Semantic Technologies 2007 wrap-up
Back home now after Semantic Technologies 2007. It was a good few days, instructive on different levels. The two Jena sessions I facilitated went reasonably well from my point of view, despite a rather shaky start to the tutorial (I was nervous, and the preparation I thought I’d done enough of turned out to be insufficient … I’ll know better next time). I’ve yet to receive formal feedback from the conference organizers, which I’d expect to come in the next few weeks. The delegates are asked to fill-in evaluations for each session.
This was my second year at ST, and both times it was a very well organized event. The days were perhaps a little on the long side. Sessions started at 8.00 or earlier, and continued to around 6 pm. On the plus side there were lots of breaks, which was a good chance to meet and mingle. The venue (Fairmont Hotel) is very nice and the food was actually quite good.
The conference sessions I attended were a little mixed, but included some very good talks. It’s interesting contrasting this conference, which essentially has a business orientation, with the more academic conferences like ISWC. The style of presentation is different, lacking the organising pattern of ‘problem-hypothesis-solution-validation’ but not necessarily worse for that. I also think that I missed some good talks (there were eight parallel tracks): somehow I need to get better at mining good candidates out of the conference programme. The talks were generally longer than the common academic pattern of twenty-minutes-plus-five-for-questions which had an interesting effect: most presenters left lots of time for questions. These question sessions were often the best bits of the talks.
There was a trade show too, with (at a guess) around 25 exhibitors from large companies (Oracle) to small one-or-two person outfits. Lots of tools, including ontology development (e.g. TopBraid Composer, SandPiper) and semantic application development (Metatomix, TopBraid). Quite a few approaches to extracting structured semantics from unstructured text sources. Being a geek technically-minded person, I gravitated towards the more techy-looking stands. The good ones were very good at explaining their pitch, while at others (who shall be nameless) I met some marketing person with that rabbit-in-the-headlights smile who answered all my questions with “you need to talk to the technical guy”. Sigh. Overall I think the trade-show was larger and more active than last year. There was some very good technology and tools, but no applications that made my jaw drop. Or even hinge downwards a bit.
There were several panel sessions, one of which I missed most of due to illness. On the whole, they were well organized but not very informative. I think they made a mistake in making the panels too large, which meant that each panelist had too little time to develop much of a theme. The investors and analysts panel was especially disappointing: I didn’t get much insight there at all. I had been looking forward to hearing Nova Spivack speak, but he didn’t get much air-time from the moderator and didn’t say anything about Radar Networks except “we’re in stealth mode”.
Would I go again? Yes. Let’s hope Wilshire invite me back next year!