The Second International Linked Open Data in Libraries, Archives, and Museums Summit has announced the finalists of the LODLAM Challenge. The finalists were broken into two heats. In the first heat, the finalists are Free Your Metadata, ReLOAD, and Linked Jazz. In the second heat, the finalists are Pundit and Mismuseos.net. The LODLAM team commented, “This rounds out the slate of 5 challenge finalists that will be competing head-to-head at the LODLAM Summit June 19-20, 2013 in Montreal. All finalists have earned travel grants for the trip to Montreal and the chance to win a $2000USD cash prize. A big thank-you to all the teams who submitted entries. It was great to see such creativity and wide range of ideas. The LODLAM community rose to the challenge and amazed us.” Read more

Wed May 22, 2013 9:00am EDT – Liaison Healthcare, a global provider of secure cloud-based integration and data management services and solutions, announced today the launch of its Healthcare Terminology Manager (HTM) and Healthcare Terminology Translator (HTT) as a part of the organization’s cloud-based Healthcare Information as a Service solutions suite. The new products provide health systems with a framework and translation support for managing different industry-standard controlled medical vocabularies, facilitating a seamless process for data exchange across the continuum of care. Read more

Derrick Harris of GigaOM reports, “WibiData — the big data startup from Cloudera Co-founder Christophe Bisciglia and Aaron Kimball — doesn’t have overly big plans. It only wants to become one of the first, if not the first, company selling off-the-shelf software that lets other companies build valuable, customer-facing applications on Hadoop. On Thursday, WibiData announced $15 million in Series B funding from Canaan Partners, as well as existing investors NEA and Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, to help make the goal a reality.” Read more

AUSTIN, Texas, May 21, 2013 /PRNewswire/ — Compare Metrics, an Adaptive Commerce company that empowers brands to harness disconnected information from across the web to power individualized discovery experiences and drive sales, today announced that it has received $4.2 million in first-round financing. The financing was lead by Austin Ventures and includes follow-on investment from the existing syndicate, including Mike Maples (Floodgate), Bob Greene (Contour Venture Partners), Julie Allegro (Allegro Venture Partners) and Ralph Mack (Mack Capital), as well as new independent investors, including Tom Meredith and Adam Ross . This brings the company’s total funds raised to $4.2 million, $3.5 million of which comes from Austin Ventures in leading the series A. The round will be used to support aggressive growth as companies, especially retailers, embrace the Compare Metrics solution as the next generation leap in product discovery and decision analytics. Read more

Orbis is looking for a Software Developer in Annapolis, MD. The post states, “Orbis Technologies, Inc. is interested in speaking to motivated Software developers with strong knowledge in Java and web services development including object oriented programming. We have immediate opportunities working at our corporate HQ in Annapolis, MD at several career levels. Candidates should reside or plan to relocate within commutable distance in order to work on-site M-F within a team oriented environment. Successful candidates will have opportunities to learn and work in a small company environment with big cutting edge technologies. Our developers utilize the latest IT technologies and advance how our customers use these technologies including cloud computing services, semantic and big data analytics.” Read more

Josh Constine of TechCrunch reports, “Does my music do better on Facebook or Twitter? Where should my next tour be? Is my new song too repetitive? Musicians can get free answers to these questions and more from BeatDeck, a Y Combinator analytics company launching today. BeatDeck plans to license this data to labels and music stores to help them sign and recommend tomorrow’s superstars. Yep, BeatDeck is an enterprise music startup. Everyone (who isn’t a cold-hearted robot) loves music. That’s led lots of entrepreneurs to start companies aiming to help listeners discover new artists and songs. Read more

NEW YORK, May 22, 2013 (BUSINESS WIRE) — Vertical Search Works (VSW), a top search technology company, announced an objective process to help advertisers, agencies and publishers to verify whether the sites found in their vertical content network are of high quality and brand appropriate. VSW’s Security Integrity Process (SIP) utilizes both human and machine intelligence to deliver premium ad impressions, and is the latest example of VSW’s longstanding commitment to provide extensive reach, premium brand-safe distribution, and effective ad targeting. SIP also dramatically reduces the risk of ad fraud and malware. Read more

Roger Macdonald and Brewster Kahle of the Knight Foundation recently wrote, “We are seeing more and more public benefits arising from applying digital search and analysis to news from our most pervasive and persuasive medium— television. That’s why, we are thrilled to announce that the Internet Archive, one of the world’s largest public digital libraries, is expanding our television news research library to make readily available hundreds of thousands of hours of U.S. television news programs for users to search, quote and borrow. The expansion plan is being supported by $1 million in funding from Knight Foundation. With this support, we will grow our TV News Search & Borrow service, which currently includes more than 400,000 broadcasts dating back to June 2009, to add hundreds of thousands of new broadcasts.” Read more

The News Storyline Ontology wants to make it easier for journalists to deal with the world as they understand it – that is,  in terms of stories and curated narrative arcs over world events. The ontology aims to be a generic model for describing and organizing the stories news organizations tell, while supporting whatever their approach is to handling those stories. It provides, in other words, a model for the news itself: how different stories relate to each other, how breaking news evolves and how the commonplace entities of people, places, organizations and events relate to news stories.

“The first benefit is for the news organization itself to organize things, but it also lets them put together web pages more flexibly and closer to the way we access information as humans,” says Jarred McGinnis, one of the authors of the ontology. Formerly head of research, semantic technologies at Press Association, he is now an independent consultant in semantics at his firm Logomachy Ltd. Fellow authors are Jeremy Tarling, BBC News data architect, and a former BBCer, Paul Wilton, previously technical lead, semantic publishing and now founder and technical architect at Ontoba, which specializes in semantic publishing.

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Basis Technology is looking for a Natural Language Processing Architect in Cambridge, MA. The post states, “Are you a hands-on natural language processing expert who is ready to play a leading role in the design, development and deployment of cutting edge natural language processing products? If so, Basis Technology would like to talk with you about our current opening for an NLP Architect in Cambridge, MA. If you thrive on leading teams providing advanced text analysis for mission critical systems, then we should talk.” Read more