: What Am I Looking At Here? The idea I was trying to convey is that, as semantic technologies become more widely adopted, we’re (sometimes) going to have to come up with data to drive our semantic applications. We’re also going to need processes for documenting that data and communicating about it to our clients and stakeholders.
More Resources
I added a few things to the Resources page.
A few new tools, like Piggy Bank – an open source tool for gathering data. I haven’t tried it, but I heard a couple people mention it at the Semantic Technology Conference. Sounds like a good way to gather data for prototypes and proof-of-concept projects.
A couple Semantic Wikis (Visual Knowledge and Knoodl.com). I’m very interested in this approach because it seems like a manageable entry into the world of building semantic content. People are already kind of familiar with the way to interact with a wiki, and this overlays a powerful layer of functionality. People will be building semantic content and applications without even realizing it. Unfortunately I think that both of these products have a little way to go before they are fully presenatble, but it’s great to be able to go in and play around with them. Alice in MetaLand is a budding semantic community built on the Visual Knowledge platform.
I also stumbled across this Semantic Web FAQ, which seems to be a work in progress, but has some potential. Check it out and add some things, if you feel so inclined.
Coming Soon: More SemTech
I’m not going to try to liveblog the rest of the Semantic Technology Conference. There’s a lot here to absorb and report on, and I’ll be adding more details once I’ve had some time to process a bit and sort through the materials. I’ve seen a lot of interesting tools and communities, which I’ll be writing about later and adding to the Resources page.
For now I’ll just say that I made it through my own presentation and I’m very pleased with how it went. More about that later, as well.
SemTech – Tutorials
In the morning I went to a tutorial on Semantic Wikis. It was great, despite some technical difficulties that kind of messed up the flow of the presentation for the first hour or so. The speaker was Conor Shankey, the founder of Visual Knowledge. They created a wiki platform, built on a semantic framework. It’s a collaborative tool, like any wiki, but the semantic aspect means there’s a structure that gives the system more knowledge about the content that people contribute. For example, if you have a record about a person, you indicate that it’s a person, and then there will automatically be certain assumptions made, and certain properties available to be filled out. You suddenly have fields where you can say the person’s birthday, surname, projects, etc.
Meaningful Data 