The Software & Information Industry Association this year debuted a category for Best Semantic Technology Solution in its 2013 SIIA CODiE Awards. Two products were finalists in the category (see our story here), and yesterday the winner was announced. It was the Luxid Content Enrichment Platform from TEMIS Inc, which is used by publishers to automate the extraction of entities, relationships, concepts and topics from their digital assets, and augment content enrichment and linking.

It won out over finalist Elsevier with its ClinicalKey solution for helping doctors and clinicians search Elsevier’s medical and surgical content smarter and faster. ClinicalKey maps content to Elsevier’s proprietary medical taxonomy, and builds relationships using a semantic framework to faster and more clinically relevant answers. Elsevier, by the way, just ended the voting for its own ClinicalKey Key Innovator Awards, with the prize being a $10,000 grant to a U.S.-based hospital, medical school or institution that has demonstrated the most innovative use of information and technology to save lives and improve patient care.

Read more

Blackberry president and CEO Thorsten Heins with new global creative director Alicia Keys.

The new and long-awaited Blackberry 10 line from Research In Motion (RIM) makes its debut today. The company that once defined the smart phone market has a lot riding on it, and it remains to be seen if the new models debuting today will revive its fortunes. It’s already revived its name: Thorsten Heins, President and CEO, revealed at the launch today that “from this day forward, RIM becomes Blackberry.”

The two models that kick off its re-engineered approach to mobile computing are the Blackberry Q10 with a hybrid touch-screen/keyboard and the Z10 with a full touch-screen and onscreen keyboard, powered by the Blackberry 10 platform. Of the Q10, Heins said, “We built this for all those people who told us, ‘we just have to have a physical keyboard typing experience’.” Given Blackberry users’ well-known attachment to traditional keyboards, getting the onscreen keyboard right is going to be a big concern for tried-and-true Blackberry users.

As on the Blackberry Playbook before it, SwiftKey – the best-selling Android app of 2012— is reportedly behind the virtual keyboard technology on the new models. Though that vendor wasn’t named in the launch presentation during the demo of the touch-screen keyboard capabilities, the features Blackberry demonstrated pointed to the company’s leveraging the cross-platform SwiftKey software development kit for at least some of the new devices’ capabilities.

And what’s behind SwiftKey is natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning technology to speed up touch-screen typing.

Read more

When Don Thorson and Charlie Constantini looked at the social graph – some 1 billlion connected people all sharing information at an incredibly fast pace – they saw a problem, and an opportunity. Data extraction wasn’t playing as big a role in the picture as it could, so the possibility that all those connected users out there could actually be gaining knowledge proportional to the size of the social network wasn’t being realized. How to return more value to end users? Thorson, whose career has spanned the video game, computer, Internet and communications industries and companies including Atari, Apple, Netscape, and Ribbit, says there had to be a way to “unlock what the world thinks about everything with the optimistic view that all of us are smarter than any of us.”

So was Swipp born. The startup – co-founded by CEO Thorson, Chief Swipp officer Constantini, and CTO Ramani “Nara” Narayan (both also Ribbit veterans) – and its new social intelligence platform launched yesterday. Its aim is to extract the wisdom of the crowd in a global, aggregated way with a solid data structure foundation as its starting point. Swipp’s effort to merge the worlds of social tools and knowledge tools is based on organizing data around terms or topics in what Thorson calls a “pure data” approach – not an interpreted or extracted one – allowing for data to be aggregated, displayed, and archived around a specific person, place, or thing.

So, when a consumer “swipps” – enters a topic via the web or a mobile device, adds a comment about it, and scores it so that their rating becomes part of the Swipp Index (its stock index of social intelligence) – he or she gets what Constantini calls a “one-two punch of what the world is saying and the truth.” That is, you get to see what people are saying socially about that exact topic, and the Index, which is the combined social data for each topic that can be sorted by geography, time, gender, and age. For the reference knowledge and the context behind millions of topics, Swipp leverages Freebase and its entity graph of people, places and things.

