There will be a lot of Big Data talk at the upcoming SemTechBiz event in San Francisco.

The opening keynote, for example, will be given by Abhishek Gattani, senior director at Walmart in the WalmartLabs. In a conversation in advance of the event, Gattani told The Semantic Web Blog that he’ll be focusing on the idea that businesses should embrace the mindset of using external data – social and web data – to solve internal problems. “This is what happens when you run an enterprise – external factors influence your market,” he says, whether that’s a new product being launched or a lower-priced competitor coming into play or a natural disaster or economic event taking place. The data about those things exist outside your own company’s realm, but combining your information with that could lead to interesting prospects and extraordinary results.

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Another announcement by Google this week – one that didn’t get quite as much play as the launch at I/O of Google Play Music All Access and improvements to its search, map and Google + services – was this: Support for JSON-LD markup in Gmail.

The W3C in April published a Last Call Working Draft for JSON-LD 1.0 (JavaScript Object Notation for Linking Data), a lightweight Linked Data format to give data context. It has been shepherded along for some time by the JSON for Linked Data Community Group.

Manu Sporny, who has been instrumental in JSON-LD’s development and is one of the authors of the draft, heralds the news here in his blog, noting that it means that Gmail now will be able to recognize people, places, events and a variety of other Linked Data objects, and that actions may be taken on the Linked Data objects embedded in an e-mail. “For example, if someone sends you an invitation to a party, you can do a single-click response on whether or not you’ll attend a party right from your inbox. Doing so will also create a reminder for the party in your calendar,” he writes.

The news was greeted with enthusiasm on a W3C JSON LD message round, as, as Sporny describes it, “pretty big validation of the technology.”

While noting that Google followed the standard closely, Sporny does point out some issues with the implementation – including a major one that Google isn’t using the JSON-LD @context parameter correctly in its markup examples:

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Google, in the midst of its I/O conference (see our story here), also has teamed up with NASA to form the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab at the agency’s Ames Research Center.

According to a post on Google’s Research Blog, the lab will house a D-Wave Systems quantum computer. The goal is to study how quantum computing can solve some of the most challenging computer science problems, with a focus on advancing machine learning. Machine learning, as Director of Engineering Hartmut Neven writes, “is all about building better models of the world to make more accurate predictions,” but it’s hard work to build a really good model. Real-world applications that he discusses include building a more useful search engine by better understanding spoken questions and what’s on the web to provide the best answer.

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“With more features in the Knowledge Graph and more languages, with conversational voice search and hot-wording coming to Chrome on desktops and laptops, and with new Now functionality like reminders….search is becoming a really beautiful and ubiquitous experience that intelligently answers your questions and assists you throughout the day across all screens.”

That’s how Google Fellow Amit Singhal summed up the evolving search experience at today’s Google I/O event. Here’s more about the latest features:

• Google’s Knowledge Graph, now some 570 million entities strong and growing, is taking it to the stats. Now, users will get important stats powered by the Knolwedge Graph, he said. “Already you can find answers to questions like what is the population of India,” he told the audience, “but starting today we will anticipate your next question,” which may be how that population compares to the population of other countries. So, you’ll get the answer alongside the trends line and see all that in comparison to the population of the two countries whose population is most often compared to India, China and the U.S. Google Knoweldge Graph is also boosting its language support, adding to the existing eight Polish, Turkish, simplified and traditional Chinese.
• Users in the Gmail search trial already have the capability of finding answers – like when is their upcoming flight or restaurant reservation — without having to sift through email, docs and calendar data. But, said Singhal, things can get better when it comes to letting users get those answers in the most natural way possible, which means Google has been working hard on technologies like voice recognition and natural language understanding. To that end, conversational search, already available on Android and iOS, is coming to all desktops and laptops through Chrome, he said.
• Joining conversation search is hot-wording, a new interface, or, as he calls it, a “no interface,” where users can ask their search questions without clicking on the mike. Just preface a voice question with, “OK Google,” and Google will speak back the answer to you, drawing among other sources on its Knowledge Graph for the response. Google product manager Johanna Wright gave a demo of the voice experience courtesy of Chrome on a mobile device, working her way through planning a day trip to Santa Cruz through to images of its beach boardwalk, asking “OK Google, how far from here to it?,” where Google, in speaking back the answer, recognized that it referred to the boardwalk and that here was her current location.
• Enter Google Now: Singhal talked up anticipation (it’s more fun if you pronounce it like Tim Curry in the Rocky Horror Picture Show number), and the usefulness of having the right answer suggested at the right time, even before a user asks. That’s what is set to happen with an on-the-way feature that lets users set reminders in Google Now to show up when they need them. Also launching on the Google Now front are other new cards: public transit commute time cards and more cards for music albums, tv shows, and video games. Google is now “even more useful as an assisted tool,” he said.

Of the new age of search, Singhal said it’s not around the corner, that it will be some time before this becomes the predominant search experience. “There are lots of complex and scientific problems to solve, but our investment and commitment to getting there sooner rather than later is immense.”

Photo courtesy: Flickr/rvaphotodude

Last month at its MarkLogic World 2013 conference, the enterprise NoSQL database platform provider talked semantics as it related to its MarkLogic Server technology that ingests, manages and searches structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data (see our story here). The vendor late last week was scheduled to provide an early access release of MarkLogic 7, formally due by year’s end, to some dozens of initial users.

