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For real-world applications of Linked Data and the Semantic Web, the long-running Semantic Technology Conference is hard to beat. For getting a real handle on the Cloud Computing landscape, GigaOM‘s Structure Conference is also a leading light.

Working across both areas as I do, these events tend to figure prominently in my calendar for the year*. Last year, both took place in San Francisco during the same week. I tried to attend both, and therefore succeeded in spending most of my week in cabs, shuttling between meetings at the two venues. I saw very few sessions that I wasn’t personally involved in, and the experience wasn’t a huge success.

This year the conference organisers have taken pity on me, and moved their events to opposite ends of June. The Semantic Technology Conference is up first, back at the Hilton Union Square from 5-9 June. Structure follows, returning to the Mission Bay Conference Centre on 22 and 23 June.

I’ll be attending both, and probably doing various official things during each event. At the moment, the only thing we’ve definitely nailed down is a special live appearance by The Semantic Link crew on the evening of 5 June; we’ll be taking a look at the highlights expected for the conference, offering some tips for those new to the event and its multitude of parallel sessions, and generally bringing our usual podcast chatter to the stage.

So if you’re in town around the time of either event, do get in touch; it promises to be an interesting month.

* Disclosure: WebMediaBrands pay me to host the monthly Semantic Link podcast, and to write a monthly column on SemanticWeb.com. GigaOM pay me to curate the Infrastructure/ Cloud Computing channel on their Pro site. I attended and participated in both of these events before that was the case, and still would today without the contractual relationship.

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A somewhat hectic June concluded with my second trip of the month to California. Whilst the first excursion led to Santa Clara and an interesting insight into attempts by Hitachi Data Systems to reinvent its relationship with the wider community, the second journey took me to San Francisco and a pair of events that lie at the heart of the advances that underpin much of my current work.

The Semantic Technology Conference celebrated its sixth year in 2010, moving from San Jose to the Hilton Union Square in Downtown San Francisco. This was my fourth (I think!) year, and alongside the “30% increase in attendance” to around 1,200, I noticed a refreshing realism amongst presenters, exhibitors and attendees; the hyperbole and inflated expectations of the “Google killers” thankfully seemed mostly to have been replaced by good ideas, sound business models, and steadily growing customer bases. Richard MacManus has been doing a good job of distilling some of the news from the event, and pushing it out on ReadWriteWeb.

Across town at UCSF’s Mission Bay Campus, GigaOM‘s smaller and younger Structure Conference broke out of its previous 1-day format to pack two days with various insights into the shifting Cloud Computing landscape; insights that were reported as they happened on GigaOM and elsewhere, and preserved on video for you to watch at your leisure.

Both events were smoothly run (at least one even brings in the same professional A/V team every year, don’t they Curtiss?), buzzing, and well worth attending. Unfortunately, for me at least, ‘attendance’ meant a near-unending stream of meetings and briefings in and around the venues, rather than much time spent listening to either carefully orchestrated programme. Lining up briefings, meetings and the rest seemed like such a good idea as this trip was planned. Participating in two events simultaneously, I persuaded myself, would be fine. And it mostly was, even though there were definitely times that I couldn’t quite remember where I was. Sitting down with John Hagel, looking blank, then saying “Hmm… so tell me about the Cloud,” was probably not the best way to get started with someone I’d been looking forward to meeting for a very long time. Delayed jetlag from the week before? Jetlag from the outbound flight earlier that same week? MUNI-lag from crossing back and forth between venues? Too much coffee? Not having quite got around to eating that day? Too many appointments in rapid succession? Or just impending senility? Whatever the reason, Hagel coped admirably with his pathetic interviewer’s opening gambit, and we went on to have a great conversation. More on that, his latest book, and his team’s Cloud Computing: Storms on the Horizon paper in due course, I suspect.

Despite starting from very different places (a sizeable chunk of the SemTech audience would not be out of place at an academic conference, whilst most of Structure’s attendees probably stalked the halls of Tim O’Reilly’s earliest Web 2.0 events), the perceived gulf between the real worlds of Cloud Computing and the Semantic Web grows narrower all the time. Companies like Facebook attend one to talk about the Open Graph protocol, and address issues of scale at the other. With Cloud infrastructures’ (yes, that apostrophe is correctly placed) capabilities ever-more commoditised by the day, value and differentiation move toward putting those assets to work in tackling real business challenges; challenges that require data, challenges that depend upon business buy-in, and challenges that benefit from lessons the Semantic Web community has learned in grappling with its transition toward a range of (hopefully) sustainable data businesses.

