Last week brought the annual Semantic Technology Conference to San Francisco.  This year saw not only a healthy increase in attendees, speaker sessions, and exhibitors, but also seemed to bring with it a new attitude that is more focused on the solutions, and not comparing itself to more "traditional technologies", such as relational databases.

As an outsider to the industry, it was interesting to observe some sessions and speak with a range of the exhibitors, to get a sense of where the insiders think the industry is going.  Overall the consensus was up, and to the right, if you were to be looking at some growth/adoption chart.

The realization of today’s world is more data, generated by more people and organizations, in more places.  Both on the production, and consumption side of things, our appetites for data not only pose the questions of where to store all this data, but what to do with it.  The storage vendors are more then happy to provide the buckets to drop the data into, but it’s the folks in this community who are tasked with solving the problem of making heads or tails of it all.

To gain insights into their marketplaces, customers, competitors, etc, organizations need to mine and reason about all of their unstructured, and structured content.  This is where semantic technologies come in.  In looking over the sessions and presenters, there is hardly an industry untouched.  From Publishing, Healthcare and Finance, to Government, Life Sciences and Marketing, semantic adoption is everywhere.

It was even interesting to see Salesforce in attendance speaking about how they are looking to leverage semantics to help small and large businesses work more efficiently and in a collaborative manner within their enterprise platform.  Jari Koister, who joined SFDC via the GroupSwim acquisition, spoke about how he is leading a team that is building an engine to efficiently make use of the structured data a CRM system provides, to gain insights into the increasing pile of documents and unstructured data and enterprise can bring into the system.

Of course a highlight that stuck out on the list of presentations was the Thursday keynote with Facebook talking about the Open Graph Protocol they unveiled earlier this year at their F8 conference.  As much as Facebook pops up in just about any subject matter relating to the web these days, their presentation underscores how semantic technologies impact our daily lives, whether it be at work, or at play when browsing the interwebs.

A surprising lack of interest and knowledge around cloud computing at the event was equally refreshing and perplexing.  Being here in Silicon Valley can sometimes put the blinders on us and we get caught up in thinking that everyone and every industry thinks as we do.  Semantics seem to be one sector that has not yet fully seen the light.  There was only a single session around cloud computing in the semantic sector.

I had a great sit down conversation with speaker Brian Ippolito from Orbis Technologies.  It was interesting to hear Brian talk about the projects, as much as he could.., his organization is doing with the Federal Government and large Fortune 50 type organizations.  He spoke about how they are really into using tools like Hadoop as a parallel processing framework, and leverage cloud-like infrastructures whenever possible to conduct jobs in a more agile manner.  It seemed to be a theme that should have cut across the entire event, but did not.., at least this year.  Brian’s guess is that by mid to late next year, you will see everyone in the Semantic world on the cloud train, given the data processing nature of this sector.

Besides the great conversations with presenters and vendor community folks in Orbis, and Thomson Reuters, there were some very interesting new services showing off as well in YoLink and Semantifi.

YoLink is a newly hatched project out of industry veteran TigerLogic.  It is a fantastic little tool that allows one to gain quick insights into unstructured content by quickly drilling into the details of the content related to your search terms.  Whether it be a browser plugin giving you a window into your web results, or their soon to be released MS Office Plugin, that looks into your documents and emails on your computer, once identified, the service then allows you to push/organize the related content into enterprise systems such as Google Docs, or within newly created assets on your desktop.

Winner of the SemTech startup pitch challenge, Semantifi is pitching an interesting solution in its semantic search and reasoning platform.  They are looking to create an "app store" type environment for data.  If you wish to give your data away, give it to Semantifi to appropriately reason about and back with powerful search semantics, and they will put it up on their platform for all to use freely.  Wish to to the same, but charge for your content?  Semantifi is using a 30/70 split of revenue in the form of a paid service offering.  An example of one of their test data sets was taking all the Crunchbase data, and being able to search via their engine on things like "show me all clean tech companies from boston".

Overall it was a fantastic event put on by the folks at Semantic Universe.  We will be on the lookout for announcements and releases from this sector as it continues to solve some of the worlds hardest data related problems.