Jeff Stamen of Cambridge Semantics has questioned whether Big Data is worth the hype or if the tech headlines should actually be touting Right Data. Stamen writes, “One look at all the IT headlines these days would suggest that Big Data is the most important data issue today. After all, with lots of computing power and better database storage techniques it is now practical to analyze petabytes of data. However, is that really the most compelling need that end users have? I don’t think so. Instead, I would claim that the issue most end users have is getting together the right data to help them do their jobs better, not analyzing billions of individual transactions.” Read more

Announcing Semantic Tech & Business Conference - San Francisco 2012

Semantic Tech & Business Conference is returning to San Francisco in June! Join us from June 3-7 for complete coverage of Big Data, Linked Data, Extreme Information Management, and Semantic Web. From breakthrough approaches to solving business problems to the big data implications of fast–evolving technologies, SemTechBiz provides you with an unparalleled interactive experience and delivers tangible business value. We're offering a special early rate when you register by February 17. Sign up now!

Reed Elsevier is searching for a Technical Project Manager of eContent in Missouri. According to the post, this position will “Provide business transformation leadership in the design, development, implementation, and maintenance of structured XML content strategies for various electronic product platforms in support of NHP e-education strategy. Experience with content package design, including object-based metadata, taxonomy selection and implementation, XML standards, and asset management/relationships. Engage with internal stakeholders to gather, document, organize, and prioritize technical business requirements for content architecture and conversion efforts. Communicate clearly and concisely with third-party vendors and internal departments.” Read more

Cait O’Riordan recently explained the many changes to the BBC Sport Website. O’Riordan writes, “This redesign is the first major launch of many this year as we get ready to cover the Olympic Games this summer. We are working on some really exciting developments, which will be showcased on the new BBC Sport website. This redesign has concentrated on doing four main things: (1) Creating a fresh website that better showcases the range of content we offer. (2) Prominent promotion of our fantastic live coverage from across the BBC. (3) Making it easier for our users to talk about our sport coverage. (4) Making it faster for our users to find our great content. We have tried to do this in a way that makes the site easier to use for the millions of people from across the UK and around the world who use the site every week and are confident it will. But we know that, initially at least, the site will take a bit of getting used to.” Read more

The Journal of Web Semantics has another new publication this week, a special issue on reasoning with context in the Semantic Web. This issue was edited by Los Lehmann, Ivan Jose Varzinczak and Alan Bundy: “Its ten articles shed direct or indirect light on the role of context in Semantic Web theories and applications. Preprints of the papers are now available on the Journal of Web Semantics preprint server.”

Some of the articles currently available online include the following: “ Representing and Querying Validity Time in RDF and OWL: A Logic-Based Approach by Boris Motik Read more

Bing is looking for a new Senior Software Development Engineer in Bellevue, WA. The post states, “We are looking for a technical lead to design and implement the infrastructure to combine the semantics, social network and recommendation engines. We offer fast paced environment where quick and iterative development and deployment of services is expected. This position offers and requires working with senior researchers and bringing machine learning algorithms to the web.” Responsibilities include: “Design and develop scalable infrastructure for knowledge web backend. Build next generation recommendation engines. Build and enhance the graph store and graph algorithms, integrate with social graph. Automation of the backend processes. Working with researchers and translate them into engineering solutions for algorithms that plug-in to the backend processes.” Read more

PureDiscovery has announced a new version of PureDiscovery Legal Suite which includes ‘Focus,’ a semantic search visualization tool. According to the article, “The release includes significant changes to the products workflow through a more intuitive user interface and the addition of several compelling product features suggested by the rapidly growing PureDiscovery user community. The most frequently suggested and significant upgrade to PDLS is the addition of a visual search capability the company calls ‘Focus’.” Read more

The Open Knowledge Foundation’s CKAN software has been chosen to power the European Commission’s new open data portal. The article reports, “The European Commission (EC) has awarded a contract to create an open data portal website, where data produced by European Commission services will be freely available. Belgian company TenForce will lead the project to deliver the portal, supported by Leipzig University’s Institute for Applied Computer Science (InfAI), and UK-based non-profit the Open Knowledge Foundation. Users will be able to search for information in a flexible range of ways, for example by subject area, country, and region, and to visualise the data or download it for re-use in research, campaigns or commercial applications. The EC and the contracted partners will run workshops and other outreach activities, to raise awareness of and interest in the data among companies, researchers, journalists and policy groups.” Read more

Zemanta’s inked a deal with Federated Media that could make brand advertising via blogosphere contributions scale higher, faster. Federated Media lets independent bloggers participate as partner-publishers in programs to build brand engagement. For example, for Dockers, Federated Media had publishers with a strong male following write articles around the theme of men crafting lifetime legacies, which were used to increase page-views and clicks to, and reader interaction with, Dockers.

Zemanta’s technology has its roots in helping bloggers with suggestions of tags, links, photos, related articles, and more to add contextual relevance to their content. It analyzes posts using proprietary natural language processing and semantic algorithms, and statistically comparing its contextual framework to its pre-indexed database of content to supply its recommendations. Zemanta content sources include Wikipedia, IMDb, Amazon, Flickr, Crunchbase, Rotten Tomatoes and Freebase, among many others.

Zemanta CTO Andraz Tori says that the big advantage Zemanta brings to the relationship is that it has lots of engaged bloggers as well as the technologies to ‘understand’ what they are writing about. “FM usually worked just with couple of hundred bloggers and we’ll be able to scale that to many more,” he says.

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How do you define a forest? How about deforestation? It sounds like it would be fairly easy to get agreement on those terms. But beyond the basics – that a definition for the first would reflect that a forest is a place with lots of trees and the second would reflect that it’s a place where there used to be lots of trees – it’s not so simple.

And that has consequences for everything from academic and scientific research to government programs. As explained by Krzysztof Janowicz,  perfectly valid definitions for these and other geographic terms exist by the hundreds, in legal texts and government documents and elsewhere, and most of them don’t agree with each other. So, how can one draw good conclusions or make important decisions when the data informing those is all over the map, so to speak.

“You cannot ask to show me a map of the forests in North America because the definition of forest differs between not just the U.S. and Canada but also between U.S. member states,” says Janowicz, Assistant Professor for geographic information science at UC Santa Barbara who’s one of the organizers of this week’s GeoVoCamp focusing on geo-ontology design patterns and bottom-up, data-driven semantics.

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