The Semantic Web Strategies conference is just a few weeks away, although there are still a few days before September 12th to get the early registration rate.

When we first thought about what to call the tracks, it was difficult to come up with two good category names that would each account for half the presentations, so we picked the names "The Past and Present of the Semantic Web" and "The Present and Future of the Semantic Web" as placeholders. The idea was that the former would present stories from the trenches about people's experience planning and rolling out implementations, while presentations in the latter category would describe applications that people are assembling now and their hopes for where this work would take their business.

Once we saw the submissions and picked the best ones, though, two new track names seemed obvious: "The Semantic Web and Your Applications" and "The Semantic Web and Your Users". Of course all applications have users at some level, but with half the talks focusing on how to get semantic web tools and standards to best serve the sponsoring organization and the other half focusing on user interfaces, training, and especially user-related data, the new division of tracks was clearly a better idea.

User-related data is an especially hot area. The people who added the tagging features to flickr and del.icio.us weren't thinking "semantic web" when they did it, but they weren't thinking "Web 2.0" either. They were thinking of something that would help both their customers and their businesses, and it's great to see people thinking about what semantic web technologies can add to that. For example, Taylor Cowan will talk in the "Semantic Web and Your Users" track about Ontology-driven Travel Recommendations and how bambora.com uses an ontology to get more value out of user-entered data, and Tony Hammond will give a talk titled Publishing Science on the Open Web: Enter the User about the effect of user data on one of the world's most well-known science publishers .

For making the applications serve an enterprise better, we have talks such as Melliyal Annamalai's on Using Oracle RDF for Managing Customer Subscription Data. I knew that Oracle had done a lot of work in this area, and I had assumed that we could get them to send a marketing person to discuss their RDF work if we had asked, so I was very pleased that we could get a "Principal Member of Technical Staff" (her job title) with a computer science Ph.D. instead. While some Ph.D.'s might talk in abstract terms about prototype projects, Melliyal will describe how the Oracle semantic web products addressed a specific customer's business needs.

Businesses, applications and users have been around for a long time. I'm really looking forward to learning more in San Jose about what semantic web tools and standards can add to the relationships between these three things.