Semantic Technology Conference Announces ``Late Breaking News'' Sessions; Conference Boasts Customer Case Studies and Applications Highlighting the Relevance of Emerging Semantic Web Technologies.

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- The Semantic Technology Conference (www.Semantic-Conference.com) today announced its much-anticipated "Late Breaking News" sessions for its conference coming up in San Jose, March 6-9, 2006.

Late Breaking News Sessions include:

--Alan Boehme, CIO of Juniper Networks, will discuss "Delivering Business Agility via SOA" along with Pano Anthos of Pantero.

--Sima Yazdani, of Cisco Systems, will provide a practitioner's view of how enterprise taxonomies are serving as a stepping-stone toward Knowledge Networking.

--Carl Mattocks will describe MetLife's development and implementation of an Ontology that fulfills IT service management practice.

--Lee Stroupe will illustrate how Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee is working towards improving payer-provider connections and unify fragmented claims systems through the establishment of a common language and service-oriented architecture.

--Gary Ng of Cerebra will introduce the principles of the logics behind Semantic Web languages, RDF and OWL, including knowledge gained from Cerebra's practical application experience.

--Masaki Itagaki, of Microsoft, will address how Microsoft is using syntactical analysis of description text to create semantic similarity between divergent descriptions for the same or related concept.

Other Late Breaking News sessions and presenters will include:

--"Deploying an Ontology-Based Enterprise Information Integration Solution at the USAF 45th Space Wing" -- Kent Bimson, Bimson Consulting and Richard Sirmons, US Air Force.

--"Accelerating and Improving Market Intelligence for the Pharmaceutical Industry: Applying Semantic Technology for Analysis of Prescription Behavior" -- Othel Rolle, Sr. Director, Software & Data Applications, ImpactRX.

--"Semantic Web for Large Scale Integration of Scientific Data" -- Peter Fox, High Altitude Observatory/NCAR and James Benedict, McGuiness Associates.

--"Semantic Web for the Front and Back Office II: swoRDFish and the Open Source Community Initiative" -- John Robert Gardner, Sun Microsystems.

--"Semantic Wikis for Information Management (SWIM)" -- Conor Shankey, Visual Knowledge.

The entire schedule of Late Breaking News sessions and other program updates is available here: http://www.semantic-conference.com/program/lbn.html

SemTech 2006 brings together industry leaders from every sector of this exciting new industry sector -- customers, developers, vendors, entrepreneurs, and researchers. The emphasis is on high quality educational sessions and showcasing the successes of early adopters.

"These Late Breaking News Sessions are further proof that customers are moving ahead with Semantic Web applications," said Dave McComb, president of Semantic Arts and co-chair of the SemTech educational program. "The applications are evolving quickly, and we have made it a top priority to incorporate these up-to-the-minute developments into our program. For those who may have evaluated Semantic Web technologies even a year ago, I think they will be surprised at the new things they'll see at this year's event."

Additional Sessions and Speakers

Previously announced speakers at SemTech 2006 include keynotes James Hendler, from the University of Maryland and Ora Lassila, of Nokia Research Center; Deborah McGuinness, of Stanford University; and Mills Davis, of Project 10X, as well as other respected industry leaders from Oracle, Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, IBM, Siderean Software, Booz Allen Hamilton, MIT and W3C. Additional customer case studies will come from General Motors, The Walt Disney Company, BellSouth, Time Inc, GE, Raytheon, NIH, Sierra Nevada and Cleveland Clinic.

With more than 80 different sessions, SemTech 2006 has something for everyone -- from basic non-technical business sessions on Semantics in Perspective to more technical discussions on Semantics in GRID Computing, Semantic Web Services, and specific industry Ontologies.

Conference Sponsors

SemTech 2006 is co-sponsored by major industry players including Oracle and Cerebra. Cerebra leads the way in technology innovation and driving standards in the application and commercialization of Semantic Technology to unify data, content, and policy across organizations.

For more information or to register for this event, please visit www.semantic-conference.com.

About The Semantic Technology Conference

The Semantic Technology Conference (SemTech) is the leading educational conference on the commercial applications and opportunities for the burgeoning semantic technology industry. Launched in 2005, the conference immediately established itself as the convergence point for developers, entrepreneurs, investors and corporate customers. SemTech is organized by Wilshire Conferences (www.wilshireconferences.com) of Los Angeles and Semantic Arts (www.semanticarts.com) based in Boulder, Colorado. Wilshire Conferences is an IT-education firm that specializes in organizing events in which corporate practitioners can meet and share implementation experience. Semantic Arts is a boutique software architecture firm. Dave McComb, president of Semantic Arts and author of "Semantics in Business Systems" (Morgan Kaufmann), is the conference chairman.