Wilshire conferences is putting on the DAMA International Symposium and MetaData Conference this week here in San Diego. A lot of the issues that data management folks care about (master data management, data federation, identity management) are also dealt with by the Semantic Web. And there is a pretty good showing of Semantic Web companies here - my own TopQuadrant is giving two talks and exhibiting. Zepheira CTO Eric Miller gave a talk in the SOA track about the background of Semantic Web and why DAMA folks should be interested.
This is also the first public venue where the book that Jim Hendler and I have written, Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist, is featured in the Morgan-Kaufmann booth. It is nice being able to point to a written description that includes not only the basics of the motivation of the semantic web, but also the details of how the standards approach the goals and desiderata of the Semantic Web. Yes, I have my elevator speech down pat, but now I can back it up with a docoument. Hooray!
Many thanks to Henry Story for plugging the book on his blog!!
