Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC) is happening next month. I’m not going unfortunately however they do post recordings of all the sessions online so I spent some time today browsing the list of sessions to see if anything took my fancy and indeed one of them did, a session called “Microsoft Semantic Engine”. Here’s the blurb on it:
See how the Microsoft Semantic Engine brings search, structured query, and analytics together in a simple, unified Search-Discover-Organize usage model. Learn how it addresses the need to have unified access to structured and unstructured enterprise data through easy to use analytical tools. Also learn how to enable business insight to support decision making at all levels within the enterprise. Get an overview of the Semantic Engine, its architecture, the product and its APIs.
There are a lot of keywords in there that catch my eye (as emphasized) but most interesting of all was that the session is tagged SQL Server and hence I’m wondering if this is the first outing of a future new feature in the product that I use day-in, day-out. The session is being run by a guy called Alexander Stojanovic whom I did a search for online and managed to find the following interesting titbit on his LinkedIn profile:
I currently manage a project designed for large-scale semantic indexing and search of enterprise and Web content. I founded the group and act as its overall manager and architect. The goal is to apply a host of semi- and unsupervised machine learning techniques, latent semantic indexing, and large-scale stream processing to provide analytics, semantic search, and knowledge discovery services to enterprises and cloud-based services.
I have a casual interest in semantic technologies (I’ve talked about microformats, semantic web, RDF before) so anything that might meld these technologies with SQL Server really captures my attention. I shall be keeping a watching brief. As a last teaser, here’s a picture taken from http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/SemanticEngine
@JamieT