There’s a new semantic web association in town – well, not this town, but the northern Trentino Valley in Italy. Founding members of the Semantic Valley Consortium include tech players Expert System, IBM and Oracle in partnership with Italian universities, such as the Università degli Studi di Trento, with strong programs in computational linguistics.

What’s the call for the new development center and its programs? We’ve got the standards, we’ve got lots of technology built around them, and lots of opportunities for end user organizations that could utilize these solutions to solve their integration problems. Now it’s time to make it all fit together, says J. Brooke Aker, CEO of Expert System USA. “It’s time to take things to the next level -- how to get [the technology] applied, how to do some integration, to get things to fit together for the benefit of industry.”

To that end the new consortium is actively looking for businesses to come play in its sandbox, as Aker puts it. “If you have a tough problem we’d like to solve it,” he says. The pieces are all there to solve those problems, and he thinks the conversation has to move away from standards-focused and academic discussions to talking to enterprises about how they can apply those pieces, giving them real use cases to chew on and clear ROI output from such efforts.

The consortium says it hopes to potentially produce new products and contribute to the content technology market by promoting synergy between research centers and companies. It also expects to support spin-offs in the region out of its work. Alberto Sangiovanni Vincentelli, a co-founder of tech companies Cadence and Synopsys, and now the Edgar L. and Harold H. Buttner Chair of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California at Berkeley, is one of the leaders heading up the initiative.

Speaking of use cases for the semantic web, Aker mentioned that another industry is finding a use for Expert's Cogito Monitor semantic analysis technology, which has traditionally had pickup in sectors such as the auto industry. CRIBIS D&B, part of the CRIF company that develops and distributes online information systems for credit and marketing activities, is now using the product to bring social media analysis for financial institutions into the picture, he says. It’s the first financial services customer win for this technology from Expert. Monitor, which automatically searches, tallies and graphs customers’ sentiment feedback about products and services from millions of Web pages, will be used to help CRIBIS D&B semantically monitor customer sentiment for 20,000 businesses and banking institutions worldwide. .

And speaking of semantic web organizations, if you can't make it to Italy over the long holiday weekend but are still looking for something to do, why not check out some more groups that exist around the Semantic Web? Here are just a few options you can explore online and some of them even extend out to the real world too. Happy 4th!:

• W3C Semantic Web Interest Group (Of course!)

• Semantic Wiki Interest Group

• Semantic Web Meetup Groups , (local in 48 cities in 17 countries)

• Semantic Web LinkedIn
Group

• Semantic Web Facebook page

• Don't forget to propose your startup for our Semantic Web Impact Awards. The deadline is Sept. 15.