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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Image via Wikipedia

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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