Semantic Technology Annual Conference 2007 in Korea

Yesterday, March 28, 2007 the South Korean Semantic Technology Annual Conference took place. Over 200 people attended, of which about 175 came from industry; a very good sign of industrial interest in corporate semantic web technology. The conferene was hosted by SemTech Korea and took place in the RitzCarlton Hotel en Seoul (see phote left). The conference was chaired by Dr. Lee, CEO of Saltlux.

Dieter Fensel of Deri gave a talk on Service Web3.0. The future web will contain billions of services and proper management of those services (discovery, composition, execution, etc.) requires a semantic infrastucture. Prof. Fensel also showed the famous "DIP" movie that explains the business value of Semantic Web Services for industry (see photo below for the financial industry). I gave a talk on today's applications that use Semantic Technology; 7 concrete applications that we built in iSOCO for clients. Mike Ullrich from Ontoprise presented use cases of Semantic Applications. Prof. Riichiro Mizoguchi from Osaka University gave a presentation on the industrial impact of Ontology Engineering.

Below a few photos to give an impression of the conference.

This is the first time that I have been to Seoul, South Korea. In 1997 I visited Japan for the IJCAI conference. South Korea is a remarkable country. 20 years ago it was a poor county, now it is the eleventh economic power in the world. It is one of the global leaders in penetration of broadband internet and home of the world-wide known brands such as LG, Samsung, Kia, Hyundai and Daewoo. My impression of the city is a mixture between oriental and western (especially US, several Starbucks ...) culture. Doing business in Korea is also quite different from Europe, but while doing and reading one learns.

The photo below is the view on Seoul from my hotel room on the 14th floor.