A few weeks ago I attended the Semantics conference in Leipzig, so here's a short report about the event.

SEMANTiCS 2016 (#semanticsconf) continues a long tradition of bringing together colleagues from around the world to present best practices, panels, papers and posters to discuss semantic systems in birds-of-a-feather sessions and informal settings.

What I really liked about this event is the fact that it is primarily industry-focused, meaning that most (if not all) of the talks were dealing with pragmatic aspects of real-world applications of semantic technologies. You can take a look at the online proceedings for more details, alternatively there are some nice videos and pictures pages too.

I meant to share some notes a few weeks ago already but never got round to doing it… so here are a few highlights:

• Springer Nature's Scigraph project got quite a bit of publicity as I was one of the invited keynote speakers. Overall, the feedback was extremely positive and it seems that many people are waiting to see more from us in the coming months. We also chatted to representatives from other publishers (Elsevier, Wolfer Kluwers, Oxford Uni Press) about areas where we could collaborate more e.g. constructing shared datasets (eg conference identifiers, coordinated by CrossRef the same way they do it for Funders).

• Cathy Dolbear from Oxford University Press gave an interesting keynote describing the work they’ve been doing with Linked Data, mostly focusing on the Oxford Global Languages project, which links lexical information from multiple global and also digitally under-represented languages in a semantic graph. Also, she talked about creating rich schema.org snippets so to better interface with Google’s knowledge graph and thus increasing their ranking in search results. That was really good to hear as we're investing in this area too!

• David Kuilman from Elsevier talked about their approach to content management based on semantic technologies. David's team has been focusing on tracking document production metadata mainly before publication (eg submission and production workflow metadata) which is quite interesting cause it’s the exact opposite of what we’ve been doing at Springer Nature.