Industry Verticals

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

The financial services sector was in focus at this week’s Sentiment Analysis Symposium in New York City, which is organized and produced by Alta Plana Corp. and its founder, Seth Grimes.  Take, for example, the presentation by Rich Brown, head of Elektron Analytics at Thomson Reuters, who disclosed that the company is about to launch market response indicators in support of its Thomson Reuters News Analytics system for the financial community. That product this week also won The Technical Analyst’s 2012 award for best news analytics software.

With its software, originally discussed here, qualitative, unstructured information is turned into a quantitative data set allowing users – machines and humans – to quickly analyze thousands of news stories in less time than it takes to read a single headline, as Thomson Reuters describes it. It uses natural language processing technology to get to the end game, which is to forecast financial market response from news and social media sentiment. Some 82 fields of metadata come into play for automating the analysis of news content. That encompasses sentiment down through to the degree of positive, negative or neutral expressions and how individual companies mentioned in a piece fare in those respects – rather than just the tone of the piece at large. “The computational linguistics system measures the author’s tone as positive or negative on any given entity, which is important and the harder part of it,” Brown said. Other fields include, for example, relevance, genre, intensity of news flow, and more.

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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

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

Jane Wakefield of the BBC reports that London plans to test a new “smart city” operating system. She writes, “Living Plan IT has developed its Urban OS to provide a platform to connect services and citizens.  With partners including Hitachi, Phillips and Greenwich council, it aims to use the Greenwich peninsula as a testbed for new technologies running on the system. The OS aims to connect key services such as water, transport, and energy. David Willetts, Minister for Universities and Science, was among the signatories to the partnership. ‘The development of smart cities in future is a crucial commercial opportunity for Britain, and London is the right place to be doing it,’ he said.” Read more

Luc Moreau of the W3C reports, “The Provenance Working Group has released the fourth public working draft of its data model. The purpose of this blog is to summarize the changes that occurred since the third working draft. From an editorial perspective, three significant changes took place since the last release.”

The first change is, “The document has been reorganized into three separate documents. The data model document focuses on defining the vocabulary, in terms of its types and relations. A second document lists the constraints that should be checked to determine if provenance descriptions are valid. Read more

Michael Cooney reports that next month the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is set to detail “the union of advanced technologies from artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, machine learning, natural-language fields it hopes to bring together to build an automated system that will let analysts and others better grasp meanings from large volumes of text documents.”

DARPA stated, “Automated, deep natural-language understanding technology may hold a solution for more efficiently processing text information. Read more

Structured Dynamics has published a list of frequently asked questions about Linked Data. The list is prefaced by a definition of Linked Data: “Linked data is the first practical expression of the semantic Web, useful and doable today, and applicable to all forms of data. Sources such as the four principles of linked data in Tim Berners-Lee’s Design Issues: Linked Data and the introductory statements on the linked data Wikipedia entry approximate — but do not completely express — an accepted or formal or official definition of linked data per se.” Read more

Federal Computer Week reports, “Data.gov has launched a new community for software developers to share ideas, collaborate or compete on projects and request new datasets. Developer.data.gov joins a growing list of communities and portals tapping into Data.gov’s datasets, including those for health, energy, education, law, oceans and the Semantic Web. The developer site is set up to offer access to federal agency datasets, source code, applications and ongoing developer challenges, along with blogs and forums where developers can discuss projects and share ideas.” Read more

Randal Jackson recently reported how New Zealand company SYL Semantics is helping governments tackle Big Data with semantic search. Jackson reports, “SYL has signed up three government departments so far, but [chief executive Sean] Wilson says he is not allowed to name them at this stage. That’s not bad going for a company which was launched less than a year ago… SYL has a New Zealand patent for its technology and is applying for a US patent. Wilson describes SYL Enterprise Search as the next generation of enterprise search applications.” Read more