Attend the upcoming SemTech session that’s dubbed Using Semantic Technologies to Deliver Industrial Strength Healthcare Benefits Administration, and you’ll hear about how semantics- and model-driven computing is the future – and how it’s a future that’s already gotten underway at The Central Administrative Agency of the Netherlands (CAK).

First, a little bit about the bigger picture.  “What can happen when you go all the way to semantic, model-driven, knowledge computing [is that] … it changes the game for development,” says Mills Davis, managing director of Project 10X and one of the session’s presenters. “It enables new categories of capabilities and levels of user experience (think SIRI for the rest of us). It brings about quantum changes in all stages of lifecycle value. It enables cost-effective strategy-driven approaches to enterprise transformation. This last sentence is worth some reflection.”

Read more

SemTechBiz is Less Than 2 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 !

We are pleased to announce the start-ups that have been selected to participate in the 2012 SemTechBiz “Top Semantic Start-Up” competition. These companies will give demonstrations/pitches before a panel of expert judges at the Semantic Technology and Business Conference June 3-7.

Judges

Our panel of judges includes (Left to Right): Phil Aucutt, CEO, TeamPatent; Mike Dunn, CTO, Hearst Interactive; James Hendler, Professor, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Mark Johnson, CEO, Zite; Chris Shipley, CEO, Guidewire Group (former Executive Director, DEMO Conference)

The Envelope Please!

The companies, presentations, and speakers for the start-up competition are…

Read more

Q: What do Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Yandex, the New York Times, and The Walt Disney Company have in common?

A: schema.org

On June 2, 2011, schema.org was launched with little fanfare, but it quickly received a lot of attention. Now, almost exactly one year later, we have assembled a panel of experts from the organizations listed above to discuss what has happened since and what we have to look forward to as the vocabulary continues to grow and evolve, including up-to-the-minute news and announcements. The panel will take place at the upcoming Semantic Technology and Business Conference in San Francisco.

Moderated by Ivan Herman, the Semantic Web Activity Lead for the World Wide Web Consortium, the panel includes representatives from each of the core search engines involved in schema.org, and two of the largest early implementers: The New York Times and Disney. Among the topics we will discuss will be the value proposition of using schema.org markup, publishing techniques and syntaxes, vocabularies that have been mapped to schema.org, current tools and applications, existing implementations, and a look forward at what is planned and what is needed to encourage adoption and consumption.

Panelists:

	Moderator: Ivan Herman Semantic Web Activity Lead, World Wide Web Consortium		Dan Brickley Contractor, schema.org at Google
	John Giannandrea Director Engineering, Google		Peter Mika Senior Researcher, Yahoo!
	Alexander Shubin Product Manager, Head of Strategic Direction, Yandex		Mike Van Snellenberg Principal Program Manager, Microsoft/Bing
	Evan Sandhaus Semantic Technologist, New York Times Company		Jeffrey W. Preston SEO Manager, Disney Interactive Media Group

These panelists, along with the rest of the more than 120 speakers from SemTechBiz, will be on-hand to answer audience questions and discuss the latest work in Semantic Technologies. You can join the discussion by registering for SemTechBiz – San Francisco today (and save $200 off the onsite price)

 

On Friday, May 11, a group of Semantic Technology 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 about Semantics in the Financial Services Industry, and “the Linkers” were joined by special guest, Lee Feigenbaum, VP Marketing & Technology at Cambridge Semantics. Lee shared insights gained over many years working in the semantic technology field and with numerous customers in the financial services industry.
Read more

The schema.org official blog has announced support for enumerated lists. Adding this support allows developers using schema.org to use selected externally maintained vocabularies in their schema.org markup. According to the W3C-hosted schema.org WebSchemas wiki, “This is in addition to the existing extension mechanisms we support, and the general ability to include whatever markup you like in your pages. The focus here is on external vocabularies which can be thought of as ‘supported’ (or anticipated) in some sense by schema.org.”

In other words, “Schema.org markup uses links into well-known authority lists to clarify which particular instance of a schema.org type (eg. Country) is being mentioned.”

For example, consider a list of countries of the world. A developer could use this URI from Wikipedia to reference the USA or this one from the UN FAO, or this one from GeoNames.

Read more

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.

Read more

[Editor's Note: This guest post is by Tom Reamy, Chief Knowledge Architect and founder of KAPS Group, a group of knowledge architecture, taxonomy, and eLearning consultants. Tom has 20 years of experience in information architecture, intranet management and consulting, and education and training software.  Tom will be presenting a tutorial, Text Analytics for Semantic Applications and moderating a panel, Emotional Semantics - Beyond Sentiment at the upcoming SemTechBiz Conference in San Francisco.]

While sentiment analysis continues to generate a lot of press, it is not clear how much real value organizations are deriving from it.  One reason for that is that the standard approach to sentiment has been mostly statistical and/or long lists of sentiment terms.  However, if you add in other, advanced text analytics capabilities such as auto-categorization using advanced operators, you can not only develop more sophisticated sentiment analysis, you can also develop a whole new class of applications that either enhance and/or go beyond simple sentiment analysis.

These advanced operators include such commands as DEST_6 (count two words as a positive indicator only if they are with 6 words of each other) or SENT (only count words in the same sentence).

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!)

Remember the days before Wikipedia had all the answers? We looked things up in libraries, referring to shelf-filling encyclopaedias. We bought CD-ROMs (remember them?) full of facts and pictures and video clips. We asked people. Sometimes, school home work actually required some work more strenuous than a cut and paste. We went about our business without remembering that New Coke briefly entered our lives on this day in 1985.

Wikipedia is far from perfect, and some of the concern around its role in a wider dumbing down of thought and argument may be justified. But, despite that, it’s a remarkable achievement and a wonderful resource. Those who argued that it would never work have clearly been proven wrong. Carefully maintained processes and the core principle of the neutral point of view mostly serve contributors well.

With Wikimedia Deutschland‘s recent announcement of Wikidata, many of the early concerns about Wikipedia itself have resurfaced once again. Read more

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