"The sons of the Semantic Web"

Average age of employees: 29 years old. The CEO is just 36 years old. In a relaxing and creative environment there is small piece of "California", the California of the dotcom and the Silicon Valley, in Rome, on the Circonvallazione Trionfale, where the company has its headquarters. Asemantics is a dynamic company specialized into software solutions typical of the Semantic Web. A small reality (the annual turnover in 2008 reached 800K EURO) born in 2003, which looking carefully, among its clients count very respectful names such as the BBC, Skype, Joost, Gruppo Espresso and Telecom Italia.

Not bad at all for a completely self-financed and privately held company. "We have been among the very first adopters of Semantic Web technologies in Italy to build innovative software solutions for companies", explains the CEO, Alberto Attilio Reggiori, who created the company together with other two veterans of the Semantic Web: the Croatian Zavisa Bjelogrlic and the Dutch Dirk Willem van Gulik, pioneer of the phases of the Web and ex-president of the Apache Software Foundation. "The idea started during an international conference in Sardinia, and the first five years 100% of the revenues have been abroad, where it is easier to present innovative ideas and get trust.  Exactly, like with the BBC, when in 2006 it t has appointed Asemantics the design of the new next generation of  historic archive of the historic English public broadcaster on the Web, and the creation of a Web 2.0 system to create Wiki pages about and around  audio/visual programmes, and create communities around BBC content. Among the new challenges of Asemantics there is one which has an European taste: the company is among the only three italian partners, together with RAI and TXT Polymedia from Turin, to participate to a European project named "NoTube", financed by the European Commission inside the 7th framework program, with the objective to develop software to bridge the world of social networks with the television content, using Semantic Web technologies: search engines specifics for video archives, targeted ads for each user, personalized programme guides. A three year project, started last February, where 12 European Partners, among the others important universities, research centers and broadcasters like the BBC. Asemantics will have the responsibility to  develop a software component to apply the recommendation logic, typical of social networks, to television content. "It is about to receive  filtered information, using the interests of people who I am engaging" explains Davide Palmisano, 29 years old,  Head of Research and Development at Asemantics responsible for the project, "if I share with more friends on my social networks the passion for 70's Rock, the system will automatically propose related videos and television services". In other words, it is about to go beyond what has already been done in the past months by big broadcasters in the States as the CNN, when during the Obama inauguration has opened up its Web site, using deals with Facebook and Twitter, to comments and relations among users: the future of television will also pass by here.