A new article reports, “After months of gratuitous hard work and cooperation by higher education students and experts, the Spanish version of DBpedia, also known as the Spanish Semantic Wikipedia, has finally come into being. The Spanish DBpedia contains 70 million data that account for 80% of the information in the Spanish Wikipedia and now rivals other languages like English or French… DBpedia is a project for extracting Wikipedia data and building a semantic version of this Internet encyclopaedia. It is a community effort for extracting structured information from the Wikipedia and making it accessible on the Web.” Read more

SemTechBiz is Less Than 3 Weeks Away

The Semantic Tech & Business Conference (SemTechBiz) is coming to San Francisco on June 3-7! Join us for case studies, innovative panels, tutorials, and keynotes that will provide you with practical advice, hands-on guidance, and breakthrough approaches to solving business problems with semantic technology. Passes go up $200 at the door. Sign up now and save !

Rufus Pollock of the Open Knowledge Foundation reports, “Last Friday (May 4), the Ministry of Planning in Brazil launched the final version of the Brazilian Open Data Portal. In line with the federal government policy to promote the use of free software in public administration, the portal was made using only free and open source tools. Among them is the Open Knowledge Foundation’s open-source data portal software CKAN. Moreover, the whole process of development of the portal was conducted with the participation of concerned citizens in an open way to promote open data.” Read more

Velichka Dimitrova of the Open Knowledge Foundation recently discussed the launch of Yourtopia Italia, an open data portal for Italy. She writes, “In countries like Italy stark regional differences have dominated over time. Particularly in times of fiscal austerity when the country attempts to recover from an economic crisis with major social consequences, seeing how and why the South and the North differ is an important step in a consensus-building process to find solutions and realise collaboration with the citizens. The Open Economics Working Group of the Open Knowledge Foundation released YourTopia Italia – an application which gives the users a chance to input their priorities in eight categories of socio-economic progress: Labour Market, Education, Health, Environment and Energy, Science and Research, Household Income and Inequality, Public Safety, and Social Life.” Read more

Yesterday, we announced RDFa.info, a new site devoted to helping developers add RDFa (Resource Description Framework-in-attributes) to HTML.

Building on that work, the team behind RDFa.info is announcing today the release of “PLAY,” a live RDFa editor and visualization tool. This release marks a significant step in providing tools for web developers that are easy to use, even for those unaccustomed to working with RDFa.

“Play” is an effort that serves several purposes. It is an authoring environment and markup debugger for RDFa that also serves as a teaching and education tool for Web Developers. As Alex Milowski, one of the core RDFa.info team, said, “It can be used for purposes of experimentation, documentation (e.g. crafting an example that produces certain triples), and testing. If you want to know what markup will produce what kind of properties (triples), this tool is going to be great for understanding how you should be structuring your own data.”

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Jenn Webb of O’Reilly recently interviewed Laura Dawson regarding metadata in the publishing industry. Webb writes, “Dawson says publishers are starting to understand that metadata is the only indication that an ebook exists (discussed at 0:10), but they still don’t quite know what “metadata” means or exactly how to fit it into a production process. She says publishers are tending to assign one person the duty of handling metadata and aren’t grasping that it’s integral to every department and stage in a workflow.” 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

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

Jessica Leber of Technology Review recently reported on the controversial idea of a stock exchange for personal data. She writes, “Here’s a job title made for the information age: personal data broker. Today, people have no choice but to give away their personal information—sometimes in exchange for free networking on Twitter or searching on Google, but other times to third-party data-aggregation firms without realizing it at all. ‘There’s an immense amount of value in data about people,’ says Bernardo Huberman, senior fellow at HP Labs. ‘That data is being collected all the time. Anytime you turn on your computer, anytime you buy something.’ Huberman, who directs HP Labs’ Social Computing Research Group, has come up with an alternative—a marketplace for personal information—that would give individuals control of and compensation for the private tidbits they share, rather than putting it all in the hands of companies.” Read more

Mike Bergman recently gave a talk in which he discussed how “the pragmatic contributions of semantic technologies reside more in mindsets, information models and architectures than in ‘linked data’ as currently practiced.” He writes, “No matter how expressed, the idea behind all of these various [Semantic Web related] terms has in essence been to make meaningful connections, to provide the frameworks for interoperability. Interoperability means getting disparate sources of data to relate to each other, as a means of moving from data to information. Interoperability requires that source and receiver share a vocabulary about what things mean, as well as shared understandings about the associations or degree of relationship between the items being linked.” Read more