SemTech 2008: First Thoughts
by Kendall Clark
Hard to believe, but we just finished our first SemTech conference. We were heads-down last year and didn’t want to attend till we could make a bit of splash, which I think we accomplished this week. We gave three talks—as I’ve said on the blog endlessly—and they were all very well received. The first two, on Pellet and Pronto, were rather surprising, since attendance was unexpectedly high (150 and 115, respectively). None of us were quite ready for that, least of all Pavel, who’s a bit shy, but will turn into a very good speaker with more practice.
Evren’s talk was something of a milestone for the SemTech community, IMO, since all the self-appointed “cool kids” have been hammering away for what seems like years about the Semantic Web—having 150 folks clamoring for information about OWL DL and Pellet suggests that the Semantic Web is not as irrelevant as the cool kids like to suggest.
Mike’s talk on XACML-DL wasn’t as well attended for various reasons (conference organizers smushed us with another good talk, but I don’t think the smushing helped us or Tim at all), but it went very smoothly (I don’t think any of us knew Mike was such a good speaker!), and we had real interest from folks in the audience.
Even more unexpected, I think, people were very interested in Owlsight and Owlgres, despite the fact that neither of them was really on the conference agenda. That’s a good sign.
Two quick thoughts:
- There’s no substitute for being there to make connections with people, both biz and personal
- We’re still in “early days” for this market (IMO, at least) and I found that encouraging since there is increasing growth and maturity (which is lumpy, to be sure, but still real)
Evren and I are off to Denmark for the next 10 days for a customer engagement; but I’m looking forward to following up with everyone we chatted with about collaborations, mutual support, etc.
Good stuff.
