Industry News

Jenn Webb of O’Reilly recently interviewed Laura Dawson regarding metadata in the publishing industry. Webb writes, “Dawson says publishers are starting to understand that metadata is the only indication that an ebook exists (discussed at 0:10), but they still don’t quite know what “metadata” means or exactly how to fit it into a production process. She says publishers are tending to assign one person the duty of handling metadata and aren’t grasping that it’s integral to every department and stage in a workflow.” Read more

Sharif Sakr of Engadget reports that Google has started to peek-a-boo it’s evolving semantic search capabilities. Sakr writes, “So, Google wasn’t merry-dancing when it promised to update its search engine with new ‘semantic’ algorithms. One of our readers sent in the screen grab above, which shows what happens when they search for ‘Howard Carter.’ In addition to all the regular links, there’s a box on the right that seems to be distinctly aware of who that poor fellow was (er, happy birthday old bean).” Read more

Silk is launching in open beta today (May 10). The service for applying semantics to create more powerful web sites, which we last discussed here, moves out of a private beta stage that the company says saw more than 10,000 users.

“A lot of the sites during the private beta were, well… private, so we can’t go into details about those,” says Sander Koppelaar, head of operations. Countries of the World, with all United Nations member state information, is one public Silk-powered demo web site for those who’d like to explore one. Generally speaking, he says there’s been a wide variety of use cases, ranging from professional publishers and data journalists to businesses and even personal use. “Publishers have used Silk to interpret data sets such as deadly traffic accidents, house sales and MBA rankings.

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Kerstin Forsberg has written an article discussing a presentation she and Frederik Malfait gave regarding the use of semantic models for CDISC-based standard and metadata management, pointing to case studies at AstraZeneca and Roche. She writes, “In AstraZeneca we have a new program called Integrative Informatics (i2) establishing the components required to let a linked data cloud grow across R&D. A key component is the URI policy for how to make for example a Clinical Study linkable by giving it a URI, that is a Uniform Resource Identifier, e.g. http://research.data.astrazeneca.com/id/clinicalstudy/D5890C00003. Read more

Today, May 9, 2012 is Global Accessibility Awareness Day (#GAAD). What started with a simple blog-post by Los Angeles Web Developer, Joe Devon, has grown to include events around the world designed to increase awareness about web accessibility issues. To read more about the day and these various activities, see the official GAAD Website and Facebook page.

According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Today, about 50 million Americans, or 1 in 5 people, are living with at least one disability, and most Americans will experience a disability some time during the course of their lives.” In other parts of the world, this number may be significantly higher.

In the interest of full disclosure, Joe Devon is a personal friend of mine, and I must admit that if he were not, I likely wouldn’t have seen his blog post or explored the issues of accessibility as deeply as I have in recent weeks. But I have been exploring, and I’ve been surprised at what I’ve found. In my opinion, Semantic Technology and Assistive Technology are a natural fit for one another, but there seems to be very little discussion or work around the intersection of the two. I have looked, but have not found much collaboration between the two communities. I have also found few individuals who possess much knowledge about both Semantic Tech and Assistive Tech. Of course, if I’ve missed something, please let me know in the comments!

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Andreas Blumauer of the Semantic Web Company reports, “PoolParty PowerTagging (PPP) is on its way: By extending Confluence’s label management, new application scenarios which make use of content recommendation and semantic indexing will be supported soon. PPP will be published at this year’s Atlassian Summit and at SemTechBiz in San Francisco at the beginning of June.”

Blumauer continues, “Tagging is still not a very popular task, especially in corporate environments. Read more

For Web Developers who have been looking for resources devoted to adding Linked Data to HTML, there’s a new site available today: RDFa.info. Visitors are greeted with the following headline, “RDFa is an extension to HTML5 that helps you markup things like People, Places, Events, Recipes and Reviews. Search Engines and Web Services use this markup to generate better search listings and give you better visibility on the Web, so that people can find your website more easily.” SemanticWeb.com has covered RDFa’s development and use in the past and we’ve often heard from developers that they were looking for such a starting place.

Manu Sporny

Led by members of the RDFa Community, RDFa.info provides information and resources aimed at dispelling the myth that RDFa is difficult to implement. SemanticWeb.com caught up with Manu Sporny, one of the creators of the site, to learn more about its goals and resources: “One of the misconceptions that RDFa has, is being seen as a very programmer-centric extension to HTML. This misconception is unfortunate because it was built for Web developers, and with the right introduction to it, anyone can author RDFa.”

He continued, “We wanted a site that captured and taught the essence of RDFa to Web Developers. We wanted the site to gather a set of documentation and tools that would help web developers not only learn about authoring RDFa, but help them write markup, show them the result of their markup, and point out any issues with their RDFa-enabled web pages.”

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The W3C reports that three RDFa specifications have been proposed as recommendations. The article states, “The RDF Web Applications Working Group has published three Proposed Recommendations for RDFa Core 1.1, RDFa Lite 1.1 and XHTML+RDFa 1.1. Together, these documents outline the vision for RDFa in a variety of XML and HTML-based Web markup languages. RDFa Core 1.1 specifies the core syntax and processing rules for RDFa 1.1 and how the language is intended to be used in XML documents. RDFa Lite 1.1 provides a simple subset of RDFa for novice web authors. XHTML+RDFa 1.1 specifies the usage of RDFa in the XHTML markup language. The group also published a draft of the RDFa 1.1 Primer today.” Read more

First Retail has been named a “Cool Vendor in Analytics and Business Intelligence by Gartner: “The report, issued on April 27, 2012, highlights five vendors selected by Gartner for their solutions in the analytics and business intelligence market.” The report states, “Selecting Cool Vendors in the analytics market this year was difficult. New providers of analytic solutions abound, especially in the popular areas of mobile, social, cloud and big data. We, as an industry, are building silos of analysis that will eventually have to be integrated, but the benefit of specialized analysis for problems that have not been addressed before outweighs most organizations’ needs for a holistic view, at least for now.” Read more

Google reports that the company’s news service, Google News “is undergoing a makeover and will now include content from the firm’s new social network. Google News, which has only gone live in the U.S. to date, will see Google+ conversations from people’s ‘circles’ and other high profile users right onto the search engine’s news homepage. In a blog post about the changes, Scott Zuccarino, product manager of Google News, said the feature brings Google+ conversations right to the Google News homepage. ‘Many news stories inspire vibrant discussions on Google+, and today we’re starting to add this content to both the News homepage, and the real-time coverage pages,’ Zuccarino wrote.” Read more