I spent yesterday at the first day of excellent Semantic Tech and Business Conference 2012 in Berlin. It was a good day covering a wide range of topics, a great range of speakers and talks, and most encouragingly some really good conversations in the breaks. I had the pleasure of presenting the opening session The Simple Power of the Link which seemed to provide a good grounding introduction to what to some is a fairly complex topic. My slides are available on Slideshare, and I provided a background article on semanticweb.com, if you want to check them out.
In my role as guest blogger for semanticweb.com I created an overview of Day 1 sessions I attended and enjoyed.
Something that struck me throughout the day was the number of references to the Kasabi Data Marketplace during the day. Well yes, you might say, you are a Kasabi Partner and Kasabi Staff members Knud Möller and Benjamin Nowack gave presentations. Of course you would be right. However, I also noticed references to it in other presentations and in general conversations.
For example keynote speaker and ‘Semantic Fireman’ Bart van Leuwen, share the fact that there is an open publicly available version of the Amsterdam Fire Service Data hosted in Kasabi. The reasoning he gave for doing this was that once he had decided to make his data open, he needed somewhere easy to put it, that did not require him to worry about things like infrastructure, servers, and scaling. Kasabi provides that, plus the Sparql and APi access that enables people to play with his data, which he encouraged people to do.
Other reasons for referencing Kasabi seemed to be two fold. Firstly, as with Bart, it is an easy cloud-based place to put your data and let it handle access, APIs and loadings that you initially have no idea about. Secondly, and far less clearly understood, is the idea that the team at Kasabi may have an insight into a possible business model for delivering generic services with Liked Data at the core.
This is not intended to be a sales pitch for Kasabi, the team there can do that very well themselves. I just found it interesting to note that it seems to be hitting a spot in the Semantic Web / Linked Data consciousness that nothing else quite is at the moment.
Declarations – I am a Kasabi Partner and shareholder in Kasabi parent company Talis.