I'm very happy to announce that the program for the Semantic Web Strategies conference in San Jose September 30 - October 2nd is finished and available. For keynote speakers, we've got some well-known names who all bring a combination of experience and creativity to their semantic web work: Eric Miller, Nova Spivack, and Kingsley Idehen. We also have presentations on many interesting projects from large and small organizations and well-known semantic web companies such as TopQuadrant, Zepheira, and Access Innovations (of DataHarmony fame) as sponsors.

The Jupiter Events people have been very good about helping me keep pure product pitches out of the presentations. I've suggested to several vendors that a tag team presentation with a customer talking about a project that uses the vendor's product would be OK, and we have a few of those. These actually fit well with the overall theme of the conference, which is to get people talking about what they had to do to connect the technology to their specific business needs.

We received several submissions for talks that had something to do with semantics and something to do with the web, but less to do with the "semantic web" in the W3C sense of the term. While many of these looked interesting, the majority of the presentations that made the program are related to applications using metadata, ontologies and taxonomies. The use of standards is what makes it possible to hook these things up together to build larger applications, and W3C standards such as OWL and RDF give applications in this area a common language to work together and form these larger applications.

As the popularity of the Semantic Web grows, many use it as an umbrella term similar to "Web n" (where n > 1) for this season's Hot New Technologies, and technology companies want their products to be seen as hot and new. Oddly enough, the bulk of the pure marketing-driven submissions, in which PR reps were pushing clients whose products happened to mention "semantics" and "web" in the same press release, came after the deadline for submission. We may offer a third vendor track next time for these people—many are doing some cool things—but I'll have a difficult enough time with the upcoming conference trying to hear two talks at once considering how many good ones we have competing with each other.

So, if you want to learn more about making the connections between the latest semantic web work and your business needs, register for the Semantic Web Strategies conference and come join us in San Jose. The conference proper is September 1st and 2nd and there are some pre-conference tutorials for people just getting started.