The semantic web technology conference is taking place every year in San Jose, California. It is meant to be the world's symposium on the business of semantic technologies. Essentially here we discuss about semantic search, how to improve access to the data and how we make sense of structured, but mainly unstructured content.
Some exhibitors were more NLP oriented, concepts extraction (such as SemanticV), others were more focused on providing a scalable storage (essentially RDF storage). Most of the solutions includes a data aggregator/unifier in order to combine multi-sources data into a single storage from which ontologies could be defined.
Then on top of that is the enhanced search engine. They concentrate on internal data within the enterprise and not that much about using the Web as a resource. For those who built a web application on top of the data, they choosed Flex as their framework (Metatomix).From all the exhibitors, the ones that kept my attention were The Anzo suite (open source project), ORDI and Allegrograph RDF store.
Developped by Cambridge Semantics, in Java, Anzo suite, especially, Anzo on the web and Anzo collaboration server, is the closest tools to CubicWeb, providing a multi source data server and an AJAX/HTML interface to develop semantic web applications, customize views of the data using a templating language. It is available in open source.
The feature that I think was interesting is an assistant to load data into their application that then helps the users define the data model based on that data. The internal representation of the content is totally transparent to the user, types are inferred by the application, as well as relations.
I did not get a demo of ORDI, but it was just mentionned to me as an open source equivalent to CubicWeb, which I am not too sure about after looking at their web site. It does data integration into RDF.Allegrograph RDF store is a potential candidate for another source type in CubicWeb . It is already supported by Jena and Sesame framework.
They developped a Python client API to attract pythonist in the Java world.
They all agreed on one thing : the use of SPARQL should be the standard query language. I quickly heard about Knowledge Interface Format (KIF) which seems to be an interesting representation of knowledge used for multi-lingual applications. If there was one buzz word to recall from the conference, I would choose ontology :)
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