If you would like your company to be considered for an interview please email editor[ at ]semanticweb[ dot ]com.

Sean: Hi Kevin, after leaving DoubleClick, which was sold to Google, what made you decide to start another company?

Kevin: I resigned as the CEO of DoubleClick in 2000, although I did remain the Chairman until the company was sold in 2005. I had spent 17 years working 80-hour weeks—and loved it—but ultimately decided I wanted more balance in my life; that meant spending more time with my family.

My passion for tech, however, never faded. I wanted to find a way get back into the tech world, but still have time for all the other important things in life. So I decided to start my own venture capital firm—O’Connor Ventures—and began investing in promising startups like Surfline, Meet-Up, Procore and Travidia.

I honestly didn’t think I would get back into the tech world as a founder, but I was becoming more and more frustrated by the chaos of the Web and I wanted to find a way to organize it.

 Sean:  What inspired you to start FindTheBest.com? What problem where you trying to solve?

Kevin: FindTheBest was founded out of three fundamental problems I saw with the Web:

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Public Sector Semantics

There was a lot of interest in the Public Sector work. One of the presentations that highlighted the Open Data movement was Nigel Shadbolt‘s Keynote presentation about the recently launched Open Data Institute. We have covered the ODI here, and Professor Shadbolt shared some exciting insights and perspectives on the Open Data economy. In his presentation, he referred to a report on which he collaborated that was published by Deloitte Analytics. This free white paper is available for download.

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In this segment of our “Innovation Spotlight” we spoke with Andreas Blumauer, the CEO of  Semantic Web Company. Semantic Web Company is headquartered in Vienna, Austria and their software extracts meaning from big data using linked data technologies. In this interview Andreas describes some of the their core products to us in more detail.

Sean: Hi Andreas. Can you give us a little background on your company? When did you get started in the Semantic Web?

Andreas: As an offspring of a ‘typical’ web agency from the early days of the internet, we became a specialized provider in 2004: The ‘Semantic Web School’ focused on research, consulting and training in the area of the semantic web. We learned quickly how the idea of a ‘semantic web’ was able to trigger a lot of great project visions but also, that most of the tools from the early days of the semantic web were rather scary for enterprises. In 2007 we experienced that information professionals began to search for grown-up semantic web solutions to improve their information infrastructure. We were excited that ‘our’ main topics obviously began to play a role in the development of IT-strategies in many organizations. We refocused on the development of software and renamed our company.

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Inforbix was co-founded  in 2010 by CEO Oleg Shilovitsky and CIO Anatoly Savin to answer the problem of how to retrieve product data located in different places in manufacturing companies that affects development, supply chains and manufacturing systems. Our own Jennifer Zaino interviewed Shilovitsky last year about this.

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Financed by Triangle Venture Capital Group, semafora is promising a “seamless takeover and continuation of the business.” The transition also means that the base of operations for these products has moved from Karlsruhe to Darmstadt.

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In this segment of our “Innovation Spotlight” we spoke with Elliot Turner (@eturner303), the founder and CEO of AlchemyAPI.com. AlchemyAPI’s cloud-based platform processes around 2.5 billion requests per month. Elliot describes how their API helps companies with sentiment analysis, entity extraction, linked data, text mining, and keyword extraction.

Sean: Hi Elliot, thanks for joining us, how did AlchemyAPI get started?

Elliot: AlchemyAPI was founded in 2005 and in the past seven years has become one of the most widely used semantic analysis APIs, processing billions of transactions monthly for customers across dozens of countries.

I am the Founder and CEO and a serial entrepreneur who comes from the information security space.  My previous company built and sold high-speed network security appliances. After it was acquired, I started AlchemyAPI to focus on the problem of understanding natural human language and written communications.

Sean: Can you describe how your API works? What does it allow your customers to accomplish?

Elliot: Customers submit content via a cloud-based API, and AlchemyAPI analyzes that information in real-time, transforming opaque blobs of text into structured data that can be used to drive a number of business functions. The service is capable of processing thousands of customer transactions every second, enabling our customers to perform large-scale text analysis and content analytics without significant capital investment.

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On Friday, July 13, a group of Semantic thought leaders from around the globe met with their host and colleague, Paul Miller, for the latest installment of the Semantic Link, a monthly podcast covering the world of Semantic Technologies.

This episode includes a discussion with Nick Holzherr, finalist on the BBC One Television Series, “The Apprentice,” and founder of Whisk, a recipe planning idea based on big data and semantic analysis. He was named ‘emerging entrepreneur of the year’ by Insider Magazine in 2010, and Birmingham Young Personality of the Year (Entrepreneurship) in 2011.
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For those who inhabit the world of Linked Data and the Semantic Web, yesterday was a big news day. Talis Systems Ltd announced that it would be winding down its generic Linked Data and Semantic Web activities, including the consulting business and the Kasabi data marketplace. The news is well covered on semanticweb.com and information-age.com. Inevitably there was a degree of fallout across social media, with some reporting the news as Talis abandoning Linked Data and the Semantic Web. This isn’t really the case. Let’s look at why, and what the future holds for Linked Data and Semantic Web ideas and technologies at Talis.

