or does it? Decide for yourself …

Yesterday I got one of those glossy multipage conference brochures in the mail. I was intrigued, because instead of being for Oracle or SAP or Office or some such, it was for an event dubbed “Semantic Technology Conference” that described itself as “The foremost place to learn about the commercialization of Semantic Technologies”.  

The brochure described many interesting talks, mostly on uses of the semantic web technologies. Looking at that, it would seem that the semantic web is finally taking off! There were even some talks from researchers I recognized on technology issues (Deb Mcguinnes, Amit Sheth, Stefan Decker, Mike Dean, John Sowa, Vasant Honavar and others). A UMBC (and Ebiquity/LAIT) alumna Melli Annamalai was also represented in the list of speakers.

On the other hand, my colleage Tim Finin has a contrarian take — perhaps conferences like these represent the peak of the hype curve for the semantic web, after which comes the inevitable fall.

Regardless of this, one interesting new “buzzword” I got from the brochure is Web 4.0, where the semantic web meets ubiquitous computing. The accompanying chart sets it start date to be 2015. Perhaps we should go out and get patents on all our work done in this space in the last 5 years, and hope to get rich a decade from now :-)

Categories: Uncategorized, , Related posts: • How the Red Queen blogs;  • CS Takes Steps to Bring Women to the Fold;  • CEO guide to the Semantic Web;   Trackback: link, Comments: