Learning

The Journal of Web Semantics has released volume 10, a special issue on Scalability edited by Jeff Heflin and Heiner Struckenschmidt: “Preprints from the issue, which includes a short introduction and four research papers, are available on the Journal of Web Semantics preprint server.” The preprints include an editorial by Heflin and Struckenschmidt entitled Web-Scale Semantic Information Processing.

Other preprint articles currently available online include the following: Scalable Distributed Indexing and Query Processing over Linked Data by Marcel Karnstedt, Kai-Uwe Sattler and Manfred Hauswirth; Searching Web Data: an Entity Retrieval and High-Performance Indexing Model by Renaud Delbru, Stephane Campinas and Giovanni Tummarello Read more

A new whitepaper is available for free via Refinder. The paper entitled Semantic Technologies Tap Unrealized Potentials of Social Business Platforms was written by Franz Jachim, Leo Sauermann and Bernhard Schandl. The abstract states, “Social technologies and collaboration tools start to find broad acceptance in the enterprise domain. As well, semantic technologies have been around for a while, offering a range of benefits in the handling of information, including the pervasive linking of content, fostering new forms of content discovery and navigation, and improving content metadata and information retrieval.” Read more

The Semantic Web Company has released a new book in conjunction with the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Partnership (REEEP) entitled Linked Open Data: The Essentials. Martin Kaltenbock reports, “Linked Open Data: The Essentials – is a a quick start guide for decision makers who need to quickly get up to speed with the Linked Open Data (LOD) concept and who want to make their organisation a part of this movement.” Read more

Christine Connors has written a short history of classification, noting how today’s taxonomies play into the grand scheme of things. Connors begins, “The earliest known means of classifying an object and keeping it in order are girginakku. These are ancient Mesopotamian clay tablets that were attached to scrolls and tablets and used to identify the contents. Examples of approximately 5300 years in age can be found in the British Museum. Girginakku at Glencairn. These clay tablets were used for many purposes, including cataloging. The famous Library of Alexandria in Egypt housed one of the earliest forms of library catalog in the third century BCE. The library reportedly housed more than 120,000 scrolls which were stored in bins categorized by subject.” Read more

This year’s National Retail Foundation’s Annual Convention & EXPO, also known as “Retail’s Big Show,” is going to feature a session entitled Profiting from Semantic Web in Retail: The new tool of successful practioners in Customer Experience and Operations. The session will be led by Mphasis, an HP company. According to the description, “IT and data practices have always needed humans to interpret the data and act on results. The Semantic Web aims to make data intelligible to computer systems, and is already leading to applications where computer systems replicate the nuanced decision making of humans. In this session we introduce Semantic Web concepts and ways in which retailers are already putting it to use to enhance customer experience and achieve orders of magnitude changes in operating efficiency.” Read more

Louise Jack has asked, “If so many people’s jobs are touched by the Internet and digital technology, then how come so few of us have even a basic understanding of how things work? This is the fundamental question behind a new course in the U.K. called Decoded, which promises to teach people how to code in one day.”

Steve Henry, one of the creators of the class stated, “The Internet is beyond doubt the prime medium for communications and commerce. Unlike TV, it’s a two-way tool. And yet how many people know how it works? Probably less than 3%.” Read more

“How would you explain RDF to my grandmother?  I still don’t get it…” a student recently asked of David Wood, CTO of 3Roundstones. Wood was speaking to a class called “Linked Data Ventures” and was made up of students from the MIT Computer Science Department and the Sloan School of Business. He responded by creating a slide deck and subsequent video explaining the Resource Description Framework using the classic Dr. Seuss style of rhyming couplets and the characters Thing 1 and Thing 2.

I hope this student’s grandmother found this as enjoyable as I did. (Video after the jump). Read more

Stanford is offering another free online course: this time, the subject is Natural Language Processing taught by Chris Manning and Dan Jurafsky. According to the description, “The course covers a broad range of topics in natural language processing, including word and sentence tokenization, text classification and sentiment analysis, spelling correction, information extraction, parsing, meaning extraction, and question answering, We will also introduce the underlying theory from probability, statistics, and machine learning that are crucial for the field, and cover fundamental algorithms like n-gram language modeling, naive bayes and maxent classifiers, sequence models like Hidden Markov Models, probabilistic dependency and constituent parsing, and vector-space models of meaning.” Read more

Andreas Blumauer interviewed Dr. Bernhard Haslhofer, an instructor of Web Information Systems at Cornell regarding his experiences teaching linked data principles. Haslhofer explained, “The course [I’m co-teaching] is about data-centric Web information systems in general and we spent some classes talking about Linked Data and Semantic Web technologies. We start explaining the origins and the fundamental architectural principles of the World Wide Web and then focus on the data-centric aspects of the Web.” Read more

IBM recently published a technical paper entitled Toward a Basic Profile for Linked Data. In the introduction, the writers begin, “There is interest in using Linked Data technologies for more than one purpose. We have seen interest in it to expose information — public records, for example — on the Internet in a machine-readable format. We have also seen interest in using it for inferring new information from existing information, for example in pharmaceutical applications or IBM Watson™ (see the Resources section for links to more information). The IBM® Rational® team has been using Linked Data as an architectural model and implementation technology for application integration.” Read more