Learn about semantic web and its benefits

Jul 13 Tue 6:30 PM
Location
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Attendance
 52  people attended.
4.00 4.009 (9 ratings)

Who organized?
Aleksandar Gargenta

Alex Genadinik, founder of SemanticValley, along with his colleague Shamod Lacoul, will present a general overview of the semantic web and its benefits. After that they will give a tutorial session on how to program for the semantic web with a Java framework like JENA. Next, they will give a short demo of the semantic shopping assistant software on milderwilder.com that runs on the backend technology developed by semanticvalley.com. That will be followed by an explanation of how taxonomies, ontologies, and Natural Language Processing were used in the project to ultimately improve the user experience. If the audience is interested, there can also be discussion of semantic companies and technologies in the marketplace like PowerSet (now Bing), other semantic search engines, future of semantic search and semantic matching.

Here is the rough agenda for this presentation:


  • 25-30 min intro and background to the semantic web (General Semantic Web slides)
  • 30 min intro to semantic web programming using Java (JENA framework slides)
  • 5 min demo of shopping assistant software we built using the semantic technologies (Live product demo)
  • 30 min discussion of practical use of technologies like: Taxonomy, Ontolgoy, NLP, LinkedData cloud as it was used in this project
  • 5 min Q&A

Folks form BlackRock generously offered to both host this event (400 Howard St @ Freemont St) as well as provide pizza, salad and soft drinks! A huge thank-you goes out to them!


Be sure to stick around until the end to get a shot at winning books and other interesting goodies from Sun, O'Reilly, Packt Pub, as well as a copy of IntelliJ IDEA from JetBrains.

Note that the actual capacity for this event is 93, despite the fact that the attendee limit is 140. Show up early to make sure you can get in!

About Alex Genadinik:
Alex Genadinik is the founder of Semantic Valley LLC, a web3.0 start-up focused on creating software for next generation of e-commerce applications. Their consumer product is milderwilder.com, an alpha-stage shopping assistant that aims to create a more natural shopping experience and takes into account considerations like style, personality, occasion, etc.

Prior to his current venture, Alex founded KwalitySoftware, a dialog visualization company during which time Alex became involved in programming Semantic Web applications. Prior to that Alex worked as a Java engineer in the valley.

Alex has a B.S in Computer Science from San Jose State University

About Shamod Lacoul:
Shamod Lacoul is a software entrepreneur, developer and consultant. He has been working as a software consultant for almost 7 years and has a deep experience and knowledge in back-end and data integration technologies. He has been following Semantic Web since 2006. He likes coding in Java and .NET and holds a BS and MS in CS. You may follow him in twitter @shamod.

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  • Aleksandar Gargenta
    Aleksandar Gargenta

    I uploaded some photos from this event:
    http://www.sfjava.org/photos/994252/

    Posted Jul 20, 2010 10:53 AM
  • Shamod Lacoul
    Shamod Lacoul

    Thank you everyone for showing up and listening to our presentations. We hope you found it useful. Feel free to ping me if you have any question - shamod[at]gmail.com. You can find my part of the presentation at http://bit.ly/dl0JRP. Also, thanks for your feedback and comments.

    Posted Jul 14, 2010 11:02 PM
  • Mark Rogers
    Mark Rogers

    I really enjoyed this MeetUp. I knew very little about Semantic webs until now. There was a lot of info jammed into a short period of time. At least I now know where to look for more info and how it fits into the big picture. Thanks Alex & Shamod for your presentations. I'd like to thank Blackrock for their hospitality, especially Nancy for getting everyone off to a good start and making us all feel welcome when we checked in.

    Posted Jul 14, 2010 1:49 AM
  • Aleksandar Gargenta
    Aleksandar Gargenta

    Yes. Unfortunately we have limited capacity for this event. With that said, usually not everyone shows up, so hopefully we won't have to turn people away.

    Posted Jul 6, 2010 9:08 PM
  • Steve Bassett
    Steve Bassett

    From the description:

    "Note that the actual capacity for this event is 93, despite the fact that the attendee limit is 140. Show up early to make sure you can get in!"

    What? Really?

    Posted Jul 6, 2010 1:49 PM

Who attended?

  • 52 attendees
    • “ Extremely informative and concise information presented on Semantic Web technology and its applications. Excellent! ”
    • “ Pretty informative overview of the technology with a broad array of tools covered. ”
    • “ This meetup provided good insights into what is going on in the world of semantic web. Certainly good kick start on what people are doing, who are the players and what are the technologies are out there. I liked that the speakers structured the meetup as the discussion and were open to dialog with the audience. I realize the technology is in it's infancy, but, one of the points for improvement would be to bring more real life usage examples or ideas on potential usage to inspire the audience. ”
    • “ I am new to the semantic web and it took me a while to grasp its concepts during the talk. Although others seemed to like the conversational approach used, I felt the first presentation was very slow going. I liked how the second presentation gave some more context and example of who is using it. Overall though, I did become familiar with the basics and would like to thank Alex and Shamoud for their time. ”
    • “ While I certainly learned a few things about semantic web, I felt that Alex was a bit unprepared to give his talk at the level I expected. Shamod's presentation, while good, overlapped a bit with Alex's. With that said, I do appreciate their effort to teach our community about the complex world of semantic web. ”
    • “ This was my first java user group meetup. I participate in a group in a different technology domain (data management association, http://www.sfdama...) that is doing a lot of work around metadata and semantic technologies, and was interested in the java perspective, since java is one of our primary languages. It was striking to see just how siloed the communities are! The DAMA folks understand the metadata aspects of semantic data much better than the java people, but they don't have the programming perspective. Maybe we can work on bringing it together. btw, semantic web is really a set of initiatives to wrap metadata around web accessible content and use that metadata to make that content usable by other services. Metadata is mostly about "has a" and "is a" relationships. All you java object oriented programmers should be able to get that ;). ”
    • Kaz
    • Ron

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