On Wednesday 16 and Thursday 17 I attended the SEMANTiCS 2015 conference in Vienna. I attended in order to present a poster for our FREME Project, to demonstrate the Ocelot based application that we have built on top of the FREME services and to catch up on the state of the art from the thought leaders in this space.
It was an enlightening conference with great presentations from large international companies, like Yahoo!, as well as research and public organizations.
Several presentations mentioned Schema.org as being the primary semantic vocabulary underpinning their technology. There was also a poster presented by researchers from the Semantic Technology Institute at the University of Innsbruck on the usage of Schema.org by hotels.
Whilst I didn’t get to talk to anyone who would be a natural customer of FREME, I left the conference with a strong feeling that the FREME e-Services, in helping to produce semantically rich digital content, would definitely serve the needs of the Linked Open Data Cloud and new technologies and services that will inevitably be built on top of it.
I reached this conclusion after listening to these presentations:
- Complex Event Extraction from Real-Time News Streams, Alexandra La Fleur, Freie Universität, Berlin
- When RDF alone is not enough – triples, documents, and data in combination, Stephen Buxton, MarkLogic
- Semantic Search at Yahoo!, Peter Mika, Yahoo!
- Evolution of Semantic Technologies in Scientific Libraries, Prof. Dr. Klaus Tochtermann, Leibniz Information Centre for Economics
All in all, an interesting and productive trip.