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.” 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 !

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.” Read more

[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.” Read more

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.” Read more

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.” Read more

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.” Read more

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.” Read more

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.” Read more

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.” Read more

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