News

This year was the 5th version of the Linked Data on the Web Workshop co-located at the World Wide Web Conference going on in Lyon, France.

At this workshop, seven issues caught my attention:

1) Media: Yunja Li presented on Synote: Weaving Media Fragments and Linked Data. This is interesting for those who not only want to link to an entire video, but want to link to a part of a video at a specific interval of time, and also add metadata information about that.

2) NLP to Linked Data: How can we relate the results of different named entity extraction tools to Linked Data. Giuseppe Rizzo introduced their project, NERD, which is working on this area.

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Google has announced two updates to rich snippets, the enhanced format that they announced in 2009 for displaying content in search results that use semantic markup.

The first update addresses an issue raised on answers.semanticweb.com in July of 2011. Prior to this update, only some places in the world saw rich snippets in their local results. Now product rich snippets is getting global support, meaning that users worldwide will be able to preview product information in the rich snippet. Here is an example from www.google.fr:

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Amazon Web Services have added CloudSearch to their increasingly comprehensive portfolio of everything a developer would ever want.

Amazon CloudSearch is a fully-managed search service in the cloud that allows customers to easily integrate fast and highly scalable search functionality into their applications. With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, developers simply create a search domain, upload the data they want to make searchable to Amazon CloudSearch, and the service then automatically provisions the technology resources required and deploys a highly tuned search index.

In their press release they say CloudSearch is based on technology that has been rattling around on their network for a while – A9.
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We caught up with Bernie Spang, IBM’s Director, Strategy and Marketing, Database Software and Systems, to discuss the latest release of its enterprise data products DB2 and InfoSphere. Version 10 of both products have just been released. DB2 is used by thousands of organizations worldwide and comes in flavors ranging from a free version that maxes out at 2GB storage to systems that support large enterprises (Coca-Cola was an early adopter of DB2 version 10, and is already reporting cost-savings of over $1 Million).

The latest version of DB2 is the first in four years and represents a significant release, according to Spang, “This is a culmination of four years of effort by hundreds of engineers in IBM Research and Software Development Labs around the world; we also had more than 100 clients and over 200 business partners involved in the ‘early access program’ to help deliver this software. With the fundamental goal of delivering faster, easier, lower-cost data management.”

The early testing is showing positive results, with customers reporting “up to 10x faster data warehouse queries; freeing up to 90% of storage space using compression; and 98% code compatibility with Oracle Database, which makes it easier to migrate from Oracle to IBM software without changing data or retraining staff.”

For our readers, though, one of the more intriguing new features of DB2 is its built-in support for RDF. While semantics is not new to IBM — IBM Watson has gained particular fame — the appearance of RDF support in such a widely used, stable, enterprise database system is exciting.
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Tom Cheredar of VentureBeat reports that Zite, a company that we have covered before, has added publisher sections to its digital magazine apps. Cheredar writes, ” Zite lets you build a custom digital magazine by pulling in shared links from bookmarking and social sites, such as Twitter, Google Reader, Delicious and Read It Later. It then builds a personalized selection of articles based on activity from your social profiles. Unlike most of its competitors, Zite learns your reading habits by giving you voting buttons for each piece of content. The idea is to give you more of what you actually want to see without having to disregard all the boring and/or uninteresting stuff.” Read more

There is a fierce debate going on in the world of the Semantic Web and Linked Data, the question being is it of fundamental importance to realising the benefits of the technology or are they just dancing on the head of a pin.    The core debate revolves around something with the stunningly opaque title of the httpRange-14 issue.

The debate has been rumbling on for years but was reignited over the last few days by proposals being submitted to the W3C to clarify and hopefully simplify things.  I use the word ignited as that what I was beginning to think my iPhone was about to do – it has been buzzing away like a bumblebee on speed over the last few days announcing the arrival of yet another passionately held opinion from a member of the respected Semantic Web/Linked Data community from Sir Tim Berners-Lee downwards.    Fortunately for those of you that do not follow the W3C’s Technical Architecture (TAG) and Linked Open Data (public-lod) mailing lists it may have gone unnoticed.

Let me try to explain, in as simple terms as possible, what the fuss is all about and why it may be important.  From my point of view, and there are many surrounding this, the issue is a combination of two problems.

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SemanticWeb.com and parent company WebMediaBrands recently announced that a competition will be held at the upcoming Semantic Technology and Business Conference (SemTechBiz) in San Francisco to select the “Top Semantic Technology Start-Up.” The contest begins with an online application process. Out of that pool of applicants, ten companies will be selected to compete in person and on stage at SemTechBiz San Francisco. There is no charge to apply. The ten finalist companies will need to register one individual, but for already registered attendees, there is no additional fee.

Requirements

SemanticWeb.com is currently accepting entrants from now until April 23, 2012. Companies encouraged to apply are those who meet the following conditions:

1. have a demonstrable product (at least in “beta” stage) in the SemTech and or SemWeb space
2. have received no more than a Series A round of financing

Companies can be located anywhere but must have the financial means to attend SemTech 2012. Ten Finalist companies will be selected to compete in a “Pitch Slam” before a panel of expert judges at the Conference. These finalists will be listed in an article at SemanticWeb.com.

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One week after closing a $3 million funding round, Mobiles Republic has launched version 2.0 of the company’s popular News Republic app for Android and iOS. Paul Sawers reports, “News Republic is a neat app that lets users curate their own news feed by creating ‘channels’, covering broad subjects such as technology, business and sports, whilst also letting them build more topic-specific feeds, such as ‘football’, ‘Apple Inc.’ or ‘Barack Obama’. With version 2.0 now out of the starting blocks, it has been given a brand new ‘look-and-feel’, and we must say it really is rather nice.” Read more

Brittany Darwell of our sister publication, Inside Facebook, recently reported that Guardian.co.uk attributed 30% of its referral traffic in February to The Guardian‘s social reader app on Facebook’s Open Graph. Darwell reports, “That’s up from 2 percent only six months ago. The change is largely the result of a Facebook canvas application that lets users read Guardian stories and share them automatically via Ticker, Timeline and News Feed. This is yet another example of Open Graph driving significant traffic to third-party apps and websites. For a few days in February, Facebook even surpassed Google in referral percentage to the Guardian, though it hasn’t maintained the lead.” Read more

Semantic news startup Mobiles Republic has raised $3 million in Series A funding. According to the release, “The company will use the investment to continue the global expansion of its popular news apps, including News Republic, APPY Geek and Glam Life, on the different platforms.” CEO GIlles Raymond commented, “With this investment, we will be able to accelerate our growth, continue to federate more publishers on top of the 300 that have joined us, and continue our expansion capitalizing on our multilingual semantic engine… We are very pleased to have the support of XAnge Private Equity and Creathor Venture, who believe in our mission to be the worldwide leader in personal media apps on the four screens.” Read more