… does not, at first glance, have any event processing content. This is unsurprising as most IT folk associate “semantics” with ontologies and the “semantic web”, where the latter is a hugely successful initiative (provided you are an academic researcher or a W3C standard). This success cumulated recently with… yet more government funding (a “Web Science” research institute whose unconventional funding by the UK government apparently raised a few eyebrows).
The Semantic Technology Conference has been growing successfully year on year due to the potential of better semantics in information processing, and probably through being one of the better organised commercial conferences. And a convergence (or collision, depending on your point of view) with the commercial world with the semantic community may not be too far off. Consider, for example:
- the promise of RDF (and associated RDFS and SPARQL) tuple stores for agile data handling, which is but a hair’s width from a commercial, internet-based tuple storage technology like TIBCO ActiveSpaces…
- the promise of declarative logics being applied to information processing, which is but a hair’s width (OK, maybe a small path’s width then) from commercial declarative rules engines like TIBCO BusinessEvents…
Although the RDF/ontology/semantics community is mostly avoiding the event / temporal viewpoint, there is a corner of a corner of Sem Tech that will be well represented by the CEP community. A track within the overall conference is on Rules, and one such session here is described as “Semantic Rules in the Dynamic IT Infrastructure” with short sessions from Sandpiper (known for semantic CEP), TIBCO and the RuleML team (on reactive rules, CEP and Streaming Knowledge), and a panel with Opher Etzion (EPTS Chair) and Jeff Palmer “formerly of Streambase” (who I don’t believe I’ve met…) [see comments].
SemTech takes place on June 21-25 in San Francisco, USA, with the aforementioned Semantic Rules sesion on Thurs 24th at 6pm.
UPDATE: oops looks like the schedule changed / got updated.
