Putting Semantic Technology on the European Business Agenda: Industry's Top CIOs and Researchers Gather for the European Semantic Technology Conference 2008

Keynote Speakers Confirmed – Early Registration Now Open

London, U.K. – 7 July 2008 – The European Semantic Technology Conference (ESTC2008) has announced a high calibre line-up of keynote speakers for this year’s event, taking place in Vienna, Austria, from 24-26 September 2008. Early registration is now open, with reduced fees for participants registering before 31 July.

Putting semantic technology on the European business agenda, the ESTC2008, now in its second year, brings together leading thinkers, developers, and senior practitioners to discuss the application of semantic technology in industry, commerce and government. The two day conference will feature real life case studies and practical experience presentations, as well as workshops, tutorials and an industrial exhibition.

Semantic technology allows the interconnection of data and content based on its meaning, making company and web knowledge management much smarter and more efficient. Examples for enterprise applications include semantic search, Service Oriented Architectures, knowledge engineering, collaboration and Web 3.0 applications.

“Semantic technology has the potential to completely change the way enterprises work. There is a significant amount of research and development underway in Europe, but more European businesses should seize the opportunity and apply it to solve real life problems. We want the conference to encourage this and play a major role in setting the industry’s agenda for 2009 and beyond,” says Dr. John Davies, Head of Next Generation Web Research at BT and Chairman of the conference.

“The conference will provide participants with a strategic overview of how semantic technology can be implemented within their organisation. Participants will learn how to develop a cohesive strategy for managing semantic technology initiatives and utilising these to dramatically evolve the operations and effectiveness of their organisations,” he adds.

Confirmed keynote speakers include:

Peter Jackson - Chief Scientist, Thomson Reuters Professional Barak Pridor - CEO of Clearforest, a Thomson Reuters Markets company Orestis Terzidis – Director, SAP Research Centre CEC Hans Uszkoreit - Scientific Director at the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) and Head of DFKI Language Technology Lab Hugo Zaragoza - Yahoo! Research Barcelona

Early registration for ESTC2008 is now open. Participants registering before 31st July can save 80€ on the 600 € registration fee. Further discounts are available for business partners, members of STI international and OCG members.

The regular papers submission is closed but late breaking topics submission is possible until 20th July 2008.

ESTC2008 is organised by Semantic Technology Institute International (STI International).

For further information, please visit the conference website at www.estc2008.com.