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

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 !

On Friday, May 11, a group of Semantic Technology thought leaders from around the globe met with their host and colleague, Paul Miller, for the latest installment of the Semantic Link, a monthly podcast covering the world of Semantic Technologies. This episode includes a discussion about Semantics in the Financial Services Industry, and “the Linkers” were joined by special guest, Lee Feigenbaum, VP Marketing & Technology at Cambridge Semantics. Lee shared insights gained over many years working in the semantic technology field and with numerous customers in the financial services industry.
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Rufus Pollock of the Open Knowledge Foundation reports, “Last Friday (May 4), the Ministry of Planning in Brazil launched the final version of the Brazilian Open Data Portal. In line with the federal government policy to promote the use of free software in public administration, the portal was made using only free and open source tools. Among them is the Open Knowledge Foundation’s open-source data portal software CKAN. Moreover, the whole process of development of the portal was conducted with the participation of concerned citizens in an open way to promote open data.” Read more

A New Framework for Querying Semantic Networks, a paper that was presented at Museums and the Web 2012, is now available online. The paper was written by Katerina Tzompanaki, Martin Doerr Institute of Computer Science, F.O.R.T.H. Crete–Greece. The abstract states, “The upcoming large-scale metadata repositories, semantic networks of Resource Description Framework triples integrating large amounts of cultural–historical data, are not easily accessible to global query paradigms, such as ‘query by example’ or keyword search. ISO21127 (CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model) is an adequate global schema for such systems, but querying individually hundreds of different kinds of properties leaves a huge recall gap compared to text retrieval, whereas a global restriction to ‘core metadata,’ such as Dublin Core, deprives the systems of any more advanced integration and reasoning capability.” Read more

Konstantin Kakaes of the New America Foundation recently discussed the NLP challenges of language translation. Kakaes writes, “Recently, on the eighth floor of an office building in Arlington, Va., Rachel held her finger down on a Dell Streak touchscreen and asked Aziz whether he knew the village elder. The handheld tablet beeped as if imitating R2-D2 and then said what sounded like, ‘Aya tai ahili che dev kali musha.’ Aziz replied in Pashto, and the Streak said in a monotone: ‘Yes, I know.’ Rachel asked: ‘Would you introduce me to him?’ Aziz failed to understand the machine’s translation (though he does speak English), so she asked again: ‘Could you introduce me to the village elder?’ This time, there was success, after a fashion. Aziz, via the device, replied: ‘Yes, I can introduce myself to you.’ Aziz, who is at most middle-aged and was wearing a sweater vest, was not the village elder.” Read more

The schema.org official blog has announced support for enumerated lists. Adding this support allows developers using schema.org to use selected externally maintained vocabularies in their schema.org markup. According to the W3C-hosted schema.org WebSchemas wiki, “This is in addition to the existing extension mechanisms we support, and the general ability to include whatever markup you like in your pages. The focus here is on external vocabularies which can be thought of as ‘supported’ (or anticipated) in some sense by schema.org.”

In other words, “Schema.org markup uses links into well-known authority lists to clarify which particular instance of a schema.org type (eg. Country) is being mentioned.”

For example, consider a list of countries of the world. A developer could use this URI from Wikipedia to reference the USA or this one from the UN FAO, or this one from GeoNames.

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Steven Rosenbaum of Forbes recently posed the question, is there too much information out there? He writes, “If anyone knows anything about the web, where it’s been and where it’s going, it’s David Weinberger.  As a co-author of the seminal Clue Train Manifesto, Weinberger gave a generation of web innovators a clue as to how the web would evolve. In Too Big To Know Weinberger sets out to argue that the very nature of information and ideas is changing, even as you flip the pages of his book.”

Rosenbaum continues, “The world was, almost since the beginning of time, built around the concept of triangular knowledge. At the bottom of  the triangle is data. Raw and unstructured.  The Knowledge Triangle presented first in 1988 by Russel Akkoff presented DIKW (Data, Information,  Knowledge, Wisdom) as the basis for our information ecology.  Weinberger says our Information Age was built on this pyramid – creating an elaborate filtering system to sort Wisdom from Data.”

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Image: Courtesy David Weinberger

Lance Ulanoff of Mashable reports, “Bing has been reinvented, offering enhanced search results that tap into the power of social media. Microsoft has done this by pulling people out of search results and putting them in their place: A right-hand social column that will eventually include Facebook, Twitter, Google+ Quora and LinkedIn integration, as well as people who may know something about your most recent Bing query. It even offers a way to ask questions on your favorite social network, directly through Bing.”

Ulanoff continues, “It’s something of an about-face for the Number 2 search engine, which up until earlier this year has been slowly but surely integrating Facebook information (like “Likes”) directly into Bing Search results. Read more

At this week’s SAP Sapphire conference. NetBase will be taking its relationship with the enterprise vendor to the next level. Last December the two paired up to bring NetBase’s social intelligence (SI) to SAP BusinessObjects’ business intelligence (BI).

Coming up now is a complete integration of the NetBase technology into SAP’s Social On Demand customer relationship management (CRM) console. “Having access to social data is becoming critical to every part of the organization,” says NetBase chief marketing officer Lisa Joy Rosner. So, “social media [becomes] just one more data point” for which the enterprise must account.

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Marisa Peacock reports that the new release of Bottlenose introduces reader and newspaper modules. She writes, “With Bottlenose 3, more than 30 new features work to improve the way users can connect with more types of social accounts, discover and respond to more than 140 kind of messages, and interact through more user friendly interfaces. Most, if not all of these new and improved features were the result of feedback from Bottlenose’s more than 50,000 beta testers, who have spent an average of 60 minutes a day using Bottlenose. Still in Beta, Bottlenose has released two completely new apps, ‘Reader’ and ‘Newspaper,’ as well as an improved version of Sonar, powered by Bottlenose’s platform, called StreamOS.” Read more