Earlier this week, we reported on the Semantic Web Challenge taking place at the 2012 ISWC Conference in Boston. The winners of the challenge have now been announced!

Taking First Place in the “Open Track” was EventMedia Live, presented by Houda Khrouf, Vuk Milicic and Raphaël Troncy. EventMedia has been a hub in the Linked Data cloud since September 2010, but EventMedia Live is a recent application leveraging the resource. The academic paper is available, as well as the web application itself.  For a quick introduction, check out this fun video the team produced (after the jump).

Read more

Schema.org has announced that GoodRelations is now fully integrated into the markup vocabulary backed by Google, Yahoo!, Bing/Microsoft, and Yandex (read our past schema.org coverage). GoodRelations is the e-commerce vocabulary that has been developed and maintained by Martin Hepp since 2002 (previous coverage).

In the official announcement, R.V. Guha (Google) says, “Effective immediately, the GoodRelations vocabulary (http://purl.org/goodrelations/) is directly available from within the schema.org site for use with both HTML5 Microdata and RDFa. Webmasters of e-commerce sites can use all GoodRelations types and properties directly from the schema.org namespace to expose more granular information for search engines and other clients, including delivery charges, quantity discounts, and product features.”

Read more

On Friday, July 13, a group of Semantic thought leaders from around the globe met with their host and colleague, Paul Miller, for the latest installment of the Semantic Link, a monthly podcast covering the world of Semantic Technologies.

This episode includes a discussion with Nick Holzherr, finalist on the BBC One Television Series, “The Apprentice,” and founder of Whisk, a recipe planning idea based on big data and semantic analysis. He was named ‘emerging entrepreneur of the year’ by Insider Magazine in 2010, and Birmingham Young Personality of the Year (Entrepreneurship) in 2011.
Read more

OCLC has announced that WorldCat.org pages now include schema.org descriptive mark-up.

Created over the last four decades with the participation of thousands of member libraries, WorldCat is the world’s largest online registry of library collections. As the official press release states, “WorldCat.org now offers the largest set of linked bibliographic data on the Web. With the addition of Schema.org mark-up to all book, journal and other bibliographic resources in WorldCat.org, the entire publicly available version of WorldCat is now available for use by intelligent Web crawlers, like Google and Bing, that can make use of this metadata in search indexes and other applications.”

On the heels of the announcement earlier this week about Dewey Decimal Classifications also being available as Linked Data, this certainly marks an exciting week in the world of library information and the Semantic Web. However, this should also prove to be exciting for non-librarians, as these resources are now available beyond the world of library sciences.

Read more

Remember how search engines can show nice snippets in their search results thanks to the structured data that webmasters embedded in the HTML of their webpages (RDFa, schema.org, etc)? Additionally, Facebook gains insight about user’s interest through structured data on webpages (i.e. Open Graph Protocol). Now there is a new kid on the block: Twitter.

Twitter Cards

Twitter recently introduced Twitter Cards, a way to “attach media experiences to Tweets that link to your content.” By adding structured data embedded in the HTML of your webpage, “users who Tweet links to your content will have a ‘card’ added to the Tweet that’s visible to all of their followers.” Basically, Twitter will now have a bit more of information about your webpage in order to know how to make a nice snippet in a tweet.

Read more

I was toying with another title for this post – Yet Another Perfect Storm, but I think that particular metaphor (although appropriate here) has been somewhat over done.  So what sparked this one then?

I am on the long flight back from the Semantic Tech & Business Conference in San Francisco to the good ol’ UK, to see how they got on with the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee festivities.  I am reflecting on what my week at the conference has told me.  It has told me that things are a changing – I got that impression last year too, but more so this year.  Obviously, from the title of this post, it has something to do with Schema.org, Wikidata, and the Google Knowledge Graph….

Read more

Even as semantic web concepts and tools are underpinning revolutionary changes in the way we discover and consume information, people with even a casual interest in the semantic web have difficulty understanding how and why this is happening.  One of the most exciting application areas for semantic technologies is online publishing, although for thousands of small-to-medium sized publishers, unfamiliar semantic concepts are too intimidating to grasp the relevance of these technologies. This three-part series is part of my own journey to better understand how semantic technologies are changing the landscape for publishers of news and information.  Read Part 1.

—-

News and Media Organizations were well represented at the Semantic Technology and Business Conference in San Francisco this year.  Among the organizations presenting were the New York Times, the Associated Press (AP), the British Broadcasting Co. (BBC), Hearst Media Co., Agence France Press (AFP), and Getty Images.

It was interesting to note that, outside of the New York Times, which has been publishing a very detailed index since 1912, many news organizations presenting at the conference did not make the extensive classification of content a priority until the last decade or so.  It makes sense that, in a newspaper publishing environment, creating a detailed and involved index that guides every reader directly to a specific subject mentioned in the paper must not have seemed as critical as it does now– it’s not as though the reader was likely to keep the newspaper for future reference material– so the work of indexing news content by subject as a reference was left for the most part for librarians to do well after an article was published.

In the early days of the internet, categorization of content (where it existed) was limited to simple taxonomies or to free tagging.  News organizations made rudimentary attempts to identify subjects covered by content, but  did not provide much information  about relationships between these subjects.   Search functions matched the words in the search to the words in the content of the article or feature.   Most websites still organize their content this way.

The drawbacks of this approach to online publishing is that it doesn’t make the most of the content “assets” publishers possess.    Digital content has the potential to be either permanent or ephemeral– it can exist and be accessed by a viewer for as long as the publisher chooses to keep it, and many news organizations are beginning to realize the value of giving their material a longer shelf life by presenting it in different contexts.   If you have just read an article about, say, Hillary Clinton, you would might be interested in a related story about the State Department, or perhaps her daughter Chelsea, or her husband Bill….   But how would any content management system be able to serve up a related story if no one had bothered to indicate somewhere what the story is about and how these people and/or concepts are related to one another?

Read more

Ontology2 has announced the release of :BaseKB Early Access 2 (EA2), a tool for accessing Freebase data in RDF.

Paul Houle, founder of Ontology 2, says, “:BaseKB is an important milestone for both Freebase and the Semantic Web. :BaseKB opens Freebase to users of SPARQL and other RDF standards.  The superior quality of Freebase data solves data quality problems that have,  so far,  frustrated Linked Data applications.”

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)

[Editor's Note: This guest editorial is provided by Sean Golliher. He can be found on Twitter at @seangolliher]

Google announced they’re rolling out new enhancements to their search technology and they’re calling it the “Knowledge Graph.”  For those involved in the Semantic Web Google’s “Knowledge Graph” is nothing new. After watching the video, and reading through the announcements, the Google engineers are giving the impression, to those familiar with this field, that they have created something new and innovative.

While it ‘s commendable that Google is improving search it’s interesting to note the direct translations of Google’s “new language” to the existing semantic web vocabulary. Normally engineers and researchers quote, or at least reference, the original sources of their ideas. One can’t help but notice that the semantic web isn’t mentioned in any of Google’s announcements. After watching the different reactions from the semantic web community I found that many took notice of the language Google used and how the ideas from the semantic web were repackaged as “new” and discovered by Google.

Read more