TopQuadrant recently wrapped up our attendance, sponsorship and exhibition at SEMANTiCS 2017 in Amsterdam. This year’s conference had a strong turnout with 370 attendees to be exact. This represented a growth of 33% over last year which reflects the growing demand for semantic technology, a trend that TopQuadrant has also noted and welcomed.
Our co-founders, Irene Polikoff (CEO) and Ralph Hodgson (CTO), spoke with several European organizations that are currently working on projects using semantic technologies, and attended a presentation on semantic asset management in the Dutch Rail engineering and construction industry. This was timely given the near completion and deployment of a major new asset management solution, built on our TopBraid Enterprise Data Governance (TopBraid EDG) product, for another EU government organization that manages that nation’s rail network.
As part of the conference, we showcased our extensive SHACL experience through a well-attended tutorial presented by our CEO, Irene Polikoff, “SHACL – Introduction and Implementation” which covered key topics, such as:
- An introduction to SHACL and the motivations behind its creation
- Detailed examples of SHACL use to ensure data quality
- A hands-on practice in defining and testing rules
- A discussion SHACL’s support within available tools
Given SHACL’s recent approval as an official standard by W3C, there was a lot of interest and discussion on the show floor and in presentations. If you are interested in learning more about SHACL please review some of our recent blog posts here and consider attending our upcoming webinar An Overview of SHACL. The TopBraid product family, including TopBraid EDG, has comprehensive support for SHACL, including rich user interfaces for editing SHACL-based data models, edit-time data validation with recommendations on how to fix errors and web services for batch validation, and programmatic access to the SHACL validation engine
We also had a great turnout as well as interesting discussions for the following presentations:
- Ralph Hodgson, TopQuadrant’s CTO, presented: “Semantic Data Governance for Regulatory Compliance.”
- David Price presented: “Virtual Construction (V-Con) and TopBraid CDE – a linked data/semantic asset management solution.”
To summarize, we were pleased to see that companies from across the globe attended SEMANTiCS 2017 to learn more about how their business initiatives can benefit from semantic technologies. This provides further validation that this technology is becoming more mainstream as its value continues to be realized by all types of organizations across industries.