I have long believed in the fusion of the two (‘Cloud of Data,’ after all), but it was both refreshing and reassuring to observe the growing convergence in hallway conversation at each event. At SemTech, many were reaching toward ‘the Cloud’ (mostly, they meant ‘using Amazon’) in its simplest, purest, form. At Structure, many of those with whom I spoke were reaching for Semantic Technologies and some of Linked Data’s promise, without initially recognising that for which they sought. The Semantic Web, to them, was all too often just a discredited pipe dream from the Web’s distant past. The Semantic Web community of today is a very different place, and one with which Structure’s attendees might find much in common. The danger for the Semantic Web community, of course, is that they once more become absorbed in internal debate or the purity of the model. They may have powerful ideas and technologies to offer, but they need to reach out and describe those in ways that resonate with an industry that is ripe for hearing these messages. Delay too long, or descend too far into re-imagining technical underpinnings, and this fleeting opportunity will be lost; the bright young things of Silicon Valley will just develop something else that does the job almost as well, then iterate rapidly as they mine the flow to observe what works, and what doesn’t.

Personally, I am still absorbing the cacophony of ideas, contacts and opportunities arising from my week in San Francisco, but I am sure that there are plenty of projects, stories, podcasts and other follow-ups to appear here and elsewhere over the next few months.

And finally, an appeal to the organisers; can you locate these events a little closer together next year, please?!

Disclosures: Costs for my trip to Santa Clara were met in full by HDS. Both the Semantic Technology Conference and GigaOM’s Structure Conference supplied Analyst Passes for admission to their events.

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I shared some of my views on this site soon after the event, but think you’ll like the range of opinions and insights from regular Gang members, participants in our audience, and conference organiser Tony Shaw. Have a listen, and see what you think.

As well as generating our regular audio podcast, the event organisers were kind enough to also video the session, and publish the video on their site. I’ve also embedded it, below.

In fact, there’s a nice set of resources from the conference taking shape over on the Semantic Universe site; take a look and see video from the Linked Data Panel (another of the sessions I moderated), the keynote sessions and more.

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Today’s my first day back at home, following a tour of Silicon Valley and a couple of days in London to present at the ISKO UK Conference.

The main event was this year’s Semantic Technology Conference in San Jose, which I’ve already partially covered via various blog posts over on ZDNet. More on this in a moment.

On the travel front, it was great to chat with JP Rangaswami on the flight out and even greater (no offence, JP!  ) to recline in comfort on the overnight return journey after a very welcome upgrade from British Airways.

Before and after the conference, I visited several Silicon Valley companies both new and old. Despite evidence of the economic situation at every turn (most shockingly, actually, in the boarding up of two fixtures of many a trip to San Francisco; the Disney Store on Union Square and the big Virgin Megastore on Market) the people I spoke with were full of ideas and enthusiasm for the journey ahead. In so many areas of technology, the edge cases and the cool or interesting concepts are moving towards the mainstream. Mobile, clearly, is everywhere, and there is a growing recognition of the value in structure, linking and data or application portability. We’re even, finally, seeing some viable business models based upon something other than just plastering sites with Ads. Painful as it has been for far too many individuals, this latest economic hiccup appears increasingly likely to have been very good for a tech industry that had become a little too complacent, far too smug, and rather caught up in tech for tech’s sake. The survivors are leaner, meaner, and far more focussed upon understanding the areas in which they bring sustainable value to audiences of a viable size. That’s a good thing, and I can only hope that we remember the lessons we’ve learned when the champagne starts flowing and the car parks of tech startups once again fill with Porsches, Ferraris and Teslas…

It’s a testament to the topicality of the subject matter and the hard work of the team at Wilshire that attendance was actually higher than last year, and the buzz of conversation during the event would suggest that the upward trend shows every sign of continuing. Speaking during a special live episode of the Semantic Web Gang that we recorded on stage just before the end of the conference, Wilshire‘s Tony Shaw discussed attendance figures and the breakdown of different audience categories. This podcast should be online shortly. In the midst of this collective tightening of belts, it’s not surprising that the freebie/schwag haul was the lowest I’ve ever seen. I understand why. The children, however, were sorely disappointed and distinctly unimpressed by my attempts at rationalisation. I think they feel that the technology sector owes them schwag.

With a programme that began at 0730 each morning and proceeded through the day with as many as ten parallel sessions, there was something for everyone. Free proper coffee helped to lubricate the corridor conversations, and I probably drank rather too many vanilla lattes as I tended to find myself engaged in those conversations when my panel moderating duties permitted. Keynote sessions each day addressed different aspects of the space, from the Toms (Tague and Gruber) discussing where we’ve been and one aspect of where we might go, through an ultimately disappointing assemblage of Semantic Search’s big hitters to Nova Spivack’s chat with Wolfram Alpha’s Russell Foltz-Smith and the final morning’s (promising, yet disappointingly vague) announcements from the New York Times.

