Derrick Harris reports that as data continues to explode, business owners don’t need to rush back to school for a degree in Big Data analytics in order to capitalize on it. He writes, “Machine learning is high data science — a discipline focused on algorithms that automatically detect complex patterns hidden within datasets — and it’s fast becoming something that anyone leverages to sell more handbags, or solve a research problem, or build the next LinkedIn or Facebook… If you’re a small business or maybe even an individual, you need something easier. You need something in the cloud. And you need someone else to handle the hard parts.” Read more

SemTechBiz is Less Than 3 Weeks Away

The Semantic Tech & Business Conference (SemTechBiz) is coming to San Francisco on June 3-7! Join us for case studies, innovative panels, tutorials, and keynotes that will provide you with practical advice, hands-on guidance, and breakthrough approaches to solving business problems with semantic technology. Passes go up $200 at the door. Sign up now and save !

Kapow Software has partnered with Informatica to provide Big Data solutions. According to the companies, “The partnership introduces Informatica PowerExchange for Kapow Katalyst which will be made available as part of Informatica 9.5 announced at the Informatica World 2012 user conference this week. Informatica PowerExchange for Kapow Katalyst harnesses the power of web, cloud applications and social media, and enables IT to quickly access and extract relevant information from the long tail of disparate data sources.” Read more

Sean Creeley of Embedly recently commented on the rise of Facebook’s Open Graph: “42% of all URLs that Embedly processes have one or more Open Graph tags. If you aren’t familiar with Open Graph, it’s the semantic metadata that Facebook introduced in 2010. Initially, it could only provide the title, image, and description for links and a few other objects, but it’s been extended to power pretty much every third-party application in the stream. Yes, the special sauce that allowed Viddy and SocialCam to amass millions of users in days is Open Graph.” Read more

I’m a fan of the waterfowl model of semantic technology. Clever semantics — as well as ‘advanced’ search boxes, arcane query syntax, and consumer interfaces that require user training — can paddle away as frantically as they like, but only while hidden well below the waterline. SPARQL, SKOS and SQL really shouldn’t be visible to most users of a web site. Ontologies and XML are enabling technologies, not user interface features.

With this week’s unveiling of the Knowledge Graph, Google has taken another step toward realising the potential of their Metaweb acquisition. The company has also clearly demonstrated its continued enthusiasm for delivering additional user value without requiring changes in user behaviour (well, except that those of us outside the US have to remember to use google.com and not our local version, if we want to try this out).

For those who don’t remember, Metaweb was one of those companies that got people excited about the potential for semantic technologies to hit the big time. Founded way back in 2005, Metaweb attracted almost $60Million in investment for their “open, shared database of the world’s knowledge” (Freebase) before disappearing inside Google in 2010.

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Semantic technology is scoring more goals in the sports world. The BBC, for example, which created the FIFA World Cup 2010 website that leveraged semantic technology, is at it again as London prepares for the 2012 Summer Olympics. Brazil has gotten into the action, too, with an Internet portal there taking soccer to the semantic web set. At the upcoming SemTech conference in San Francisco, attendees will have an opportunity to hear the latest details about both efforts.

Over at the BBC, for example, the 2012 Olympics site accompanies a completely redesigned BBC Sports site, both based on technology including Fluid Operations’ Information Workbench to support the editorial process for the BBC’s Dynamic Semantic Publishing strategy, from authoring and curation to publishing of ontology and instance data following an editorial workflow. The BBC environment since the World Cup also has been updated to use the MarkLogic document store for managing rapidly changing statistics, navigation and ultimately all content objects, as lead architect Jem Rayfield described it in this blog posting. Today, the triple store that’s been behind the BBC’s past work is extended to cover every team, athlete, venue, discipline, country and so on, Rayfield told The Semantic Web Blog.

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Red Bee Media, a company that “builds bridges between content and viewers” has posted a new article to their corporate blog regarding the growing volumes of television metadata. The article states, “TV Metadata is becoming increasingly rich and complex – powering increasingly advanced experiences. At a basic level, metadata tells us which programmes are available, and informs us about the content of those programmes. But metadata is getting richer and even bigger to support more visually engaging and functionally sophisticated user experiences.” Read more

This morning Google announced the Knowledge Graph, which “enables you to search for things, people or places that Google knows about—landmarks, celebrities, cities, sports teams, buildings, geographical features, movies, celestial objects, works of art and more—and instantly get information that’s relevant to your query. This is a critical first step towards building the next generation of search, which taps into the collective intelligence of the web and understands the world a bit more like people do.” Read more

Edamam wants to be the one place where all the food knowledge of the world is organized. That’s the goal of co-founder and CEO Victor Penev, who launched the site in April, and recently updated the several hundred major recipe sites in its knowledge base to also include some smaller blog sites that add additional variety.

Semantic technology is helping the company reach its goal. “A big problem is that data about food is very messy,” says Penev. “It’s hard to find something, what you find often contradicts other information of what is good for you and what the calories are. So we set out to solve that problem. We played around with different approaches but settled on using semantic technology.”

The confusion arises in part from the fact that recipe sites themselves usually just hire services to calculate nutritional data. But that may lead to mistakes when calculations aren’t undertaken with exactitude — substituting white cream for heavy cream nutritional details changes the whole profile of the recipe, he says.

So, what is that right semantic stuff? One piece of it is that, in conjunction with Ontotext, Edamam built a food ontology. An ontology can be the foundation for a lot of things, such as extracting the knowledge of the chemical composition of a particular recipe and thus inferring its flavor and texture. And Edamam means to grow its own to include various datasets such as chemical data (for flavor and texture), geolocation (for local and seasonal recipes), product data (for e-commerce). and more.

But initially, it’s taken the simple approach, with the core of the ontology focused around classifying ingredients, nutrients and food. “We have started with the simplest ontology and focused on the most common use case — mobile recipe search,” he says.

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Andrea Di Maio of Gartner recently articulated concerns about open data processing, particularly the divide between data professionals who have the skills to do so and those who do not. Di Maio writes, “Over the last four years open government and open data have been at the forefront of the debate on how governments can become more transparent, participative and efficient. The theory is well known: rather than (or alongside) providing the government’s interpretation or packaging of public data, this data should be made available in raw, open format for people to build their own views and applications… The downside is a deluge of data. People can easily drown in raw open data that is either too much or simply meaningless unless some processing takes place.” Read more

A new article reports, “After months of gratuitous hard work and cooperation by higher education students and experts, the Spanish version of DBpedia, also known as the Spanish Semantic Wikipedia, has finally come into being. The Spanish DBpedia contains 70 million data that account for 80% of the information in the Spanish Wikipedia and now rivals other languages like English or French… DBpedia is a project for extracting Wikipedia data and building a semantic version of this Internet encyclopaedia. It is a community effort for extracting structured information from the Wikipedia and making it accessible on the Web.” Read more