Steven Rosenbaum of Forbes recently posed the question, is there too much information out there? He writes, “If anyone knows anything about the web, where it’s been and where it’s going, it’s David Weinberger.  As a co-author of the seminal Clue Train Manifesto, Weinberger gave a generation of web innovators a clue as to how the web would evolve. In Too Big To Know Weinberger sets out to argue that the very nature of information and ideas is changing, even as you flip the pages of his book.”

Rosenbaum continues, “The world was, almost since the beginning of time, built around the concept of triangular knowledge. At the bottom of  the triangle is data. Raw and unstructured.  The Knowledge Triangle presented first in 1988 by Russel Akkoff presented DIKW (Data, Information,  Knowledge, Wisdom) as the basis for our information ecology.  Weinberger says our Information Age was built on this pyramid – creating an elaborate filtering system to sort Wisdom from Data.”

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Image: Courtesy David Weinberger

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At this week’s SAP Sapphire conference. NetBase will be taking its relationship with the enterprise vendor to the next level. Last December the two paired up to bring NetBase’s social intelligence (SI) to SAP BusinessObjects’ business intelligence (BI).

Coming up now is a complete integration of the NetBase technology into SAP’s Social On Demand customer relationship management (CRM) console. “Having access to social data is becoming critical to every part of the organization,” says NetBase chief marketing officer Lisa Joy Rosner. So, “social media [becomes] just one more data point” for which the enterprise must account.

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Silk is launching in open beta today (May 10). The service for applying semantics to create more powerful web sites, which we last discussed here, moves out of a private beta stage that the company says saw more than 10,000 users.

“A lot of the sites during the private beta were, well… private, so we can’t go into details about those,” says Sander Koppelaar, head of operations. Countries of the World, with all United Nations member state information, is one public Silk-powered demo web site for those who’d like to explore one. Generally speaking, he says there’s been a wide variety of use cases, ranging from professional publishers and data journalists to businesses and even personal use. “Publishers have used Silk to interpret data sets such as deadly traffic accidents, house sales and MBA rankings.

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For-profit businesses clearly are tuned into the social media-sentiment analysis trend, to stay abreast of how their brand, services or products are perceived. But are non-profits equally as concerned? The answer seems to be yes, and not just when it comes to social media but across all paths of constituent engagement.

At this week’s Sentiment Analysis symposium in New York City, Banafsheh Ghassemi, the American Red Cross vice president of marketing, e-CRM, and customer experience, pointed out some reasons why. “It’s a brave new world for those of us in the non-profit world,” she said. While charitable organizations don’t like to use the word competition, because they’re all working for the greater good, the number of non-profits angling for contributors’ dollars, time, or other resources, has grown by 60 percent in recent times. And there are even for-profit organizations doing some of the same things the Red Cross itself does, such as blood collection. “We still have to attract your attention for your dollar, time, and even the physical part of you that is blood,” she says.

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The financial services sector was in focus at this week’s Sentiment Analysis Symposium in New York City, which is organized and produced by Alta Plana Corp. and its founder, Seth Grimes.  Take, for example, the presentation by Rich Brown, head of Elektron Analytics at Thomson Reuters, who disclosed that the company is about to launch market response indicators in support of its Thomson Reuters News Analytics system for the financial community. That product this week also won The Technical Analyst’s 2012 award for best news analytics software.

With its software, originally discussed here, qualitative, unstructured information is turned into a quantitative data set allowing users – machines and humans – to quickly analyze thousands of news stories in less time than it takes to read a single headline, as Thomson Reuters describes it. It uses natural language processing technology to get to the end game, which is to forecast financial market response from news and social media sentiment. Some 82 fields of metadata come into play for automating the analysis of news content. That encompasses sentiment down through to the degree of positive, negative or neutral expressions and how individual companies mentioned in a piece fare in those respects – rather than just the tone of the piece at large. “The computational linguistics system measures the author’s tone as positive or negative on any given entity, which is important and the harder part of it,” Brown said. Other fields include, for example, relevance, genre, intensity of news flow, and more.

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Wavii made waves when it launched  its automated, algorithm-driven news aggregation service in April, which has been billed as making Facebook out of Google. But what makes Wavii work? When The Semantic Web Blog found a picture in Wavii.com’s Flickr photostream featuring the word “predicates” on a white board, it was time to discover whether Semantic Web standards had anything to do with its engine.

