Industry News - semanticweb.com

Bloomberg LP Acquires PolarLake

Angela Guess — Thu, 24 May 2012 16:30:49 +0000

Bloomberg LP has acquired Dublin-based semantic software provider PolarLake and launched a new enterprise data management service. According to the article, “Bloomberg’s new EDM unit, with the addition of PolarLake, will allow firms to increase their efficiency by better managing high volumes of data from multiple sources, either third parties or proprietary sources. ‘The PolarLake purchase is a strong signal to the marketplace that Bloomberg intends to be a leader in the enterprise data management business,’ said Thomas Secunda, Bloomberg Co-Founder and Global Head of Bloomberg’s Financial Products and Services.” continued…

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The Semantic Evolution of Talis

Angela Guess — Thu, 24 May 2012 13:00:21 +0000

Hal Hodson recently covered the “semantic evolution” of Talis culminating in Kasabi. He writes, “In 1969, a group of libraries in Birmingham decided they needed to become more efficient. Calling themselves the Birmingham Libraries Cooperative Mechanisation Project (BLCMP), the group built a centralised database of ‘machine-readable’ bibliographic records, first using microfilm to store book data then, from 1982, using IBM mainframes with terminals at each library. BLCMP went on to become Talis, named after its integrated library system, and for many years it was leader in the automated library management software market. But that is a mature market, and last year Talis divested its library division to focus on the company’s other passion: semantic technology.” continued…

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IBM and the Linked Data Platform Working Group

Angela Guess — Thu, 24 May 2012 10:08:11 +0000

[Editor's Note: SemanticWeb.com was a co-sponsor of the Linked Data Platform proposal that led to the creation of the Linked Data Platform Working Group discussed here.]

Ian Jacobs reports, “Shortly after W3C announced the launch of the Linked Data Platform Working Group, I spoke with Arnaud Le Hors about IBM’s interest in linked data and their decision to co-chair the Working Group.” Asked why IBM became involved with organizing the Linked Enterprise Data Patterns Workshop and the Linked Data Platform Working Group, Le Hors responded, “IBM has been involved in Semantic Web activities from the beginning, but primarily from a research perspective. Until recently we had no products using the technology. Now we have IBM Rational, which develops a set of tools for application and product lifecycle management (requirements, bugs, etc.). Other parts of IBM are actively exploring it for complementary purposes. Customers typically use tools from more than one vendor and require integration; this is a problem IBM addresses.” continued…

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OKF Launches School of Data

Angela Guess — Wed, 23 May 2012 16:30:11 +0000

Laura Newman of the Open Knowledge Foundation reports, “Earlier this year, we announced plans to launch the School of Data. Thanks to the generous support of Open Society Foundations and the Shuttleworth Foundation, we’re now ready to go! We’re holding a kick-off sprint next week, and we invite you to get involved. The School of Data is led by the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN) and Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU). The School will provide online training for data ‘wrangling’ skills – the ability to find, retrieve, clean, manipulate, analyze, and represent different types of data.” continued…

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Ambitious Plans for the Open Data Institute

Angela Guess — Wed, 23 May 2012 11:05:10 +0000

Olivia Solon reports that Professor Nigel Shadbolt has shared an outline of the plan for the UK’s Open Data Institute. She writes, “Shadbolt told Wired.co.uk: ‘Open data is not just about transparency and accountability; there is potential for economic innovation and value to come from it.’ The Institute’s remit is fairly broad, but will primarily focus on helping private and public organisations understand how to make the most of open data. It will not actually store any data itself, but it will provide business incubation for startups, providing mentoring, advice and potentially space. Shadbolt says that the aim is to cultivate and incubate 12 companies a year.” continued…

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New UMBEL Release Supports schema.org, GeoNames

Angela Guess — Tue, 22 May 2012 18:00:17 +0000

Mike Bergman reports that the latest UMBEL release includes schema.org and GeoNames support. He writes, “We are pleased to announce the release of version 1.05 of UMBEL, which now has linkages to schema.org and GeoNames . UMBEL has also been split into ‘core’ and ‘geo’ modules. The resulting smaller size of UMBEL ‘core’ — now some 26,000 reference concepts — has also enabled us to create a full visualization of UMBEL’s content graph.” continued…

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Facebook Gets Some Karma (in an App)

