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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The main topic of Wolfram’s post is a proposal about the form and placement of raw data on the internet. In the post, he proposes that .data be created as a new generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) to hold data in a “parallel construct.”

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Well, maybe it’s time to invest a little something in efforts that might not pay you back in dollars, but in online badges, acknowledgement of your contributions or donations, maybe even in a chance to provide input into a solution that can advance semantic web, Linked Data, or discovery technologies? Or maybe the ROI is just about feeling that you did something good.

Recently we wrote about Sebastian Trüg’s fundraiser to keep the Nepomuk semantic desktop alive, for example, which this month reached its 9000€ initial goal (though he’s still in search of long-term funding). Turns out there are – or recently have been – other opportunities to put some of your pocket change to work for a smarter and more meaningful web of data. Projects on Kickstarter.com, for instance, run the gamut from fashion ($1 to fund chic 3D glasses), to theatre (you can help launch the LA production of Spring Awakening for $10 or more), to technology.

Kickstarter builds itself as the world’s largest funding platform for great projects, and whiling away the late-night hours wandering through the crowd-funding forum, it surprised me to learn that among its successfully funded projects were efforts including hypothes.is, the brainchild of online travel industry pioneer Dan Whaley. This is described as “a distributed, open-source platform for the collaborative evaluation of information. It will enable sentence-level critique of written words combined with a sophisticated yet easy-to-use model of community peer-review. It will work as an overlay on top of any stable content, including news, blogs, scientific articles, books, terms of service, ballot initiatives, legislation and regulations, software code and more-without requiring participation of the underlying site.”

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“In particular, a lot of the strengths of Knowledge Explorer have to do with modeling data as RDF and then testing queries, visualizing and browsing the data to see that you have the ontologies and data mappings you need for your integration and application requirements.” says Robert Stanley, IO Informatics president and CEO. The Personal version is aimed at academic experts focused on data integration and semantic data modeling, as well as personal power users in life sciences and other data-intensive industries, or anyone who wants to learn the tool in anticipation of leveraging their enterprise data sets for collaboration and integration projects.

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Zite

CEO Mark Johnson says a prerequisite for the iPhone app was its release of Sybil technology in late October, which allowed Zite to have multiple profiles that adapt to the reader’s preference. This made it possible to share the Zite app on a family’s sole iPad without messing up individuals’ preferences. It comes in handy for the new smartphone app because, “if you did all this work on your iPad training this very intelligent AI, you don’t want to lose that when you go to the iPhone,” Johnson says.

Johnson expects the iPhone app to appeal to existing iPad users. “Personalization is really addictive. Once you have it one place, you want it everywhere,” he says

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FindtheBest

“Joins is a very hard database connection between two tables. Soft joins are a little more semantic,” says CEO Kevin O’Connor, co-founder of DoubleClick. “We’re linking a lot of data sets together on a loose basis.” To the end, he says, of trying to “cross-relate information a lot more, trying to discern all the data we have and give it some semantic meaning into ways people can understand it. It turns out there’s a huge, huge number of these semantic relationship between our data.”

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TrustYou already monitors social sentiment across the web in online reviews, posts, and comments for the hotel, travel, and restaurant sectors.“Our key advantage is that we are the only ones in the space, I think, who tackled the key fundamentals of how can we scale this in as many languages as we want to,” says CEO Ben Jost. “That’s very interesting for the hospitality industry, because it’s very international. We currently have 12 languages and today, if we have enough content, we can add a new language each day if we want to.

And we can learn the key concepts for a new vertical every three to four weeks.”

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Semantic technology is playing a part in that too – both from the standpoint of consumers who want to reach out and the organizations that want to be reached out to.

DailyFeats, a social platform for positive actions that incorporates detailed semantic understanding about such efforts in order to categorize them and recommend to users related actions (see here), is building up more partnerships for supporting good causes. It’s recently added opportunities for users to redeem the points they earn on the service for partner donations to 501©3 non-profits. For 50 points, Cigna, for example, will make a $1 donation to P2V, which matches military veterans with shelter pets to help them heal from psychological wounds.

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Not that the report spells that out, exactly. But here are some things it does say that help us form that conclusion. Take, for instance, the finding that IT spending has not yet strongly recovered. The study reports that both IT operational and capital spending is rising, but not at a strong increase. On top of that, it says that many IT executives lack confidence in their spending plans, even though confidence, at least, is higher today than during the previous two years.

Why not look beyond that mix of “eh” and “ok” news to this option: Leverage semantic web technologies to stretch IT budgets further in key areas.

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Amid so many negatives, perhaps we can take some inspiration from the fact that this month will see the Open Government Data Camp 2011 being held in Warsaw, Poland. Think about that for a minute: A country that not all that long ago was controlled by an iron fist and blocked from the free world by the Iron Curtain is the host site for the Open Knowledge Foundation event — an undertaking that is very much focused on making government data more transparent and interoperable and transformative for the societies whose governing bodies adopt open data principles and values.

Maybe thinking about things in that light will help anyone discouraged by current events to hope still for a brighter future. Among the presenters at the event discussing how open data can be essential to realizing transformation is Bernadette Hyland, co-chair W3C Government Linked Data Working Group and CEO of 3 Round Stones. Hyland also will be co-conducting a half-day Government Linked Data Workshop during the course of the camp. Hyland’s speech, a report on the progress of the W3C Government Linked Data Working Group, will hone in on why it’s important to share government information and the benefits to be attained from doing so, including transforming how governments serve their citizens in the 21st Century. (The W3C Government Linked Data Working Group is chartered to produce standards and document best practices for the publication of governmental data.)

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Rather, perhaps the sad news of his passing might provide an opportunity to reflect on what it means to innovate, and what it means to be an innovator. Apple’s well-known mantra – Jobs’ coaxing of his fans to “think different” – isn’t just something we’ve seen played out in the design of that company’s products, or in the sheer genius Jobs had for tapping into the zeitgeist, turning it around, and building a business model out of it.

Certainly those are the most obvious fruits to most people. But the work the Semantic Web community is doing exemplifies the “think different” attitude every day. That’s true of products like Apple’s Siri that bring some (now) in-house semantic smarts to Jobs’ creations, as well as a host of others whose creators hope to harness new opportunities from Jobs’ tablet revolution.

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This is the situation the IT team explained:

We need to aggregate information and present it to the user, so we build a warehouse.  We spend all this time building and designing the warehouse, and when it’s done they need something else.  Unfortunately, it’s not so easy to modify a warehouse once it’s running, so we build another one.  And then another.  The cycle has been repeating itself for years and is not sustainable.

The alternative to warehousing is Data Virtualization (EII, Data Federation…lots of terms for it)…or, at least that’s what they, and many others, see!  Essentially, they have been burned by years of working with an inflexible technology, so are looking to dump the approach all together.

I get this.  If a Durian is the only fruit you’ve ever smelled, you’d think all fruit were really stinky.

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Photo courtesy: Flickr/Bruce Berrien

So many semantic web efforts have their beginnings as R&D projects. Moving these projects from the lab into the real world has its challenges. But they can be overcome, and Daniel Field, business consultant at IT services and consulting company Atos Origin, has advice on how to manage them so the investment pays off.

In many cases these projects begin with multiple partners from different backgrounds –universities, businesses (including sometime competitors), and research centers on commission for other parties. “So they’re starting from a diverse set of perspectives,” he says. And the focus on meeting a mission’s specific goals can take center stage without due consideration of next steps – how, that is, to ensure that the partners contributing to the effort actually are able to exploit its achievements.

One thing Field recommends in order to realize that value is that the business case for the project be made at the proposal stage, and stuck to throughout the term of the effort. Critical to this is dealing upfront with questions around licensing and intellectual property.

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Orchestr8’s NLP- and machine learning-based AlchemyAPI service for analyzing content and extracting semantic metadata has added some new capabilities.

One new feature is dubbed Relation Extraction, which project engineer Shaun Roach tells the Semantic Web Blog “detects sentences describing actions, events, and facts, and then codes them into a machine-readable format.  It is a key feature for developers who want to go a step beyond tagging, to understand specifically how all the people, places, and things mentioned in the document are interacting.”

So, it processes natural language, and converts documents and web pages into actionable, semantically enriched “Subject-Action-Object” data, as the company blog describes it.

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Let’s start with the positive stuff. Today at the schema blog, the news was released that schema.org has added to its NewsArticle and related types such as CreativeWork new properties for mark-up based on the rNews standard from the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC).

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