Mark Ballard has commented on the UK’s Department of Business, Innovation and Skills’ recent action to dissolve the Public Data Corporation “while its confused policy Cabinet joint Office initiative team works out how to make open data workable. The Cabinet Office rushed out a revamped Open Data strategy on 29 November, ‘delivering on its commitment to establish a Public Data Corporation’. BIS had already established the Public Data Corporation as a private company on 11 November 2010. But the company had laid dormant for a year while the departments and the Local Public Data Panel worked out how to get an HM data-set free-for-all round the vast bellies of such comfortable institutions as the Ordnance Survey, Land Registry and Met Office.” Read more

Join us in June at Semantic Tech & Business Conference - San Francisco

Join us at Semantic Tech & Business Conference, June 3-7 in San Francisco, for complete coverage of Big Data, Linked Data, Extreme Information Management, and Semantic Web. From breakthrough approaches to solving business problems to the big data implications of fast–evolving technologies, SemTechBiz provides you with an unparalleled interactive experience and delivers tangible business value. Early bird prices are available. Sign up now and save!

Monster has signed a $20 million deal with the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) in the United Kingdom. Under the deal, Monster will provided “managed online vacancy listing, filling and automated job matching service”, Monster.co.uk announced on its site today.” Monster CEO Sal Iannuzzi commented, “In Europe we are optimistic about building a meaningful business with European governments. Last year, we started an effort to expand out successful U.S. government business on a global basis. Just this week we completed a major new contract with the DWP valued in excess of $20 million. This is an important, initial accomplishment in developing a global government business.” Read more

James Hendler was recently interviewed regarding the state of the World Wide Web and advances in semantic technology. Asked about the proliferation of the web, Hendler commented, “The Web is changing very fast and it has a very rapid effect on our economy. Consider something like aeroplanes which, as a subject, has been studied all along. On the contrary, the Web has happened so fast and hit so many places that we never really had time to understand it. Many of the periodical works on the Web are being done on the data collected in 1999. In 1999 Facebook didn’t exist. Twitter didn’t exist. A lot of people study Twitter. But again that is just one thing. Wikipedia has been successful, while most ‘wikis’ have failed. Online, we are now discovering the power of the (individual’s) voice and governments do not know how to deal with it.” Read more

The White House’s Open Government Initiative has published a toolkit of twenty resources for open data innovators. According to the toolkit website, “President Obama emphasizes a ‘bottom-up’ philosophy that taps citizen expertise to make government smarter and more responsive to private sector demands. This philosophy of ‘open innovation’ has already delivered tangible results in public and regulated sectors of the economy – areas like health IT, learning technologies, and smart grid – that are poised to deliver productivity growth and grow the jobs of the future.” Read more

A new report from the Institute for Global Futures, Global Futures Forecast 2012, lays out the top trends that it believes will shape the coming year. It’s looking ahead to a future that it says may be characterized by complex trends, accelerated change, hyper-competition, disruption, innovation and uncertainty, and that will demand a new way of operating.

It recommends continuing investment in innovation in the U.S., as that is the central driver of US and global competitive advantage, and a requirement for achieving more stable growth. And it advises that organizations’ leaders need to do a better job becoming long-range thinkers given that the accelerated pace of change means that the future is coming at us faster than ever before, and with change comes risk.

What do such things have to do with the Semantic Web and semantic technologies? Apparently, quite a lot.

Read more

The Open Knowledge Foundation’s CKAN software has been chosen to power the European Commission’s new open data portal. The article reports, “The European Commission (EC) has awarded a contract to create an open data portal website, where data produced by European Commission services will be freely available. Belgian company TenForce will lead the project to deliver the portal, supported by Leipzig University’s Institute for Applied Computer Science (InfAI), and UK-based non-profit the Open Knowledge Foundation. Users will be able to search for information in a flexible range of ways, for example by subject area, country, and region, and to visualise the data or download it for re-use in research, campaigns or commercial applications. The EC and the contracted partners will run workshops and other outreach activities, to raise awareness of and interest in the data among companies, researchers, journalists and policy groups.” Read more

How do you define a forest? How about deforestation? It sounds like it would be fairly easy to get agreement on those terms. But beyond the basics – that a definition for the first would reflect that a forest is a place with lots of trees and the second would reflect that it’s a place where there used to be lots of trees – it’s not so simple.

And that has consequences for everything from academic and scientific research to government programs. As explained by Krzysztof Janowicz,  perfectly valid definitions for these and other geographic terms exist by the hundreds, in legal texts and government documents and elsewhere, and most of them don’t agree with each other. So, how can one draw good conclusions or make important decisions when the data informing those is all over the map, so to speak.

“You cannot ask to show me a map of the forests in North America because the definition of forest differs between not just the U.S. and Canada but also between U.S. member states,” says Janowicz, Assistant Professor for geographic information science at UC Santa Barbara who’s one of the organizers of this week’s GeoVoCamp focusing on geo-ontology design patterns and bottom-up, data-driven semantics.

Read more

Digital Reasoning, developers of the Synthesys platform for discovering the meaning in unstructured data at scale, has on the roadmap exposing to and packaging up for its customers a simplified version of its internal technology for teaching the system new grammatical structures so that it can quickly understand custom or otherwise specific data sets.

The company has quickly added support for new languages such as Arabic, traditional and simplified Chinese, Farsi and Urdu (with more languages on the way) to Synthesys using the tool. The tool gets the software up to speed on each one in just a few weeks by teaching it the grammatical structure and then letting it go off and figure out what the words mean for its work of transforming unstructured (and structured) data into the underlying facts, entities, relationships, and associated terms.

“In the same way we teach it languages you may have a data set that is highly scientific, for example, and this tool essentially makes it easier for our customers to make Synthesys even more accurate for that specific set of data,” says Dave Danielson, VP of marketing.

Read more

Andy Oram recently commented on Massachusetts’ newest open government venture, Open Checkbook. Oram writes, “On December 5, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick joined with state treasurer Steven Grossman to create an open government initiative with the promising moniker Open Checkbook. The site launched to some acclaim and has received over 220,000 hits. I decided to take a look at what’s offered and what’s missing from this site, and to ask someone in the government here in Massachusetts to describe their thinking in creating the site. The results can give us some insight into the effort it takes at each stage to release government data–and even more significantly, what it takes to increase the data’s value.” Read more

Editor’s Update Jan. 19: DBpedia, Wikipedia and company are all back online, while some lawmakers have taken their support for SOPA and PIPA offline. Republican Senators Roy Blunt and Marco Rubio have withdrawn their support for the Protect IP Act, and Representative Lee Terry (R-Neb.), an original co-sponsor of SOPA, also has asked to have his name removed from the bill.

 

It’s Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) day. At 8 a.m. EST  OpenLink Software began a 12-hour blackout of the following sites it controls in support of Wikipedia, Reddit and others spearheading the online protest against the legislation:

• http://dbpedia.org
• http://dbpedia-live.openlinksw.com
• http://lod.openlinksw.com
• http://uriburner.com

Founder and CEO of OpenLink Software Kingsley Idehen yesterday directed interested parties to a Linked Data-driven poll for the opportunity to vote on taking this step, and the ayes, so to speak, had it.

Turn to any of the above sites and you’ll see:

Read more