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

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 !

Yesterday, we announced RDFa.info, a new site devoted to helping developers add RDFa (Resource Description Framework-in-attributes) to HTML.

Building on that work, the team behind RDFa.info is announcing today the release of “PLAY,” a live RDFa editor and visualization tool. This release marks a significant step in providing tools for web developers that are easy to use, even for those unaccustomed to working with RDFa.

“Play” is an effort that serves several purposes. It is an authoring environment and markup debugger for RDFa that also serves as a teaching and education tool for Web Developers. As Alex Milowski, one of the core RDFa.info team, said, “It can be used for purposes of experimentation, documentation (e.g. crafting an example that produces certain triples), and testing. If you want to know what markup will produce what kind of properties (triples), this tool is going to be great for understanding how you should be structuring your own data.”

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For Web Developers who have been looking for resources devoted to adding Linked Data to HTML, there’s a new site available today: RDFa.info. Visitors are greeted with the following headline, “RDFa is an extension to HTML5 that helps you markup things like People, Places, Events, Recipes and Reviews. Search Engines and Web Services use this markup to generate better search listings and give you better visibility on the Web, so that people can find your website more easily.” SemanticWeb.com has covered RDFa’s development and use in the past and we’ve often heard from developers that they were looking for such a starting place.

Led by members of the RDFa Community, RDFa.info provides information and resources aimed at dispelling the myth that RDFa is difficult to implement. SemanticWeb.com caught up with Manu Sporny, one of the creators of the site, to learn more about its goals and resources: “One of the misconceptions that RDFa has, is being seen as a very programmer-centric extension to HTML. This misconception is unfortunate because it was built for Web developers, and with the right introduction to it, anyone can author RDFa.”

He continued, “We wanted a site that captured and taught the essence of RDFa to Web Developers. We wanted the site to gather a set of documentation and tools that would help web developers not only learn about authoring RDFa, but help them write markup, show them the result of their markup, and point out any issues with their RDFa-enabled web pages.”

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First Retail has been named a “Cool Vendor in Analytics and Business Intelligence by Gartner: “The report, issued on April 27, 2012, highlights five vendors selected by Gartner for their solutions in the analytics and business intelligence market.” The report states, “Selecting Cool Vendors in the analytics market this year was difficult. New providers of analytic solutions abound, especially in the popular areas of mobile, social, cloud and big data. We, as an industry, are building silos of analysis that will eventually have to be integrated, but the benefit of specialized analysis for problems that have not been addressed before outweighs most organizations’ needs for a holistic view, at least for now.” Read more

[Editor's note: Quotes have been translated from German.]

German company Ontoprise GmbH has filed for bankruptcy. According to the German Business publication, econo, “The software specialist Ontoprise is in trouble. The company has asked for bankruptcy due to insolvency.”  The firm Schultze & Braun has told the district court in Karlsruhe that lawyer Holger Blümle has been appointed provisional liquidator.

In an official release by Schultze & Braun, Blümle states, “With their innovative solutions, Ontoprise has developed a very good market position. Since the products are used both directly and indirectly in other programs, I am confident that the company can be rehabilitated…Initial discussions with potential investors are already actively being pursued.”

Ontoprise was founded in 1999 as a spin off from the research environment at the University of Karlsruhe. The software company specializes in knowledge management applications of Semantic Technologies.

Cambridge Semantics’ new Competitive Intelligence Solution has been named Best in Show at the 2012 BioIT World Conference. The company reports, “Based on the flagship Anzo Software Suite, the Cambridge Semantics Competitive Intelligence Solution was recognized for its unique approach to helping biopharma companies handle their diverse and ever-changing information needs.” Read more

With the increase in the number of #SemTechBiz events taking place in a calendar year, we understand that tracking the deadlines can be tricky. There are several approaching for various events and stakeholders, so we present the most pressing ones below:

April 26 – Register for SemTechBiz – San Francisco by April 26, and save up to $300

April 30 – SemTechBiz Start-Up Contest Application Deadline — Free for registered attendees & speakers to apply!

April 30 – Call For Presentations deadline for SemTechBiz – London

June 3-7 – SemTechBiz – San Francisco! See you there!

June 11 – Call For Presentations deadline for SemTechBiz – New York

Sponsorships for all the SemTechBiz events are still available (even San Francisco — some promotional opportunities are already sold out, so hurry!)

This year was the 21st World Wide Web Conference located in Lyon, France. This conference is a unique forum for discussion about how the Web is evolving. There were hundreds of talks over 3 days. Let me summarize some Semantic Web presentations I was able to attend.

NautiLOD

Programmers daily use the wget tool to specify and retrieve data on the Web. However, wget is limited since it cannot dig into the semantics of Web data to do the job. What if you were to add semantics to wget? This is the question that Valeria Fionda, Claudio Gutierrez and Giuseppe Pirró asked themselves. They took that question to the next level: imagine a semantic wget on top of Linked Data. They wanted to create a language to declaratively specify portions of the Web of Data, define routes and instruct agents that can do things for you on the Web. All this by exploiting the semantics of information (RDF data) found in online data sources. For example, find all the Wikipedia pages of directors that have been influenced by Stanley Kubrick and send them to my email; retrieving information about David Lynch from different information providers only gives a hint of what can be done. The researchers developed a simple, generic declarative language, NautiLOD and implemented it in swget (semantic wget). swget comes in two flavors: a simple command line tool (to give the Web back to users) and a GUI. This is not a fantasy anymore. Check it our for yourself (http://swget.wordpress.com).

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SemanticWeb.com and parent company WebMediaBrands recently announced a contest to earn the title of  “Top Semantic Technology Start-Up.” Today, we have two exciting announcements to make about the contest.

Deadline Extension

We have had several requests to extend the deadline, and are announcing today that we will now accept applications for the contest until April 30, 2012. We also learned of some applicants who encountered technical problems when trying to submit in the early days of the contest. We have fixed the code that caused these problems, and encourage all who experienced difficulties to try again.

Judges

We are also pleased to announce the panel of judges that will be at SemTechBiz evaluating the companies. It’s a great group, and we’re looking forward to a lively afternoon!

Left to Right, they are: Read more

Google has announced two updates to rich snippets, the enhanced format that they announced in 2009 for displaying content in search results that use semantic markup.

The first update addresses an issue raised on answers.semanticweb.com in July of 2011. Prior to this update, only some places in the world saw rich snippets in their local results. Now product rich snippets is getting global support, meaning that users worldwide will be able to preview product information in the rich snippet. Here is an example from www.google.fr:

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