Complementary anglesImage via Wikipedia: Complementary Angles

Since Tony Shaw wrote his post about their motivations and intentions in selling the SemTech Conference and Semantic Universe, some others have asked what I was thinking by having proposed it in the first place.  That’s actually pretty easy to explain.

In my initial post about the deal, I touched on my sense that the WebMediaBrands approach to the space, and its efforts to date, complemented what Tony was doing with SemTech.  Sure, they both focused on similar material, and involved many of the same cast of characters, but the interesting part was in their individual strategies and execution.

As background: Outside the more academically focused ISWC, SemTech had pretty much become the annual convention for the community, a good part of which was about migration to the business potential of these technologies.  The energy caught the attention of what was then Jupiter Media, who saw the opportunity to focus right in on what outside business was looking for: how to leverage these capabilities for competitive advantage.

SemTech too was looking to help answer that question – but was doing so within the context of fostering that community and its discovery, with programs structured to focus on sector-specific application.  Jupiter came from the other direction, with the LinkedData Planet conference asking right off, how business can make use, which they sustained in the subsequent Web3.0 Conference, under WebMedia’s Mediabistro.

It is the underlying approaches of the organizers that shines a light on the potential synergies here – the complementary angles – and the benefits should manifest outside the organizers themselves.  The modus operandi in the case of the SemTech organizers has been methodical community building, across academics, standards and business, while that for WebMedia is vertical integration of offerings for their consumption.  So the thinking was that SemTech’s introspective contemplation of the question, and WebMedia’s pragmatic approach would yield brass tacks.

68/365 - TackImage by Niharb via Flickr

To put a shine on those tacks, combining of the big SemTech event with WebMedia’s year-round and multi-pronged focus-within-the-vertical should also help wash away a subtle but present “us versus them” undercurrent from among participants.  For today, the community can ignore any “which team” questions, or what “it” (Semantic Web, Linked Data, Web 3.0, Web of Data) should be called, and who coined which terms.  As one, the combined efforts can focus on furtherance – for interoperability, efficiency, usefulness…  Perhaps we’ll see the first signs of this happening at this week’s Semantic Web Summit, in Boston.

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