“People see a convergence of search and semantics,” Stephen Buxton, Director, Product Management, recently told The Semantic Web Blog. To that end, a lot of the vendor’s customers have deployed MarkLogic technology as well as specialized triple stores, but what they really want, he says, is an integrated approach, “a single database that does both individually and both together,” he says. “We see the future of search as semantics and the future of semantics as search, and they are very much converging.” At its recent conference, Buxton says the company demonstrated a MarkLogic app it built to function like Google’s Knowledge Graph to provide an idea of the kinds of things the enterprise might do with both search and semantics together.

Following up on the comments made by MarkLogic CEO Gary Bloom at his keynote address at the conference, Buxton explained that, “the function in MarkLogic we are working on in engineering is a way to store and manage triples in the MarkLogic database natively, right alongside structured and unstructured information – a specialized triples index so queries are very fast, and so you can do SPARQL queries in MarkLogic. So, with MarkLogic 7 we will have a world-class triple store and world-beating information store – no one else does documents, values and triples in combination the way MarkLogic 7 will.”

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It’s pretty common these days for people to hit the web in search of medication advice to deal with symptoms they’re experiencing.  The trouble is, most people don’t approach the process in a truly safe manner.

Semantic technology can help rectify the situation. In fact, it’s already doing so in France, where Olivier Curé, an associate professor in computer science at the University of Paris-Est in France, created a web application based on the book by pharmacology expert and educator Jean-Paul Giroud Médicaments sans ordonnance: Les bons et les mauvais!, of which he is a co-author with Catherine Cupillard. The app is made available to their consumers via three big insurance companies there, in order to help the companies save costs on reimbursing them for buying drugs that won’t actually help their condition, or direct them to the appropriate drugs at pharmacies with which the insurers may have relationships to supply them at lower costs. An iPhone version of the app was just released to accompany the web version.

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Photo Courtesy: Flickr/katerha

Among the topics covered at this week’s Sentiment Analysis’ Symposium was an exploration of just how much the negative or positive expression of sentiment about a company or a product really matters – and in what context it does. (Another one, which The Semantic Web Blog covered yesterday here, looked at the expected transition from sentiment to emotions analytics.)

Augie Ray, director of social media at Prudential Financial, and formerly a social media leader at USAA and Forrester, recounted some of the bigger blow-ups online in recent years: The passenger whose guitar was broken by United Airlines and made a Youtube video that went viral; NBC’s 2012 London Olympics coverage that was criticized for dissing a tribute to the victims of terrorist bombings, among other things; and Bank of America’s being castigated for its announced plan to institute debit card fees.

“We live and die by the concept that negative sentiment matters,” he said.

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What’s next in sentiment analytics? The road’s pointing to a deeper understanding of emotions.

“We still are clearly at the nascent level regarding text and sentiment analytics,” said David Rabjohns, CEO of social intelligence company MotiveQuest, speaking at yesterday’s Sentiment Analysis Symposium, the event organized by Seth Grimes’ Alta Plana Corp. “There are much higher levels of emotional depth still to be mined.”

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As Linked Data matures across the web – courtesy of efforts such as that underway by the Linked Data Platform Working Group to mandate publishing data in RDF and to use the HTTP protocol, (see our story here) – anyone running a website is going to need to know how to manage it. That, says Geoffrey Bock, principal at strategic marketing and insight services firm  Bock & Company, is going to make the popular Drupal platform for managing web content even more important.

Drupal 7 brought to the platform the ability to manage semantic metadata by incorporating RDF as a core capability, in a module that outputs RDFa. From the end user’s point of view the task of managing the metadata is made very easy through the familiar editing environment, says Bock. He will be co-hosting the session, How Drupal 7 Manages Linked Data for Smart Web Experiences, at the SemTechBiz conference in San Francisco in June. He’ll be joined by Stéphane Corlosquet, software enginner at Acquia Inc., the company co-founded by Drupal creator Dries Buytaert, which provides cloud, SaaS, and other services to organizations building websites on Drupal. Corlosquet was a critical force in bringing semantic web capabilities to Drupal’s core, with roles including being the maintainer of the RDF module in Drupal 7 a member of the Drupal security team.

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One in 50 American children have autism, according to the latest figures released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in March. One of the winners of the YarcData Graph Analytics Challenge, announced in April, can make a difference in better understanding the causes of the disease.

Taking second place in the competition, the work of Adam Lugowski, Dr. John Gilbert, and Kevin Dewesse, of the University of California at Santa Barbara, leveraged a dataset created for the Mayo Clinic Smackdown project, that has the same structure and property types – and scale – as the medical organization’s actual Big Data sets around autism, but which uses publicly available data in place of the real thing. The team can’t use the real data because it includes private information about patients, diagnosis, prescriptions, and the like.

But the actual data deployed for the project doesn’t matter, says Lugowski . “The goal is to find relationships we have never thought of before, and this way it doesn’t prejudice the algorithm,” he says. Using YarcData’s uRIKA graph analytics appliance, the algorithm queries the Smackdown dataset – which in its smallest version has almost 40 million RDF triples and in its largest is about 100 times bigger, mirroring the size of all the Mayo Clinic’s actual autism data – to discover commonalities among the data, mimicking how the real data sets could be queried in search of common precursors among clusters of patients with the diagnosis.

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