The Conductrics blog has shared a list of data science and machine learning resources. The introduction states, “Every now and then I get asked for some help or for some pointers on a machine learning/data science topic.  I tend respond with links to resources by folks that I consider to be experts in the topic area.   Over time my list has gotten a little larger so I decided to put it all together in a blog post. Since it is based mostly on the questions I have received, it is by no means complete, or even close to a complete list, but hopefully it will be of some use.  Perhaps I will keep it updated, or even better yet, feel free to comment with anything you think might be of help. Also, when I think of data science, I tend to focus on Machine Learning rather than the hardware or coding aspects. If you are looking for stuff on Hadoop, or R, or Python, sorry, there really isn’t anything here.” Read more

Irene Celino recently shared a presentation on Linking Smart Cities Datasets with Human Computation: the case of UrbanMatch at the eleventh annual ISWC conference in Boston. The description of the presentation states, “To realize the Smart Cities vision, applications can leverage the large availability of open datasets related to urban environments. Those datasets need to be integrated, but it is often hard to automatically achieve a high-quality interlinkage. Human Computation approaches can be employed to solve such a task where machines are ineffective.” Read more

Bart van Leeuwen, software executive (netage.nl) and firefighter (Amsterdam Fire Department), has a story of practical application of Semantic Web technologies that we have covered before here at SemanticWeb.com and in our Semantic Technology & Business Conference series. Below, we offer the video of the keynote address he delivered in June at the San Francisco event.

His, like many of the most successful Semantic Web case studies, is a story of iterative growth and agile development, a mixing of technical and cultural challenges and solutions. Even since Bart’s keynote at the recent London SemTechBiz conference, there have been developments, and we caught up with him to hear the latest (video after the jump).

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The Semantic Technology and Business Conference (#SemTechBiz) will take place October 15-17 in New York City. In addition to presentations regarding Big Data, open government, and business, the highly anticipated conference will feature a number of presentations discussing the use of Semantic Technologies in the financial and publishing industries.

Two presentations to look forward to include:

Smart Financial Data: How Semantic Technology Can Help Big Data Become Smart Data
David Saul, Chief Scientist, State Street Bank and Alok Prasad, President, Cambridge Semantics will explain how the use of industry standards set by organizations such as the Enterprise Data Management Council (EDM), the Object Management Group (OMG) and their Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO) to describe data semantically has the ability to create an intelligent information fabric that overlays key data assets and links across the organization and the financial industry. Not only are semantic technologies a benefit to financial institutions, but they are also critically important to the end user – the business. We see the next step for semantic technologies as the development of end-user-oriented semantic tools that bring data from the information fabric into the hands of the business people thereby irrevocably linking the business to IT.
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On Friday, June 15, 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 about the recent SemTechBiz Conference in San Francisco and where the world of Semantic Tech is today.
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Daniel Tunkelang, principal data scientist at LinkedIn has shared the slides from his SemTechBiz SF presentation: Scale, Structure, and Semantics. He prefaces the presentation, “[Friday] morning I had the pleasure to present a keynote address at the Semantic Technology & Business Conference (SemTechBiz). I’ve had a long and warm relationship with the semantic technology community — especially with Marco Neumann and the New York Semantic Web Meetup. But I’m not exactly a fanboy of the semantic web, and I wasn’t sure how the audience would respond to some of my more provocative assertions. Fortunately the reception was very positive. Several people approached me afterwards to thank me for presenting a balanced argument for combining big data with structured representations and for raising HCIR issues.” Read more

Algebraix Data has announced that CTO Christopher Piedmonte and Product Manager Arthur Keen will be presenting Algebra Unlocks SPARQL Performance at the SemTechBiz Conference in San Francisco. According to the article, “Mr. Piedmonte and Dr. Keen will provide a technical presentation to attendees that will show how Algebraix® Technology can unlock SPARQL performance. Algebraix technology leverages newly developed data algebra to dynamically re-factor queries as algebraic expressions of prior result fragments and optimally order queries to improve result re-use.” Read more

Yesterday we announced an expert panel on schema.org that will be featured at next month’s SemTechBiz Conference in San Francisco. But schema.org won’t be the only hot topic at SemTechBiz. Two other expert panels are also happening on Wednesday, June 6: a panel on Wikis & Semantics as well as a panel on Semantic Analysis of Big Data.

During the first discussion, Wikis & Semantics, the panelists will discuss their experiences with combining wikis and semantic technology. 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)

This year was the 21st World Wide Web Conference located in Lyon, France. This conference is a unique forum for discussion about how the Web is evolving. There were hundreds of talks over 3 days. Let me summarize some Semantic Web presentations I was able to attend.

NautiLOD

Programmers daily use the wget tool to specify and retrieve data on the Web. However, wget is limited since it cannot dig into the semantics of Web data to do the job. What if you were to add semantics to wget? This is the question that Valeria Fionda, Claudio Gutierrez and Giuseppe Pirró asked themselves. They took that question to the next level: imagine a semantic wget on top of Linked Data. They wanted to create a language to declaratively specify portions of the Web of Data, define routes and instruct agents that can do things for you on the Web. All this by exploiting the semantics of information (RDF data) found in online data sources. For example, find all the Wikipedia pages of directors that have been influenced by Stanley Kubrick and send them to my email; retrieving information about David Lynch from different information providers only gives a hint of what can be done. The researchers developed a simple, generic declarative language, NautiLOD and implemented it in swget (semantic wget). swget comes in two flavors: a simple command line tool (to give the Web back to users) and a GUI. This is not a fantasy anymore. Check it our for yourself (http://swget.wordpress.com).

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