NeOn at SemTech 2009
From NeOn Project
The SemTech conference is a major annual event where academic and commercial developers of semantic technologies meet together with businesses and companies interested in using and applying these technologies. The success of this conference is a clear indication of the growing maturity of the field, with more and more examples of companies adopting semantic technologies in a variety of domains and for a variety of task. This year's edition was held between the 14th and the 18th of June in San Jose, California.
As part of the main track of the conference, Mathieu d'Aquin from the Open University presented a talk entitled "Building Next Generation Semantic Applications". He gave an overview of some of the tools developed in NeOn that help in the development of networked ontologies by supporting reuse and collaboration (including the NeOn Toolkit, the ontology modularization plugin, ontologyDesignPattern.org, the pattern-based design plugin (XD), Watson, and the collaboration plugin). This led to numerous questions concerning the technologies and the way to apply them in specific situations.
NeOn was also part of the "European Day" organized by STI international. This consisted in a brief presentation of the project, followed by a demonstration (conducted by Michael Erdmann from Ontoprise) of some of the tools developed in NeOn.
Finally, a major objective for NeOn was to take this opportunity to get in contact directly with users and developers of semantic technologies, which form the core target community for the NeOn project. In the NeOn booth, SemTech participants had a chance to discover the latest developments in the project and talk directly to project members. Needless to say, the famous NeOn USB wristbands were also present, with more than 200 SemTech attendees going back home with the NeOn toolkit attached around their wrists.
In summary, SemTech was a successful opportunity for NeOn members to get in contact with a very interesting and motivated audience. It also helped in measuring the impact of our past dissemination activities, as both the NeOn project in general and the Neon Toolkit in particular were several times in other presentations, as one of the major research efforts in the area and as one of the leading ontology engineering environments.
Story By: Mathieu d'Aquin
