The European Commission has launched a month-long public consultation to investigate the problem of “incompatible vocabularies used by developers of public administration IT systems. ‘Core vocabularies’ are used to make sharing and reusing data easier, and the EC hopes that if they are defined properly, it will be able to quickly and effectively launch e-Government cross-border services. The EC has divided the consultation into three separate core vocabularies; person, business and location.” Read more

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The Open Knowledge Foundation has announced a new Finnish data journalism app contest. THe contest is being organized by Finland’s leading national newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, in order to find better data visualizations. The post states, “For many journalists today, it’s not a lack of open data that’s the problem, but a lack of the skills and off-the-shelf visualizations needed to make that open data useful to them. A year ago, the Finnish government decided that in principle all data generated with taxpayer money should be free.” Read more

Mark Ballard has commented on the UK’s Department of Business, Innovation and Skills’ recent action to dissolve the Public Data Corporation “while its confused policy Cabinet joint Office initiative team works out how to make open data workable. The Cabinet Office rushed out a revamped Open Data strategy on 29 November, ‘delivering on its commitment to establish a Public Data Corporation’. BIS had already established the Public Data Corporation as a private company on 11 November 2010. But the company had laid dormant for a year while the departments and the Local Public Data Panel worked out how to get an HM data-set free-for-all round the vast bellies of such comfortable institutions as the Ordnance Survey, Land Registry and Met Office.” Read more

The W3C has opened a new office in Russia. According to the official release, “The Office is hosted by the National Research University ‘Higher School of Economics’ (HSE), founded in 1992. As one of Moscow’s leading Universities, HSE will work with W3C to strengthen ties to both industry and research in Russia as well as HSE’s many international academic and industry partners.” Read more

A new article reports that Opera software is pushing further into mobile advertising by “acquiring a pair of mobile ad networks: U.S.-based Mobile Theory and 4th Screen Advertising in the U.K. for $10 million total. The deals follow two years after Opera, best known for its Web browsers, bought mobile ad network AdMarvel. While AdMarvel caters mainly to publishers and developers, Opera CEO Lars Boilesen said the acquisitions of two mobile demand-side platforms would be complementary. ‘Opera is uniquely positioned to deliver end-to-end mobile advertising solutions to brands, agencies, publishers and mobile operators across the globe,’ he stated. Read more

A new Threaded Publications ontology seeks to make unpublished research more easily searchable. The article states, “Unpublished research is a serious problem for evidence-based decision making in healthcare, and this was recently highlighted on BBC Radio 4’sToday programme and in an entire issue of the BMJ. Systematic reviews aim to present the totality of the evidence, and a problem for those preparing and maintaining these reviews is how to find unpublished studies and data. But, even when clinical trials are reported in journals and their supplements the formats and descriptions are widely heterogeneous and studies can remain difficult to discover and challenging to compare with similar trials.” Read more

Evan Sandhaus reports for the New York Times that rNews has finally arrived. He explains, “On January 23rd, 2012, The Times made a subtle change to articles published on nytimes.com. We rolled out phase one of our implementation of rNews – a new standard for embedding machine-readable publishing metadata into HTML documents. Many of our users will never see the change but the change will likely impact how they experience the news. Far beneath the surface of nytimes.com lurk the databases — databases of articles, metadata and images, databases that took tremendous effort to develop, databases that the world only glimpses through the dark lens of HTML.” Read more

Monster has signed a $20 million deal with the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) in the United Kingdom. Under the deal, Monster will provided “managed online vacancy listing, filling and automated job matching service”, Monster.co.uk announced on its site today.” Monster CEO Sal Iannuzzi commented, “In Europe we are optimistic about building a meaningful business with European governments. Last year, we started an effort to expand out successful U.S. government business on a global basis. Just this week we completed a major new contract with the DWP valued in excess of $20 million. This is an important, initial accomplishment in developing a global government business.” Read more

The coolest thing at the 109^th International American Toy Fair in New York City this week might have been the Lazer Tag Blaster or the World of Warcraft version of Monopoly. Or, for semantic tech aficionados, it would have been Uma’s semantic Skin multitouch display installation. Even the Power Rangers were getting into it (see photo).

Here is the marriage of semantic technology with interactive signage and multi-touch displays, RFID technology, Intel’s Audience Impression Metrics suite, and social media integration. It is, as Christian Doegl, founder and CEO of uma, an example “where semantics gets tangible.”  And touchable by everyone.

For the Toy Fair, Uma got access to the exhibitor database, itself complete with structured metadata such as company name, location on the floor, and Twitter handle. “From this we can build up a semantic database connecting all different databases to the system,” says Doegl.

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Manu Sporny writes, “Google is building a gigantic Knowledge Graph that will change search forever. The purpose of the graph is to understand the conceptual “things” on a web page and produce better search results for the world. Clearly, the people and companies that end up in this Knowledge Graph first will have a huge competitive advantage over those that do not. So, what can you do today to increase your organization’s chances of ending up in this Knowledge Graph, and thus ending up higher in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs)?” Read more