Semantic Technology Conference is the largest conference in the industry for users, technologists, publishers, developers, innovators, academics, entrepreneurs, and investors. It brought the most updated knowledge and trend in the semantic community. So, it was a great chance to verify and update our knowledge of semantic technology and collect other recent works, which could be applied to our project.
The conference offered a variety of interesting programs including tutorials, case studies, keynotes, panels, and interview, as well as 220 hours of presentations focusing on financial services, pharmaceutical/healthcare/life sciences, application development, government/military, and semantic search/data discovery/linked data, among others.[i]
In this year, the latest developments from Google, Yahoo!, bing.com (Microsoft), Adobe Systems, Oracle, Metatomix, STI International, and Delve Networks were presented. The New York Times announced to publish the NYT Annotated Corpus (XML tagging) and the NYT Index in the “Linked Data Cloud” [ii]in order to open to the public.
FAO Country Profiles introduced one hour presentation about “Integrating country-based heterogeneous data at the United Nations: FAO’s geopolitical ontology and services” to the non-technical business audience. They were impressive with our work and asked over 10 questions and many people including US government agency(Department of State) asked following-up meeting for using the geopolitical ontology and services. In addition, Semantic Technology Conference invited a leader of FAO Country Profiles to the “Enterprise Data Roundtable” and discussed issues about semantic technology in large organizations.
Interesting products
Web-based information system
| product | Website | notes |
| LinkedData | www.linkeddata.org | Free over 200 open databases structured with RDF |
| Freebase | www.freebase.org | Topic-based DB (open source) |
| DBpedia | www.dbpedia.org | Tagged version of Wikipedia |
Ontology editor
| product | website | notes |
| Topbraid | http://www.topquadrant.com/products/TB_Composer.html | Strong features, updated version, but need to test for our demand. |
| Protégé 4 | http://protege.stanford.edu/ | Many changes on interface, need to wait for final configuration. |
| NeOntoolkit | http://www.neon-toolkit.org/ |
Ontology database management system
| product | website | notes |
| Oracle 11g for semantic technology | http://www.oracle.com/database/index.html | Not release yet. Probably this October. Can save triple store and table and query at the same location, faster than AllegroGraph. Full support on SPARQL and JENA |
| AllegroGraph 4.0 | http://www.franz.com/agraph/allegrograph/ | Top for real time triple storage. Reducing updating, querying, inferencing time |
Faceted browsing (filtering data)
| product | website | notes |
| Anzo | http://www.cambridgesemantics.com/products/anzo_on_the_web | Open source, Requires server |
| Fresnel | http://simile.mit.edu/wiki/Fresnel | Complex rendering |
| Simile Exhibit | http://simile.mit.edu/ | Exhibits are self-contained, custom lenses aren’t easily reusable, large datasets run into resource constraints, lenses are read-only |
Ontology query language
| product | Tutorial | notes |
| SPARQL | Advanced tutorial for using SPARQL |
Ontology API
| product | Tutorial | notes |
| JENA | The most popular | |
| SESAME | popular | |
| Mulgara by Zepheira | new |
Appendix
List of participants:
SemTech 2009’s globally-recognized speakers and faculty include experts from: Accenture Technology Labs; AdaptiveBlue; Adobe Systems; The Analysis Group; Asemantics; ask.com; Babel-Ease Ltd.; BBN Technologies; bing/Microsoft; Bintro.com; The Boeing Company; Cambridge Semantics; CIC-IPN; Clark & Parsia; Cleveland Clinic; The Cloud of Data; Cognition Technologies; Collexis Holdings Inc.; Custom Technology Ltd.; Cycorp; Dan McCreary & Associates; DataPortability Project/Dow Jones; Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), National University of Ireland, Galway; Emergent Intelligence Technology, Inc.; Earley & Associates; Expert System; Fedora Commons; Florida IHMC; Franz; Getty Research Institute; Google; Guidewire Group; hakia, Healthline Networks; IBM Rational; Intuit; iQser AG; iQuest Analytics; Jazz Foundation; James Leigh Services Inc.; JS-Kit; Kapow Technologies; KnowledgeHives; Kriedman.com; Los Alamos National Laboratory; Matrixware Information Services; Merck and Co.; Metatomix; Metaweb Technologies; MuseGlobal, Inc.; Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI); Ontos AG; Ontotext AD; Open Link Software; Oracle; Orbis Technologies; Oregon Health & Science University; Overtone; Oxford University; Palomar Ventures; Primal Fusion; Procter & Gamble; Progeny Systems; Project10x; Radar Networks; Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Revelytix; Riot Games; RiverGlass; Sabre Holdings; Sandia National Laboratories; Saltlux; Sandpiper Software; SAP Labs; Sciova; Semantic Arts; SemanticCommunity.net; Semantic Discovery System; SemanticV; Siri; Smartlogic; Stanford University; Syntactica; TextDigger; TextWise; TopQuadrant; Travelocity; TriviumRLG; True Knowledge; Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations; University of California, San Diego; University of Cambridge; University of Texas, Houston; US Department of State; VIStology; Widality; the World Wide Web Consortium; Wolfram|Alpha; Wright State University; XBRL International; XSB, Inc.; Yahoo!; Zemanta; and Zepheira.
[i] http://www.prweb.com/releases/SemTech2009/web3/prweb2518684.htm
* faceted browser was summarized by Joseph C. Wicentowski
