Dispatch from the Semantic Technology Conference (May 18-22)

I’m a little behind with this post, but hopefully it will be worth it. More than 1,000 participants from around the globe converged on the San Jose Fairmont toting laptops, notebooks and, well, ontologies.Too bad I couldn’t get Occam’s razor through security (bad joke I know). Here are some quick highlights from what was a really interesting and even, at times, exciting show:

• The big buzz was around a “social interest” RDF enabled site, backed by Paul Allen, Vulcan Ventures, and currently in beta-invite only mode. It is called “twine”; the other milder buzz was around PowerSet (natural language search over Freebase and Wikipedia), which just launched.

• I could find no one offering a commercial product based on natural language processing (NLP) at internet scale. Nor could I find anyone offering semantic search with integrated premium scientific content. So illumin8 is currently unique in the industry, and our ability to apply our NLP engine over this vast content remains a very compelling differentiator.

• Google played the role of spoiler in the semantic party. It is skeptical of the semantic web, and very skeptical about the potential for semantic search on a global consumer scale. Yahoo, on the other hand, is a strong believer and they were pushing their Search Monkey platform very hard.

All in all, a very worthwhile show; I hope to be back next year.