The Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) at NUI Galway will play a significant role in the Semantic Technologies Conference in San Jose, from 20 – 24 May 2007. DERI will provide several technology presentations to a mostly industrial audience at the conference which will focus on industry-ready semantic technology solutions.

"DERI Galway's leading role in semantic solutions is confirmed again - not only in Europe, but also in the Silicon Valley. Our innovative solutions continue to generate considerable industrial interest," says Prof. Stefan Decker, director of DERI.

The presentations by DERI include work by researcher Eyal Oren, who will speak about this work on ActiveRDF, which bridges the gap between the new data formats of the Semantic Web and the mainstream approach of object-oriented programming. ActiveRDF, an open-source innovation from DERI which has triggered world-wide interest, allows existing developers to use Semantic Web data within their familiar tools and development approaches. In particular, ActiveRDF integrates the popular Web development framework Ruby on Rails and "puts the Semantic Web on Rails." Mr Oren will also present DERI s ongoing work on Semantic Business Process Integration which improves business-to-business integration, a multi-billion dollar market.

Sebastian Kruk, who specialises in e-learning research, will present a semantic digital library, JeromeDL, which can turn a humble reader of digital content into a knowledge contributor, knowledge that can be used by other users, not only of this particular digital library. He will explain why systems like JeromeDL, which adapt semantic web and social networking technologies to knowledge organization systems in digital libraries domain, are the corner stones of the future Internet. Mr Kruk will also present how JeromeDL can support future solutions in e-learning, web archiving and e-government.

The DERI team will also present other technologies at the conference where they will show how knowledge can be shared and filtered using Semantic Web 2.0 technologies; how to develop ontologies in a collaborative way using MarcOnt Portal; as well as explaining the role semantics play in digital content repositories.

DERI is currently the largest applied research organisation in the world developing the next generation of internet technology - the Semantic Web. Founded in 2003 with CSET (Centre for Science and Engineering Technology) funding from Science Foundation Ireland, it has since grown to over 100 people and has acquired significant additional research funding from sources such as the European Union Framework Programmes, Enterprise Ireland and Science Foundation Ireland.

Science Foundation Ireland s investment in DERI represents one of its largest investments in the software area, signalling the importance of the Semantic Web. SFI is greatly encouraged by the world class results such as this being produced by the DERI researchers.