The News Storyline Ontology wants to make it easier for journalists to deal with the world as they understand it – that is,  in terms of stories and curated narrative arcs over world events. The ontology aims to be a generic model for describing and organizing the stories news organizations tell, while supporting whatever their approach is to handling those stories. It provides, in other words, a model for the news itself: how different stories relate to each other, how breaking news evolves and how the commonplace entities of people, places, organizations and events relate to news stories.

“The first benefit is for the news organization itself to organize things, but it also lets them put together web pages more flexibly and closer to the way we access information as humans,” says Jarred McGinnis, one of the authors of the ontology. Formerly head of research, semantic technologies at Press Association, he is now an independent consultant in semantics at his firm Logomachy Ltd. Fellow authors are Jeremy Tarling, BBC News data architect, and a former BBCer, Paul Wilton, previously technical lead, semantic publishing and now founder and technical architect at Ontoba, which specializes in semantic publishing.

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Image Courtesy: Flickr/Patrick Hoesly

The financial services industry is taking to semantic tech in an important way, and that’s in the form of the Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO), which aims to standardize the language used to precisely define the terms, conditions, and characteristics of financial instruments; the legal and relationship structure of business entities; the content and time dimensions of market data; and the legal obligations and process aspects of corporate actions. Attendees at SemTech Biz in San Francisco will get a deep dive on the how’s and why’s, at this session, while the FIBO Technology Summit invitation event will present an opportunity for working collaboratively to continue advancing the effort that has its roots in The Enterprise Data Management Council and communities of interests.

Leading that event will be Dennis E. Wisnosky, founder of Wizdom Systems, Inc. and former CTO and Chief Architect of the DoD Business Mission Area, who was recently named to provide technical strategy and operational guidance to help the Council finalize and implement FIBO standards, and David S. Newman, SVP & Strategic Planning Manager Enterprise Architecture at Wells Fargo, and Chair of the EDM Council’s Semantics Program. (Newman, with Enterprise Data Management Council Head of Semantics and Standards Mike Bennett, will also host the SemTech FIBO session.)  Speaking of the upcoming event, Wisnosky explains that a goal is to cast a wide net to find the new tech ideas and developments that both can bring benefits to FIBO in the short term and influence the longer-term research agenda to help the financial industry.

As FIBO stands now, in June the second draft of the FIBO Foundations ontology and the conceptual FIBO Business Entities ontology will be presented at a meeting of the Object Management Group in Berlin. By year’s end it is expected that the OMG will have ratified these as formal standards. “We are on the path to turn the corner from thinking of what FIBO will be to delivering it,” says Wisnosky. Read more

Ontology Systems, the semantic search company for structured enterprise application data, announce Vodacom SA , the leading South African mobile service provider, has deployed Ontology to enhance their service assurance operations.

Ontology provides Vodacom with a comprehensive Service Assurance solution for Change Management and Fault Management operations. The solution provides a correlated view of Vodacom’s transport network (SDH and MPLS) topology in relation to Vodacom’s RAN network and Vodacom Business information in Siebel CRM that: Read more

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IT leaders keeping an eye on Gartner’s top tech trends list know that early in March semantic technologies made the cut (see our original story here, and our follow-up with one of the authors of the Gartner report here). The big question for many enterprise IT pros, though, is what should they be doing with that knowledge – how can they start leveraging semantic technology to their own organizations’ benefit?

Help is on the way. Three experts in semantic web technologies and Linked Data weigh in with their advice on heading down that road:

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Inventorying and managing cultural heritage data turns out to be a pretty complicated undertaking. The construction of a famous site may have lasted across different time periods, and its present location may span multiple districts. Buildings may be associated not only with famous architects but also with well-known residents. Or structures may have been constructed atop pre-existing entities.

Helping sort it all out is the work of The Arches Project, collaboration between the Getty Conservation Institute (GCI) and World Monuments Fund (WMF). The Arches effort grew out of GCI’s and WMF’s work to develop MEGA-Jordan, a purpose-built geographic information system (GIS) to inventory and manage archaeology sites at a national level for that country. But for this more generic and open-source take at accommodating any country, region or other institution worldwide responsible for the protection of immovable cultural heritage, the focus expanded from the geo-spatial to the semantic.

“We became very familiar with the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model ontology,” says Alison Dalgity, who manages the Arches project on GCI’s side. The CRM provides definitions and a formal structure for describing the implicit and explicit concepts and relationships used in cultural heritage documentation. “We realized we needed something like that. Now, the GIS piece is only part of this – it’s nice to know where something is, but all the other relationships – the who, how, what and when and so on – have to be represented, too.”

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Kevin Fitchard of GigaOM reports, “Yummly is releasing its semantic food search technology into the wild, announcing on Wednesday that it is selling developers access to its database of more than 1 million web-sourced recipes as well as the technology it uses to parse them. The launch is timely, considering Punchfork is shutting down its API at the end of the month after it was bought by Pinterest. Several sites and apps tap Punchfork’s recipe content and search capabilities – for instance, Punchfork powered Evernote Food’s Explore Recipes feature – so it will soon be looking for an alternative.” Read more

Turns out that supply chains need the Semantic Web, too. The iCargo project, co-funded by the 7^th Framework Programme of the European Commission, was formally launched last year to help make global logistics across multiple modes of transport more sustainable, both in terms of lowered costs and greater energy efficiency.

The project is composed of multiple components, including technical tasks where semantic interoperability plays a key role in the goal of developing an open information architecture that lets real-world objects, existing systems and new apps to better cooperate with each other. Things have progressed to the point where the semantic capabilities it’s developed are to be included in prototypes debuting in May.

“Enabling interoperable supply chains could provide us better intermodal door-to-door services, and semantic technologies will provide the interoperability between services,” says Germán Herrero Cárcel, head of sector, Full Electric Vehicle & Supply Chain Sector, MRS Market, Research & Innovation at international IT services company Atos, which is coordinating the iCargo consortium of 29 organizations with experience in the field of logistics, supply chain management and ICT.

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Oli Bartlett of the BBC recently discussed the latest uses of linked data at the BBC. He writes, “The Linked Data Platform is one of the legacies of the BBC Sport 2012 Olympics website. You may have read my blog post on the work we did for the Olympic Data Service. One aspect of the service delivered the semantic framework for the 10,000 athlete pages and a page per event, discipline, country and venue. This framework provides the semantic graph of data (the linked data containing the athletes, events and venues and their associations with each other) and the APIs on this data. It was all built on the Dynamic Semantic Publishing (DSP) platform which facilitates the publication of automated metadata driven web pages and had originally been developed for the football World Cup in 2010.” Read more

Dennis Wisnosky is on-board to lead the standards implementation process for FIBO, the Financial Industry Business Ontology that is a joint effort of The Enterprise Data Management Council in conjunction with the Object Management Group.

The data management standards can be used by financial institutions and industry regulators to support conformance to federal regulatory reporting requirements and for internal business processes and risk analysis. Wisnosky, who previously was Chief Technical Officer and Chief Architect, Business Mission Area, U.S. Department of Defense, has spearheaded the U.S. DoD’s use of semantic technology across systems to meet the goal of having an “executable, integrated, consumable, solution architecture.” (See story here).

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Image courtesy: Flickr/ Ian W Scott

Teaching may seem the most obvious career choice for philosophy students. But it’s not the only one. Epistematica, which provides tools and services for Linked Data and semantic web applications, sees opportunities for philosophers at any organization that will be publishing Linked Data.

“Any organization that will want to be in the semantic web will need a philosopher,” says Dr. Marco Romano, Epistematica’s chief knowledge officer – a graduate in Philosophy at RomaTre University, who also has a Phd in Logic from Paris 13 University.

Why? “In order to produce a good ontology or even also a good vocabulary that can be really useful in the semantic web, that is to connect to Linked Data on the web of data, you need a philosopher, someone who can look at things on the web, to understand what they actually are and how to describe them in the most suitable way. That is, such that it is well-useable and understandable to machines, to services that will use that data, but also to the people [who will want] to find it.”

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