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. 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 !

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?’ Read more

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)

 

Oleg Shilovitsky, CEO of Inforbix and speaker at next month’s SemTechBiz Conference, has written a new article discussing the move to intelligent data. He writes, “I think the word ‘intelligent’ adds a special panache to most anything. It imparts a refreshing ‘smell’ that evokes the impression that something ‘smart’ is involved.  So a move from ‘dumb’ to ‘intelligent’ must be a good move, right? Jos Voskuil would answer ‘yes’ when it comes to moving data towards something more intelligent.”

Shilovitsky quotes a recent post by Voskuil regarding dumb data: “Here it was even more a key point of the discussion that most of the legacy data is stored in dumb documents. And the main reason dumb documents are used is because the data needs to be available during the long lifecycle of the the plant, application independent if possible. So in the previous century this was paper, later scanned documents (TIFF – PDF) and currently mainly PDF. Most of the data now is digital but where is the intelligence?” Read more

3M has opened up the 3M Healthcare Data Dictionary under an agreement with the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs. According to the article, “The 3M Healthcare Data Dictionary will provide the core technology to enable semantic interoperability for the joint DoD/VA integrated Electronic Health Record (iEHR), making it possible to share medical knowledge and secure patient data between care providers at U.S. military treatment facilities located around the world and VA Medical Centers. Access to actionable clinical information whenever and wherever care is delivered will enable safer, better coordinated, and higher quality care for the country’s 32 million veterans, active service members, and their families.” Read more

Kapow Software has partnered with Informatica to provide Big Data solutions. According to the companies, “The partnership introduces Informatica PowerExchange for Kapow Katalyst which will be made available as part of Informatica 9.5 announced at the Informatica World 2012 user conference this week. Informatica PowerExchange for Kapow Katalyst harnesses the power of web, cloud applications and social media, and enables IT to quickly access and extract relevant information from the long tail of disparate data sources.” Read more

Sean Creeley of Embedly recently commented on the rise of Facebook’s Open Graph: “42% of all URLs that Embedly processes have one or more Open Graph tags. If you aren’t familiar with Open Graph, it’s the semantic metadata that Facebook introduced in 2010. Initially, it could only provide the title, image, and description for links and a few other objects, but it’s been extended to power pretty much every third-party application in the stream. Yes, the special sauce that allowed Viddy and SocialCam to amass millions of users in days is Open Graph.” Read more

Semantic technology is scoring more goals in the sports world. The BBC, for example, which created the FIFA World Cup 2010 website that leveraged semantic technology, is at it again as London prepares for the 2012 Summer Olympics. Brazil has gotten into the action, too, with an Internet portal there taking soccer to the semantic web set. At the upcoming SemTech conference in San Francisco, attendees will have an opportunity to hear the latest details about both efforts.

Over at the BBC, for example, the 2012 Olympics site accompanies a completely redesigned BBC Sports site, both based on technology including Fluid Operations’ Information Workbench to support the editorial process for the BBC’s Dynamic Semantic Publishing strategy, from authoring and curation to publishing of ontology and instance data following an editorial workflow. The BBC environment since the World Cup also has been updated to use the MarkLogic document store for managing rapidly changing statistics, navigation and ultimately all content objects, as lead architect Jem Rayfield described it in this blog posting. Today, the triple store that’s been behind the BBC’s past work is extended to cover every team, athlete, venue, discipline, country and so on, Rayfield told The Semantic Web Blog.

Read more

This morning Google announced the Knowledge Graph, which “enables you to search for things, people or places that Google knows about—landmarks, celebrities, cities, sports teams, buildings, geographical features, movies, celestial objects, works of art and more—and instantly get information that’s relevant to your query. This is a critical first step towards building the next generation of search, which taps into the collective intelligence of the web and understands the world a bit more like people do.” Read more

A new article reports, “After months of gratuitous hard work and cooperation by higher education students and experts, the Spanish version of DBpedia, also known as the Spanish Semantic Wikipedia, has finally come into being. The Spanish DBpedia contains 70 million data that account for 80% of the information in the Spanish Wikipedia and now rivals other languages like English or French… DBpedia is a project for extracting Wikipedia data and building a semantic version of this Internet encyclopaedia. It is a community effort for extracting structured information from the Wikipedia and making it accessible on the Web.” Read more