Read more

Gregory Ferenstein recently shared his opinion on Google, semantic search, and the future of competition on the internet. He writes, “In a 2005 interview, Eric Schmidt said that, ideally, a Google search should yield only a single, perfect result. ‘When you use Google, do you get more than one answer? Of course you do,’ he told public television host Charlie Rose at the time. ‘Well, that’s a bug. We should be able to give you the right answer just once. We should know what you meant. You should look for information. We should get it exactly right.’ Fast forward to Thursday, when the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) ended its two-year antitrust investigation into the search giant. The FTC found that, contrary to claims made by Google’s detractors, there was not sufficient evidence to show Google unfairly prioritized its own products in search results over those belonging to companies that offer competing services.” Read more

The BBC has posted a new video discussing the Internet’s next frontier, particularly the Internet of Things. According to the description of the video, “In its early days the internet was seen simply as a way of transferring data across large distances but it is now playing an ever increasing part in our lives. David Reid reports on what is seen as the next big frontier for the web – called the internet of things – allowing you to use your smartphone to control your home heating, pay for parking and even monitor your own fitness.” Read more

…and make it machine readable. Jason Miller of Federal News Radio reports, “White House technology leaders are close to issuing a new policy that will change the way agencies release data to the public. Todd Park, the federal chief technology officer, said Friday the new policy is one of several steps to spur the release of more data from agencies. ‘We are going to continue to enlist additional federal agencies in the open data initiatives program as fast track liberators of key existing data sets that could create large scale economics benefit while protecting privacy,’ Park said at the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology meeting in Washington. ‘We also, as per the recently announced Digital Government Strategy just this past summer, with OMB will be releasing policy soon that makes open and computer readable the default status of new data created by the government going forward’.” Read more

Karen Coyle recently analyzed a new release of OCLC metadata records. She writes, “OCLC recently released a file of 1.2 million metadata records for the most widely held items in its catalog. These are all items with 250 library holdings or more. I created a list on WorldCat of the top 50, mostly out of curiosity. I was quite surprised at the results, however. Here’s how it breaks down: 16 periodicals, with Time and Newsweek being numbers 1 and 2, respectively; 29 kid and YA books, four of which (and very high even in this small list) from the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series; 5 adult books.”

Coyle goes on, “The five adult books are: (1) McCullough, D. G. (1992). Truman. New York: Simon & Schuster. (2) Brown, D. (2003). The Da Vinci code: A novel. New York: Doubleday. (3) Johnson, S. (1998). Who moved my cheese?: An a-mazing way to deal with change in your work and in your life. New York: Putnam.  (4) Haley, A. (1976). Roots. Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday.  (5) Peters, T. J., & Waterman, R. H. (1982). In search of excellence: Lessons from America’s best-run companies. New York: Harper & Row. This small set gives me many ideas of things to investigate in the full set.”

Read more here.

Image: Courtesy OCLC

Aron Kramer of The Guardian recently predicted long-term changes to the world that will occur in 2013. He writes, “A healthy dose of scepticism is in order whenever one attempts to foresee the future. Events usually make great sense in retrospect, but are difficult to predict at the time. The daily hum of headlines, breaking news and Twitterfeeds may distract us from the underlying changes taking place. With this in mind, the best way to think about 2013 is to consider the long-term changes that are reshaping our world – some with visible effect, and some under the radar.” Read more

Rachel Haot of the Open Gov Partnership reports, “From hackathons to social media, open government is transforming the way that Mayor Bloomberg’s administration and New York City government serve the public. And there has been no greater testament to open government’s potential than the strategy and innovation in action during Hurricane Sandy. Learning from our experience during Hurricane Irene, in the days leading up to Hurricane Sandy’s landfall in New York City, government technologists reached out to the data science community to share recently updated hurricane evacuation zone maps based on up-to-the-minute flooding projections.” Read more

Ken Yeung of TheNextWeb reports, “Finding ways to keep track of what’s happening in the world and in various markets can be pretty difficult, especially on mobile devices. People are interested in seeking out new ways to allow them to get information that’s relevant and important to them. Apps to help with this problem include Flipboard, a popular social news aggregator that has helped to change the way people consume content, Zite, Cir.ca, and Summly. Now, Clipped is seeking to take its place as one of those services and has launched its iOS and Android apps to help optimize the way people consume the news on their mobile devices. An alumni of the Teens in Tech incubator, Clipped says that it delivers top news content in the form of bullet point summaries that it believes will ‘save users time and energy.’ Its app also includes a summarized search engine that allows users to ‘read summaries about exactly what they want’.” Read more