In summary, this year’s conference was a big success. Why? First, conference attendance grew in a year where the economy has caused many conferences to falter. In addition, while in years past an undercurrent of questions about whether semantic technologies were “ready for primetime” seemed to linger, this year was different. This year the lingering questions were less about “if” and more about “how”. There to answer such questions and announce major investments in the space were the three major search engine companies: Google, Yahoo, Microsoft.

The expo held more booths this year and there was a constant flow of people wanting to find out more about the tools available to support implementation of semantic technologies. There were even tools that allow the average non-technical user to participate in the Semantic Web such as Zepheira’s Freemix and Cambridge Semantics Anzo.

Open data was a recurring theme. More and more organizations are making their data open and available, encouraging its linkage to other data sets. An announcement by the New York Times about the NYT Annotated Corpus and the NYT Index being released to the “Linked Data Cloud” generated a great deal of buzz in this regard.

Finally, the upward trend in practical use cases continued. One example was Chime Ogbuji’s talk about his work at Cleveland Clinic to create a clinical informatics framework improve the Clinic’s ability to use patient data for generating new knowledge and improve future patient care. Another example was the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) discussion on their launch of an ontology and associated services to manage, exchange and integrate geopolitical information at corporate level and with international partners.

There’s still a long way to go to provide friendly ways for the average user to participate and to help organizations understand the benefits and where and how these technologies should be used. From the momentum gained over the course of the past year, it’s a good bet that we will see a lot more on this front at next year’s conference.

Dates for next year’s conference have been posted.

Zepheira’s CEO Bernadette Hyland and David Wood, Partner, will brief representatives of the press at 12:00 US Pacific Time in the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose. Zepheira will demonstrate Freemix at booth #108 on the SemTech 2009 exhibit floor.

SemTech conference attendees may also attend a briefing on Freemix on Wednesday, 17 June 2009 from 5:00-6:00 PM US PST.

If you are a spreadsheet user and want to share your data more widely, Freemix is for you. Wouldn’t it be nice if your data had friends, too?

San Jose, CA June 15, 2009 — Zepheira™, a leading global provider of semantic web technology services for accelerating the integration and understanding of complex information, today announced the availability of Freemix™ for invitational beta. Freemix is a new and innovative platform that allows users to slice, show and share data via the Web. The announcement was made at the Semantic Technology 2009 Conference, the industry’s largest conference on semantic technologies.

Freemix is a free social networking site for wrapping, exposing and sharing data. The invitational beta of Freemix allows you to rapidly upload data, visualize and share it on the Web, providing quantum leaps in speed, efficiencies and cost reduction in comparison to traditional data management strategies. Over the past year, there has been increasing attention to the critical need for easy ways to quickly wrap and expose both local content and an increasing amount of open data. The ability to rapidly add, visualize and share data is driving the next generation of successful organizations delivering products and services online.

Freemix is a platform to assist people in sharing information which is the foundation of online communities. Provided on demand as a software-as-a-service offering, Freemix provides easy access to a suite of Web 3.0 tools and a highly-customizable user interface for improved visualization and analysis.

David Wood, Partner and co-founder of Zepheira, stated “this new service lowers the barriers for sharing data on the Web and will enable the widespread use of semantic web technologies. With Freemix, you can now point at data, perform powerful transformations, create metadata and in minutes create a compelling Web-based user interface.” An entrepreneur and multidisciplinary engineer, Dr. Wood has been involved with the development of Semantic Web standards, tools, products and services since 1999.

About Zepheira Zepheira is a leading global provider of semantic technology services that accelerate the integration and understanding of complex information. Zepheira is able to uniquely identify patterns and relationships inherent in content, transforming and unlocking the full potential of data for collaboration and social computing. Recognized Zepheira customers include The Library of Congress, Elsevier, Cleveland Clinic Foundation, Sun Microsystems, Dow Jones, Thomson Reuters and OCLC. Visit Zepheira.

About Freemix Freemix is the social networking site for data and the people who use it, allowing users to slice, show and share content via the Web. Accessed on demand, Freemix is publicly-available and promotes the analysis, remixing and sharing of data. With Freemix, users visualize content in previously unimagined ways while simultaneously experiencing efficiencies and cost reduction in comparison to alternative data management strategies. Wouldn’t it be nice if your data had friends too? Access Freemix at http://freemix.it

Media Contact: Bernadette Hyland, CEO Zepheira cont...@freemix.it 571-331-3758 (direct)

Freemix is a service offering of Zepheira LLC.

The site features a personalized conference Scheduler , a dynamic user interface based on the the MIT Picker tool which allows the user to quickly look at the available sessions on the schedule, narrowing down choices by facets such as speakers, dates and subject matter, and using common features such as search, pagination, and bookmarking favorites. The user can then select sessions to create a custom schedule, which can be exported to iCal format for incorporation into most popular calendar software. The user can also export other views of the data such as RDF/XML and JSON.

The user can also click through to see session details, and the site provides Weblog features for conference sessions , including the ability for people to comment on sessions, and track the discussion throughAtom feeds. Contributing comments requires log-in through OpenID , showcasing the popular, decentralized standard for single sign-on.

The session Weblog features and the overall site framework are implemented using the open source Bright Content platform, one of the many community projects supported by Zepheira.