Decided to go see Stefane Fermigier, the founder of Nuxeo, and Olivier Grisel talk focusing on what Nuxeo is doing in the semantic space. While I may dither about whether or not the Semantic Web is Web 3.0, it is still cool technology and it holds great promise in solving a lot of findability problems in Content Management.

[Slides now online on Slideshare]

• 1.8 Zettabytes of data will be produced in 2011
• 50% more data/content/information produced every year
• Linking the web to real-life people and concepts through relationships is the goal of the Semantic Web
• Four stages to move from Content Management Systems to Semantically enabled system
  • Extract meaning from raw data/content: done through advanced algorithms  and Natural Language Processing (I believe we are still stuck here, how to do it intelligently and accurately)
  • Connect information to form knowledge
  • Reason about this knowledge
  • Present this knowledge in actionable form
• When you are working on reliable metadata (RDFa embedded in web pages), rules /inference engines can infer actionable knowledge from your content
• Rules can also clean-up and flag errors when working with unreliable information
• Smart presentation system solves the information overload issue by contextualizing the information, essentially only showing the information that is relevant.
• Nuxeo is involved in the IKS Project which led to the Apache Stanbol project

Presenter change as Stefane steps down and turns it over to Olivier for some demos and detailed discussion of the Semantic engine (Apache Stanbol)

• Showing some good views of how the tech works, including how to fix incorrect assignments.
• Showed some good multi-lingual linking of the same entities
• Stanbol has the Apache OpenNLP, Apache Solr (index), and Apache Jena (semantic rules)
• Using Wikipedia to train the engine on identifying and tagging entities (Cool), hitting 80% accuracy in French and 71% percent on English (Need higher to get old content processed in my opinion, good progress though)

That’s it, time for lunch

All information in this post was gathered from the presenters and presentation. It does not reflect my opinion unless clearly indicated (Italics in parenthesis). Any errors are most likely from my misunderstanding a statement or imperfectly recording the information. Updates to correct information are reflected in red, but will not be otherwise indicated.

All statements about the future of Nuxeo products and strategy are subject to change at any time due to a large variety of factors.