Angela Guess — Tue, 22 May 2012 16:30:39 +0000

Facebook is buying Karma, a social gifting app that we have covered before. According to Om Malik of GigaOM, “The news was released via Karma’s blog. As we first posted, Karma was founded by Lee Linden and Ben Lewis who in their past life were co-founders of Tapjoy, that was acquired by Offerpal Media after reaching more than $100 million in revenue. Investors in Karma include Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Sequoia Capital, and Evan Williams and Biz Stone’s Obvious Corp.” A Facebook spokesperson commented, “We’ve been really impressed with the Karma team and all they accomplished in such a short time. This acquisition combines Karma’s passion and innovative mobile app with Facebook’s platform to help people connect and share in new and meaningful ways.” continued…

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Data.gov Celebrates Third Anniversary

Angela Guess — Tue, 22 May 2012 15:32:37 +0000

Today Data.gov celebrates its third anniversary. An announcement on the site noted, “The first national open data site, Data.gov led the way in opening government data around the world. Now 30 countries host open data sites and they are key tools in the global open government movement. Growing from 47 datasets in 2009 to nearly 450,000 datasets today, Data.gov reaches across 172 federal agencies to bring data to innovators, developers, analysts and citizens across the nation. The data shows up in smart phone apps, websites, and information that lets people buy smarter, use energy more efficiently, and find better health-care solutions each day.” continued…

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Bridging Words and Meaning at Google

Angela Guess — Tue, 22 May 2012 11:00:27 +0000

Valentin Spitkovsky and Peter Norvig of the Google Research Team have posted an article about their new paper on dictionaries for linking text, entities, and ideas. They write, “Human language is both rich and ambiguous. When we hear or read words, we resolve meanings to mental representations, for example recognizing and linking names to the intended persons, locations or organizations. Bridging words and meaning — from turning search queries into relevant results to suggesting targeted keywords for advertisers — is also Google’s core competency, and important for many other tasks in information retrieval and natural language processing. We are happy to release a resource, spanning 7,560,141 concepts and 175,100,788 unique text strings, that we hope will help everyone working in these areas.” continued…

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“Top Semantic Start-Up” Contenders Announced!

Eric Franzon — Tue, 22 May 2012 09:00:32 +0000

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…

continued…

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New Report: Sharing and the Semantic Web

Angela Guess — Mon, 21 May 2012 18:00:07 +0000

A recent report asked the question, is the future of sharing the Semantic Web? The abstract states, “Current information sharing is based mostly on using so-called Web 1.0 search tools and Web 2.0 tools such as social media to collect and display data and information on the Web and make it easier for people to access. The next generation of Web technologies — collectively called the Semantic Web — will move sharing into the era of Web 3.0.”

It goes on, “Semantic Web technologies are already used in government sites such as Data.gov and Recovery.gov, which are part of the Obama administration’s push for open government. continued…

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The Future of Siri

Angela Guess — Mon, 21 May 2012 16:30:41 +0000

Christian Zibreg recently reported on the future of Siri and how the service intends to become even more personalized. Zibreg writes, “Digital secretary Siri was, and still is, the headline feature of the iPhone 4S. It owes some of its allure to the vast processing power of Apple’s servers that run a remarkably sophisticated voice recognition software licensed from Nuance, a Burlington, Massachusetts-based provider of arguably the best voice technology money can buy. According to Nuance’s marketing honcho, you can bet on Siri to improve over time.”

He continues, “Upcoming developments in personal assistants will enable new stuff, such as more accurate voice recognition and personalization. So yeah, eventually you’ll be able to ask Siri ‘Is my favourite movie on tonight?’ continued…

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Expert Schema.org Panel Finalized for #SemTechBiz San Francisco Program

Eric Franzon — Mon, 21 May 2012 14:42:58 +0000

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)

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Start Up Treum Makes Sense of Social Media Data

Angela Guess — Mon, 21 May 2012 11:00:41 +0000

Andy Tebay of The Next Web recently reported on Treum, a Korean company that is cutting through the noise to find value from social media data. Tebay writes, “A major challenge, when trying to do market research or analyze social media trends, is the massive amount of information you have to sort through. Korean startup Treum is a social intelligence company which specializes in providing high-profile companies with solutions for analyzing various elements of social media. This information can then be used to improve marketing, customer relations and more.” continued…

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MarkLogic Names Gary Bloom CEO

Angela Guess — Fri, 18 May 2012 16:30:05 +0000

MarkLogic has a new CEO. According to the company, “Gary Bloom, a proven technology executive who was most recently the CEO and president at eMeter, has been named president and chief executive officer. Gary brings an exceptional background that includes more than two decades of successful leadership in enterprise software. He was the CEO and president at eMeter, which provides smart grid management software for electric, gas, and water utilities. eMeter was recently acquired by Siemens Corporation. Prior to that, Gary was a consultant of TPG, a leading global private investment firm.” continued…

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