Back from SemTech & ESWC - but still busy...

The last weeks have been rather busy, I've presented SemWIQ at ESWC and before ESWC I had spontanously decided to go to the Semantic Tech Conference in San José to see what's going on in the US.

In the end it was a good combination of research and applications/business. I think it's very interesting that there are not so many startups, but there are many many mature companies from all areas successfully applying semantic technologies for diverse business needs. The topics at SemTech reached from classical knowledge management, ontology engineering, applied reasoning, and enterprise data integration to Web information extraction and new search paradigms. It was a great pleasure to talk to well-known people like Tom Gruber, Eric Miller, Paul Gearon, etc. and to meet people I only knew by e-mail before.

Not only from a research point of view, ESWC is really a wonderful conference. This year's venue was absolutely outstanding: Tenerife with it's 3,718m volcano peak El Teide. The only problem was the wireless network at the hotel causing people really getting mad although we had a pool and a bar next to the session rooms...

I gave a talk about SemWIQ as well a poster presentation. I think it was a good combination that Bastian Quilitz had his presentation of DARQ next. People seamed to be very interested and I could find interesting contacts.

In the upcoming weeks I'd like to

  1. finish RDFStats
  2. integrate it into the already prepared SemWIQ optimizer
  3. and optimize D2R-Server

Last week I had a Skype call with Richard Cyganiak about D2R performance and issues. Since we would like to use D2R as a wrapper for a bigger archive of solar observation data, we have to optimize the SPARQL-SQL translation. It will be interesting what the RDB2RDF Incubator Group will find out in future, however, we cannot wait any longer and that's why I suggested that our student, Herwig Leimer will stick to this.

Unfortunately I was so busy when I got back from the two conferences that I did't find time already to post this follow-up, nor could I continue the RDFStats project yet.