I didn’t see (much) radical innovation, and I didn’t see any great technological leaps forward from last year. However, what I saw again and again was evidence of maturity, adoption and real-world deployment. Ideas that might have seemed a little unrealistic or risqué just a year ago had become an accepted part of the conversation. The Web was more dominant than in previous years. As Ian Davis has often described it, we’ve seen a welcome and perhaps overdue shift from the Semantic (Web) toward (Semantic) Web. Efforts like Freemix package existing capabilities and bring them within reach of the next wave of adopters. Linked Data was on the lips of many, and Mills Davis was amongst those keen to encourage the sector’s serious engagement with the accelerating enthusiasm for Linked Data in Government on both sides of the Atlantic. I agree with him, and look forward to playing my part in ensuring that something real follows the political rhetoric of recent weeks. Although the terminology is different, in many ways it’s the realisation of the vision we set out within the Common Information Environment at the beginning of this decade. I’m trying to line up podcasts with some of those involved inside the US and UK Governments, so watch this space…

Thanks to Tony Shaw, Eric Franzon and the team at Wilshire for once again laying on a great event. Thanks to the panelists on all the panels I moderated for making my job exceedingly easy. And thanks to all of those I met for some great conversation, much of which I’m still digesting.

Roll on next year, when the conference moves out of San Jose to take over the San Francisco Hilton from 21-25 June. See you there!

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Thomson Reuters‘ Open Calais team have clearly been busy, with several announcements at the Semantic Technology Conference here in San Jose.

On 15 June the company rolled out version 4.1 of Open Calais, embracing Spanish language content and the notion of ‘social tags;’

“OpenCalais is a great semantic data extraction engine. If you write an article about the relative merits ofPorsche and BMW at the test track in Leipzig, we’ll diligently identify Porsche and BMW as companies and Leipzig as a geography. We’ll create Linked Data URIs to represent these things and open up access to theLinked Data ecosystem so you can enhance your article with other content assets.

But… sometimes you just want a great description. The kind of tags a human would put on the article. Like “Car racing” or “Automobiles”. The kind of tag that would, for example, be very searchable and therefore …. SEO’able (that is definitely is not a word).

In 4.1 we’re introducing OpenCalais Social Tags. Social Tags is our attempt to emulate how a human might tag the document. Social Tags does some fairly sophisticated analysis of your entire document and maps it to a knowledgebase based on Wikipedia and other assets. From that process we generate Social Tags.“

This morning, they followed through with a further pair of announcements. Firstly, CNET has been joined by The Huffington Post, DailyMe and the UK’s Mail Online in integrating Open Calais into their workflow.

One of the more interesting aspects of the earlier CNET announcement was the contribution of data back into the pool;

“CNET joins Thomson Reuters as one of the first commercial media companies to publish core data assets for public, programmatic use on the open semantic Web. CNET will leverage OpenCalais’ connection to the rapidly expanding ‘Linked Data cloud’ to allow its original content — such as tech product reviews on laptops, TVs, smart phones, and digital cameras; news articles and blog posts from its CNET News editorial staff; and parts of its core technology product catalog – to be available for public use.”

It will be interesting to see whether these latest media properties are able and willing to do something similar.

The second element announced today in many ways mirrors Amazon’s recent Import/Export service. Thomson Reuters, too, have recognised that it remains impractical to move large quantities of data over the network, and today announced their ‘Archive Express’ which will process up to 20 million documents off a physical storage device within 24 hours, free of charge.

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Tom Gruber will be one of the keynotes at the Semantic Technology Conference in San Jose next week, and there’s a lot of interest in what he’s likely to show. I spoke to Tom yesterday to learn more, and the result has just been released as a podcast.

Well known in the Artificial Intelligence research community, and perhaps better known to the Web world as Founder of RealTravel, Tom is now CTO and co-Founder of Siri.

Siri itself came to notice back in October, when a company previously going by the name Stealth Company announced itself to the world. The intervening months have seen the team hard at work to deliver on their vision, prior to once again coming to wider attention in the past week or two with appearances at All Things Digital and (next week) the Semantic Technology Conference. Interest in the tech media has clearly been piqued, with several posts on TechCrunch, and write-ups in BusinessWeek and the New York Times.

Production of this podcast was supported by Talis, and show notes will appear on their Nodalities blog shortly.

As Tom’s abstract for next week notes,

“We are beginning to see a new interaction paradigm for the web: the Virtual Personal Assistant (VPA). A VPA is task focused: it helps you get things done. You interact with it in natural language, in a conversation. It gets to know you, acts on your behalf, and gets better with time. The VPA paradigm builds on the information and services of the web, with new technical challenges of semantic intent understanding, context awareness, service delegation, and mass personalization.

Siri is a virtual personal assistant for the mobile Internet. Although just in its infancy, Siri can help with some common tasks that human assistants do, such as booking a restaurant, getting tickets to a show, and inviting a friend.”

Siri’s first incarnation will be in the form of an iPhone app, which Tom describes in the podcast.

Have a listen, and see whether you think a VPA will become an essential part of your mobile life anytime soon…

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I mentioned the Semantic Web Gang podcast last week, in the context of our upcoming Live appearance at the Semantic Technology Conference in San Jose next month.

This month’s show was recorded yesterday, and is now available. During the conversation, Gang members dig into the two hot stories of the moment; the launch of Wolfram Alpha and Google’s apparent embracing of semantics with their ‘Rich Snippets.’

Have a listen, and see what you think.

The Semantic Web Gang podcasts are sponsored by Talis. Show notes are available.

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One of the podcasts I’ve been doing for a while is the monthly Semantic Web Gang. It began whilst I was with Talis, and the company continues to support production and hosting of the show.

Unlike most of my podcasts (all listed over there on the right, for those of you reading on the cloudofdata.com site), the Gang is a (virtual) round table rather than an interview. Each month, regular Gang members (and the occasional guest) get together to discuss the latest moves in the semantic technology arena.

June’s Semantic Web Gang is going to be a little different, as it will be recorded – live – on the stage at this year’s Semantic Technology Conference in San Jose, California.

Almost all of the Gang will be there, and I’m delighted to say that Richard MacManus, Founder and Editor of Read/Write Web will be joining us on stage, along with Tony Shaw of conference organisers Semantic Universe.

We also intend to get the audience involved in our look back at some of the conference’s highlights, so if you’re in San Jose for Semantic Technology do come along to take part in our session at 11am on 18 June.

It looks like being a busy few days, with meetings before and after, three panels to moderate on 16 June, one on 17 June, and this on 18 June. I’m also in the middle of lining up a few more Semantic Web, Cloud Computing, Enterprise 2.0, Social Media-type meetings in San Jose, San Francisco and points between for 15, 19, 20 and 21 June… so if you’re in the area and interested please do get in touch.

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The annual Semantic Technology Conference in San Jose plays an important role here, with ever-more ‘proper’ business people joining the semantic enthusiasts each year in order to understand the ways in which the Semantic Web and the diverse product offerings of exhibitors can help them to tackle real problems inside their business today.

Online, too, the team behind the conference has been working to build a portfolio of case studies and papers under the Semantic Universe banner. The latest iteration of this site sees it take ‘Semantics in the Enterprise‘ as an editorial focus, comprising a collection of more than twenty articles and media resources.

In amongst the various papers is one that I was invited to write, entitled ‘Bringing Semantic Technologies to Enterprise Data.’ I had great fun writing this, and am grateful to everyone who gave up their time to talk with me about their views on Enterprise Data. I spoke with executives from Oracle, SAP Business Objects, Silver Creek Systems and other companies, and learned a lot from the different perspectives that they bring to bear. Master Data Management, Business Intelligence, regulatory ‘segregation of duties‘ and more receive the semantic technology treatment at the companies I spoke with, and there is plenty to unpick for those on the verge of making similar moves themselves.

The trick now, of course, is to carry these conversations to the enterprise data practitioners who don’t yet know that semantic technologies can help them, by sharing success stories and exemplars in their conferences and publications in order to draw them to ‘ours,’ and the resources gathered on sites such as Semantic Universe.

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My favourite technology event last year was, undoubtedly, the Semantic Technology Conference in San Jose, California. An interesting mix of Enterprise and geek attendees, combined with slick organisation and an engaging programme all came together to ensure a worthwhile and stimulating few days.

This year’s programme looks even better, and I’ll definitely be heading back to the Fairmont San Jose in June to see what’s changed in the Semantic Technology world.

Thanks to Tony Shaw and the organising team it looks as if I’ll also be moderating a number of the panel sessions, and I look forward to chatting with the panellists in the run up to the event in order to ensure that they and our audience gain as much as possible from the opportunity.

Due to the vagaries of international airline pricing, I’m going to have some time in San Jose and San Francisco (and points between, of course) both before and after the Conference, and will be lining up clients, briefings, podcasts and coffee between now and my flight.

So if you’re interested in Semantic Technology, seriously consider attending this event. And if you’re in the area for the conference or something else, do say Hi.

And thank you, British Airways, for having a flight booking system that at least makes it easy to see how scarily expensive some days are when compared to those either side of them!