In summary this is a story about horizontal and vertical. Talis Group has pursued both for some years, the former through the generic Linked Data consulting and hosting services of Talis Systems, and the latter through Talis Education — home of the Talis Aspire SaaS application for universities, which I wrote about in the Linked Data Book as an exemplar of a native read/write Linked Data application. The product is currently sold to one third of UK universities, creating a user base of up to 750,000 academics and students.
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While noting some of the many successes they have had over the years, Dodds acknowledged “…there is a limit to how much one small organisation can achieve. In our view, the commercial realities for Linked Data technologies and skills whilst growing is still doing so at a very slow rate, too slow for us to sustain our current levels of investment.”

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Andraz Tori is the Owner and Chief Technology Officer at Zemanta, a tool that uses natural language processing (NLP) to extract entities within the text of a blog and enrich it with related media and articles from Zemanta’s broad user base.    This interview was conducted for Part 3 of the series “Dynamic Semantic Publishing for Beginners.”

Q. Although the term “Dynamic Semantic Publishing” appears to have come out of the BBC’s coverage of the 2010 World Cup, it looks as though Zemanta has been applying many of the same principles on behalf of smaller publishers since 2008.  Would you characterize it this way, or do you think that Zemanta is a more limited service with specific and targeted uses, while the platform built by BBC is its own semantic ecosystem?  How broadly should we define Dynamic Semantic Publishing?

A. What Zemanta does is empower the writer through semantic technologies. It’s like having an exoskeleton that gives you superpowers as an author. But Zemanta does not affect the post after it was written.   On the other hand dynamic semantic publishing is based on the premise of bringing together web pages piece-meal from a semantic database, usually in real time.

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I sat down with YarcData President Arvind Parthasarathi during the Semantic Technology & Business Conference in San Francisco, to get an update on YarcData and to hear why the company is investing $100,000 in prizes for a new ‘Big Data Graph Analytics Challenge.’ continued…

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If you would like your company to be considered for an interview please email editor[ at ]semanticweb[ dot ]com.]

Pingar Interview:

Alyona Medelyan ( @zelandiya ) joined Pingar ( @PingarHQ ) in 2010 and is the chief research officer at Pingar. She has a PhD in Natural Language Processing that was completed at the University of Waikato and funded by Google. Her expertise areas are Keywords and Entity Extraction, as well as Wikipedia Mining.

In this interview we find out more about Pingar’s research, their products, and the clients they work with.

Sean: Hi Alyona. Thanks for speaking with us today.  When was Pingar founded and can you explain a little bit about what Pingar does?

Alyona: Pingar was founded in 2007 and in the past 5 years we have developed innovative software for document management and text analytics. I joined the company in 2010 and have been focusing more specifically on automated metadata assignment by adding keyword extraction, named entity recognition and taxonomy mapping capabilities.

Sean: What techniques do you use for keyword extraction and named entity recognition? Are you using any existing databases to aide with entity recognition?

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We are pleased to announce that FluidOps has created a viewer for the SemTechBiz conference program in Information Workbench.  The viewer is a good example of a faceted, semantic viewer for the conference program data, including map, timeline, and graph views, and tying in data from disparate sources such as Facebook, Twitter, and the conference program itself.

You can view this event browser here:
http://conference-explorer.fluidops.net/resource/semtech:semtech-SF-2012

Of course, we have the conference agenda-at-a-glance here, and will make the program available to conference attendees via the Guidebook app for mobile devices, but this is an interesting example of Semantic Technology at work in a human-friendly user interface.

Thanks to Peter Haase and the FluidOps team for this work!

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fluid Operations’ Information Workbench is part of the semantic infrastructure supporting the BBC’s revolutionary coverage of the 2012 Olympic Games.  Below is a conversation with fluid Operations Senior Architect for Research & Development Michael Schmidt

Q. Is the Information Workbench a response to the need for more robust applications to help process “Big Data”? How is it different than other popular tools?

A. Dealing with Big Data involves a number of different challenges, including increasing volume (amount of data), complexity (of schemas and structures), and variety (range of data types, sources).

However, most Big Data solutions available on the market today focus on volume only, in particular supporting vertical scalability (greater operating capacity, efficiency, and speed.)   This means that such solutions mainly address the analysis of large volumes of similarly structured data sets. Yet the Big Data problem is not fully solved only by technologies that help you process similarly structured data more quickly and efficiently.

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Paul Wilton was Technical and development lead for semantic publishing at BBC News and Sport Online during the 2010 World Cup.  Currently he is the Technical architect at Ontoba.  In this interview, a supplement to “Dynamic Semantic Publishing for Beginners”, Paul describes the current landscape for DSP as it applies to news organizations.

Q. Are you seeing a wide disparity in the way that news organizations have approached the creation and use of semantically-linked (or annotated) content?

A. Actually the pattern and often the (general) technical architecture is surprisingly similar. Where things differ are the applications, models used and instance data. This is undoubtedly bleeding edge technology, and typically the impetus to begin investigating the use of linked data, RDF and semantics in the technology stack has come from within the Information Architecture and R&D teams, not from the offices of the CTO/CIO. Maybe this is starting to change now.

Q. Do many news organizations have the resources (staff and/or Content Management Systems) that are able to publish and use semantic data?

A. Not in our experience, but this shouldn’t be a barrier to integrating semantic technologies and publishing linked data.

The key components to adopting semantic publishing – a semantic repository (triple store); appropriate linked data sets; and the ability to semantically annotate your content – can be built alongside an existing Content Management System. continued…

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