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Yesterday’s semantic web event hosted by SDForum EMTECH SIG had a great turnout, a clear indication of increasing interests in the emerging semantic web from the local community at silicon valley. I had the privilege to help put together the event, which had a scary title “Shrinking the Meaningless Web: Semantic Technologies for 2007â€. But, the five-member panel was highly qualified to give perspectives from many different angles concerning the semantic web. The panelists included Peter Rip of Crosslink Capital, Lew Tucker of Radar Networks, Giovanni Tummarello of Dbin project, Alain Rappaport of Medstory, and Ramana Rao, founder of Inxight Software.
Peter Rip gave a fantastic overview of semantic web history and comparison to web2.0. In particular, he looks at semantic web as a path to next generation web – more structured and potentially more powerful than today’s web. His presentation slides are available from Crosslink web site. Peter also moderated the panel discussion. The questions from the audience were very deep and challenge. I think there were certainly more questions than answers.
The biggest question Peter posted to the panel was: What’s the killer app? People from Oracle and IBM in the audience gave some good examples. But, the question still remains open. Fortunately, there are plenty of open source tools available now for anybody to test out big ideas. One such open source tool – Dbin was presented by Giovanni, who came all the way from Italy.
Future semantic web events from SDForum will follow this killer app question, aiming to provide a forum for engineers and companies to showcase their potential killer apps and tools, and debate how semantic web will shape the Internet as the ultimate computing platform.
*Below is the original event announcement:
Next week, we have Peter Rip, Nova Spivack and Giovanni Tummarello describing what’s new in semantic technologies…
The semantic web has always been about delivering more knowledge, not more information. While some proponents are fighting standards wars, others are just getting on with new applications. Join us as three experts discuss the emerging market and its emerging technologies.
Peter Rip, a General Partner at Crosslink Capital, will share his view on investing in the emerging semantic web. Nova Spivack, CEO of Radar Networks, will talk about commercial opportunities, and Giovanni Tummarello, Chief Architect for DBin, will present his open source project that applies semantic web technologies to community building.
After their short presentations, the panel will take on your questions. No matter whether you are new to the semantic web or already deep into the “next big thing”, you should leave knowing of new opportunities and of new tools to help get you there.
Where: Cubberley Community Center, 4000 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto,
Room H-1. Here’s a link that gives directions to Cubberley:
http://www.sdforum.org/p/l1.asp?SID=1&PID=324
When: Wednesday, January 10, 2007
7:00 Registration, Pizza, networking, and small-talk
7:20 Introduction and announcements
7:30 – 9:00 Peter Rip, Nova Spivack, Giovanni Tummarello
Speaker Bios
Peter Rip - Peter joined Crosslink in 2006 as a general partner, and focuses on software, Internet services and infrastructure, and consumer services. Peter brings over 25 years of experience as a successful entrepreneur, venture investor, and institutional investor. He has focused exclusively on early stage technology companies. Before becoming a venture investor, Peter co-founded Silicon Compiler Systems, a major IC design automation software company acquired by Mentor Graphics in 1991. He began venture investing in 1992. He has specialized in investing in early stage companies, several of which have been acquired by AOL, CA, HP, Microsoft and others. Prior to joining Crosslink, Peter was a Managing Director at Leapfrog Ventures and the Managing Director of Knight Ridder Ventures.
Nova Spivack – Founder and CEO of Radar Networks. Nova Spivack is a technology visionary and entrepreneur with nearly two decades of experience in pioneering ventures. In 1994, Mr. Spivack co-founded EarthWeb, one of the first Internet companies, where he was Executive Vice-President for Products, Strategy and Marketing. EarthWeb went public in 1999 and resulted in the Nasdaq’s largest IPO single-day percentage point gain up to that point, spawning a wave of Tech IPOs. Mr. Spivack left EarthWeb’s board of directors in 1999 and began advising startups and angel investing. During the down-years of the post-Internet-bubble, EarthWeb’s content properties were acquired in 2000 by Internet.com. The company’s Dice.com property remained a strong stand-alone business until it was acquired for approximately $200 million in 2005. Mr. Spivack has extensive experience working on knowledge representation and the Semantic Web, and has authored and helped to design several large (500 to 3000 class) ontologies in the OWL language, the W3C open standard for ontology specifications. Mr. Spivack has co-authored several books on Internet strategy and technology and led the EarthWeb Press publishing imprint with Macmillan Computer Publishing, one of the largest computer book publishers, which resulted in a series of publications by leading authors on technology. He has been featured and cited in Business Week, CNN, CNBC, CBS Evening News, CNN-FN, Discovery Channel, The New York Times, Washington Post, WIRED Magazine, Chronicle of Philanthropy, Communications Week, Interactive Week, Internet World, Reuters, Newsweek, Red Herring, Silicon Alley Reporter, Interactive Age, Web Week, Java Developer’s Journal, and has spoken at numerous conferences and industry events. Mr. Spivack also helped to invent key technologies for interactive television and Web convergence in the early days of the Web, as well as several pending patents for Radar Networks.
Dr. Giovanni Tummarello – Chief Architect, Dbin, & CEO, Sensible Logic. Giovanni Tummarello is the driving force behind the DBin project. DBin is the first, general purpose, complete Semantic Web Application; and in general it has been also a source of innovative ideas and concepts. Dr. Tummarello has a formal background in signal processing and machine learning, but has spent most of his Ph.D. and postdoc studies on Multimedia Metadata and Semantic Web technologies. He currently works at Universita’ Politecnica delle Marche, where he leads the SeMedia group. He is also the CEO of Sensible Logic, a startup focused on Semantic Web consulting and the creation of applications based on the DBin platform.
[::Subject::]semantic web, semantic technology, web 2.0
[::Category::]
semantic web
[::Author::]
AJ Chen