2. European Semantic Technology Conference

Berlin, 10/6/2008: The second European Semantic Technology Conference (ESTC) took place in Vienna in late September this year, with the purpose of promoting the ‘industrialisation’ of semantic technologies. The conference was well-attended with over 210 visitors from 24 countries, 70% of which were from industry, even if it has not yet managed to pull in the 1000 or so visitors drawn to the more long-running Semantic Technology Conference in the USA. Steve Bastasini (Semantic Universe) and Mills Davis (Project10X), the originators of the USA conference, called for closer collaboration and networking between the conferences next year (ESTC 2009 will be held from 30 September to 2 October 2009).

The conference showed that there are already a large number of everyday applications for semantic technology. Semantic technologies are used particularly in various service areas within the healthcare industry, the telecommunications industry and the financial sector. A range of smaller European companies presented their solutions alongside major names in international IT such as SAP, British Telecom, Yahoo and Reuters.

The THESEUS research programme, which supported the conference as a gold sponsor and ran its own stand, gave a total of three presentations on the TEXO, PROCESSUS and MEDICO use cases. These were extremely well-received, particularly the keynote speech by Mr Terzidis from SAP, who gave a presentation on the topic “Internet of Services”. There was also an in-depth discussion of the PROCESSUS and MEDICO schemes which generated a lot of interest among listeners.

The presentations and demonstrations at the conference addressed the following areas:
- widgets, which are easy to integrate into website in order to enrich editorial systems with additional content-relevant information (such as Ontos),
- business intelligence products that analyse various issues and distribute the appropriate information to the relevant persons (Expert Systems, IT; iSOCO ES),
- patent and IP rights searches (matrixware),
- human resource management tools (Innoraise, DE; D.O.O.M, IT),
- web service searches and orchestration (Seekda, AT),
- tools for implementing semantic technologies in existing IT structures (Ontotext, BG, etc.).

Business Idea Contest

Seven groups took part in this year’s Business Idea Contest. The winner was Sindice Data Web Services (http://sindice.com/), presented by Stefan Decker (DERI). DOOM (Data Over Ontological Models), which uses formal logic to provide access to semi-structured data (http://www.doom-srl.it/), came second. Third place was awarded to the first business ideas originating from the THESEUS project: Innoraise (http://innoraise.com/), presented by Raphael Volz (formerly of FZI), a use in social enterprise searches, which was able to provide the correct answers to the experts’ questions.

For more information please see the press release on heise.de:
heise online

Back