Key news at the Semantic Technology Conference in San Jose:

Wolfram Alpha rep Russel Foltz Smith said they will offer an API to their engine that will allow companies with natural-language front ends to call their engine and get rich data from across the web.

Ask.com announced they are crawling the web gathering Q&A pairs and parsing them for quality, and now have 300 million specific questions and answers available on line, in a beta feature.

Microsoft’s Bing search engine inspired the crowd with its combination of a new interface, extracts from Powerset’s web indexing, and the Powerset access to Wikipedia. Rumors at the conference: Bing has grown by 25% in a few months; the image and video search features imported from live.com’s web site are popular.

The number of companies offering ontological creation and search tools, the presence of VCs and publishers, and the 1,275 attendees suggests that the semantic web movement is taking off in spite of the downturn in the economy.