Semantic Technology Conference 2009 Day One: first impressions
The 2009 edition of the Semantic Technology Conference is just started today with a Code Camp and two introductory key notes by Dave Comb and Mark Greaves. Looking at the attendance numbers and at the tweets with the #semtech2009 hashtag it seems that this event will be an exiting moment for the whole Semantic Web community.
The Code camp ended with some good news regarding Freebase and OpenCalais plus an unexpected and positive interest around the growing adoption of the Adobe Flex technology for ontology visualization purposes. This first and introductory code camp has been followed by a welcoming talk by Dave Comb from Semantic Arts and the whole day ended by an interesting presentation by Mark Greaves named “The Evolving Semantic Web: From Military Technology to Venture Capital”.
Numbers, mood and general trends gathered from this first day could be better summarized leaving the scene to the actor of this first day:
“the cost of semantic data creation is going to zero - the size of semantic data is going to web-scale” - Mark Greaves
“database linkage means that LOD will soon be impossible to count except via order of magnitude” - Mark Greaves
“Gartner says that by 2012 70% of web pages will be augmented by some semantic annotation” - Dave Comb
It should also be noticed how the wave of such EU founded projects related to the Semantic Web could influence the whole conference. In fact, on Tuesday there will be an entire session dedicated to such European efforts: in that session the NoTube project, where we are deeply involved, will be presented by its scientific coordinator.
Finally, our presentation is scheduled on Wednesday, where we will be pleased to show you our “99ways to build your own Web”, the first of a new breed of applications based on the Semantic Web technologies we are currently working on.
Looking forward to meet you at the conference

