Laura Newman of the Open Knowledge Foundation reports, “Earlier this year, we announced plans to launch the School of Data. Thanks to the generous support of Open Society Foundations and the Shuttleworth Foundation, we’re now ready to go! We’re holding a kick-off sprint next week, and we invite you to get involved. The School of Data is led by the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN) and Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU). The School will provide online training for data ‘wrangling’ skills – the ability to find, retrieve, clean, manipulate, analyze, and represent different types of data.” Read more

SemTechBiz is Less Than 2 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 !

Attend the upcoming SemTech session that’s dubbed Using Semantic Technologies to Deliver Industrial Strength Healthcare Benefits Administration, and you’ll hear about how semantics- and model-driven computing is the future – and how it’s a future that’s already gotten underway at The Central Administrative Agency of the Netherlands (CAK).

First, a little bit about the bigger picture.  “What can happen when you go all the way to semantic, model-driven, knowledge computing [is that] … it changes the game for development,” says Mills Davis, managing director of Project 10X and one of the session’s presenters. “It enables new categories of capabilities and levels of user experience (think SIRI for the rest of us). It brings about quantum changes in all stages of lifecycle value. It enables cost-effective strategy-driven approaches to enterprise transformation. This last sentence is worth some reflection.”

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Olivia Solon reports that Professor Nigel Shadbolt has shared an outline of the plan for the UK’s Open Data Institute. She writes, “Shadbolt told Wired.co.uk: ‘Open data is not just about transparency and accountability; there is potential for economic innovation and value to come from it.’ The Institute’s remit is fairly broad, but will primarily focus on helping private and public organisations understand how to make the most of open data. It will not actually store any data itself, but it will provide business incubation for startups, providing mentoring, advice and potentially space. Shadbolt says that the aim is to cultivate and incubate 12 companies a year.” Read more

Mike Bergman reports that the latest UMBEL release includes schema.org and GeoNames support. He writes, “We are pleased to announce the release of version 1.05 of UMBEL, which now has linkages to schema.org and  GeoNames. UMBEL has also been split into ‘core’ and ‘geo’ modules. The resulting smaller size of UMBEL ‘core’ — now some 26,000 reference concepts — has also enabled us to create a full visualization of UMBEL’s content graph.” Read more

Facebook is buying Karma, a social gifting app that we have covered before. According to Om Malik of GigaOM, “The news was released via Karma’s blog. As we first posted, Karma was founded by Lee Linden and Ben Lewis who in their past life were co-founders of Tapjoy, that was acquired by Offerpal Media after reaching more than $100 million in revenue. Investors in Karma include Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Sequoia Capital, and Evan Williams and Biz Stone’s Obvious Corp.” A Facebook spokesperson commented, “We’ve been really impressed with the Karma team and all they accomplished in such a short time. This acquisition combines Karma’s passion and innovative mobile app with Facebook’s platform to help people connect and share in new and meaningful ways.” Read more

Today Data.gov celebrates its third anniversary. An announcement on the site noted, “The first national open data site, Data.gov led the way in opening government data around the world. Now 30 countries host open data sites and they are key tools in the global open government movement. Growing from 47 datasets in 2009 to nearly 450,000 datasets today, Data.gov reaches across 172 federal agencies to bring data to innovators, developers, analysts and citizens across the nation. The data shows up in smart phone apps, websites, and information that lets people buy smarter, use energy more efficiently, and find better health-care solutions each day.” Read more

Yesterday we announced an expert panel on schema.org that will be featured at next month’s SemTechBiz Conference in San Francisco. But schema.org won’t be the only hot topic at SemTechBiz. Two other expert panels are also happening on Wednesday, June 6: a panel on Wikis & Semantics as well as a panel on Semantic Analysis of Big Data.

During the first discussion, Wikis & Semantics, the panelists will discuss their experiences with combining wikis and semantic technology. Read more

Valentin Spitkovsky and Peter Norvig of the Google Research Team have posted an article about their new paper on dictionaries for linking text, entities, and ideas. They write, “Human language is both rich and ambiguous. When we hear or read words, we resolve meanings to mental representations, for example recognizing and linking names to the intended persons, locations or organizations. Bridging words and meaning — from turning search queries into relevant results to suggesting targeted keywords for advertisers — is also Google’s core competency, and important for many other tasks in information retrieval and natural language processing. We are happy to release a resource, spanning 7,560,141 concepts and 175,100,788 unique text strings, that we hope will help everyone working in these areas.” Read more

We are pleased to announce the start-ups that have been selected to participate in the 2012 SemTechBiz “Top Semantic Start-Up” competition. These companies will give demonstrations/pitches before a panel of expert judges at the Semantic Technology and Business Conference June 3-7.

Judges

Our panel of judges includes (Left to Right): Phil Aucutt, CEO, TeamPatent; Mike Dunn, CTO, Hearst Interactive; James Hendler, Professor, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Mark Johnson, CEO, Zite; Chris Shipley, CEO, Guidewire Group (former Executive Director, DEMO Conference)

The Envelope Please!

The companies, presentations, and speakers for the start-up competition are…

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A recent report asked the question, is the future of sharing the Semantic Web? The abstract states, “Current information sharing is based mostly on using so-called Web 1.0 search tools and Web 2.0 tools such as social media to collect and display data and information on the Web and make it easier for people to access. The next generation of Web technologies — collectively called the Semantic Web — will move sharing into the era of Web 3.0.”

It goes on, “Semantic Web technologies are already used in government sites such as Data.gov and Recovery.gov, which are part of the Obama administration’s push for open government. Read more