Turns out, RDF is not at play here. But natural language processing certainly factors in, albeit from the perspective of information extraction and being almost entirely machine-learning based rather than deep-parsing oriented. The service’s technology is influenced by the expert machine-reading NLP work being done at the University of Washington, where Wavii advisor Oren Etzioni is a professor of computer science.

But Wavii CEO and founder Adrian Aoun can credit growing up in a household where his father was a linguist — a student of Noam Chomsky – for originally sparking his interest in how language works. Whenever his dad would have a debate about a language construct with his fellow MIT buddies, he says, “they’d turn to me and say which one sounds better….The irony is that they’re arguing over the rules, but they acknowledge the right answer is whatever humans do.”

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While much of the publishing industry still is getting up to speed on what semantic technology can do for business, it’s already deep within the DNA of The Tribune Company – to the point where Keith DeWeese, Director, Information and Semantics Management, can comfortably use the word “ontology” in discussions with non-tech employees, and enjoy the fact that they’re equally comfortable using it themselves.

DeWeese has been with the company since 2007, putting in place a sophisticated semantic system for auto-tagging and indexing content using natural language processing and controlled vocabularies, and leveraging its taxonomy for projects such as providing advanced search functionality. Thanks to building a collaborative communication channel with Tribune executives, producers, and editors, “now I actually am in meetings with executives who say how exciting it is that we now can be part of a community of people applying semantic technologies to content,” he says. “The other day I was at a meeting where a top executive used the word ontology all the time. I kept smiling and later I thanked her.”

Closely engaging with his business customers also is helping make it possible to push the semantic vision further at the company.

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These days, it’s not just the traditional publishing community that has reason for leveraging the content syndication model. As more and more companies across vertical sectors themselves become content providers, syndication makes sense for them, too.

NewsCred has a new – and semantic – take on content syndication, with content partners ranging from Reuters to The Guardian to The Economist. Recently-added customers that leverage the service’s fully licensed text, image and video content include traditional publishers such as the New York Daily News (and NewsCred is in talks with it about becoming a content provider, too). But other recent customers point to the importance of quality content to the consumer and corporate brand market:  For example, insurance provider Zurich recently signed on. NewsCred also just closed a deal with Johnson & Johnson to be a subscriber of its syndication services for content related to the health care products and pharmaceuticals space.

Brands, says NewsCred CEO Shafqat Islam, are responding to consumers getting smarter and more demanding. “They have so much access to information that brands are starting to realize they can’t just sell products or services anymore,” he says. “They need more authentic, engaging conversations with their customers and the best way to build these authentic relationships is with highly-engaging, trusted, high-quality content.”

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Market Strategies International recently released the first edition of what it says will be an annual Social Media Brand Index, a measure for brands both of consumer-generated social media about them and of their own sponsored content. The Index takes into account four components. Volume, or the amount of buzz about a brand online, is one of them — and its most highly weighted component, too. The others take their cue from what we might call more meaning-related measures, sentiment analytics and semantic markup among them.

For example, there’s net Sentiment, which Market Strategies says represents the ratio of positive to negative sentiments expressed about a brand based on automated natural language processing of the content of posts, comments and mentions. Another component, Positive Emotions, seems to flow from that measure, representing the number of content items that are identified as having the warm fuzzies about them, again based on automated coding of content.

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Hojoki, the cloud productivity-app aggregator with semantic tech underpinnings that The Semantic Web Blog first discussed here, is going mobile. The company’s launching the take-along version of the app, which delivers a single newsfeed of users’ cloud-connected work, for both Android and iOS platforms at The Next Web Conference’s Startup Rally event.

In the coming weeks, the mobile version will add to the newsfeed features including collaboration and push notifications, says CEO and co-founder Martin Böhringer.

As far as collaboration goes, the company is announcing in conjunction with its mobile news the addition of new social features to make that process easier. It wants to advance the cause of helping users leverage what it calls the much- overlooked Work Graph. “Our mission now is: discover the Work Graph,” says Böhringer. The Work Graph, he explains, consists of the people you’re working with, and Hojoki already know most of them if you’ve connected it to some productivity apps.

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