Publishing

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

Luc Moreau of the W3C reports, “The Provenance Working Group has released the fourth public working draft of its data model. The purpose of this blog is to summarize the changes that occurred since the third working draft. From an editorial perspective, three significant changes took place since the last release.”

The first change is, “The document has been reorganized into three separate documents. The data model document focuses on defining the vocabulary, in terms of its types and relations. A second document lists the constraints that should be checked to determine if provenance descriptions are valid. Read more

Structured Dynamics has published a list of frequently asked questions about Linked Data. The list is prefaced by a definition of Linked Data: “Linked data is the first practical expression of the semantic Web, useful and doable today, and applicable to all forms of data. Sources such as the four principles of linked data in Tim Berners-Lee’s Design Issues: Linked Data and the introductory statements on the linked data Wikipedia entry approximate — but do not completely express — an accepted or formal or official definition of linked data per se.” 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

While much of the publishing industry still is getting up to speed on what semantic technology can do for business, it’s already deep within the DNA of The Tribune Company – to the point where Keith DeWeese, Director, Information and Semantics Management, can comfortably use the word “ontology” in discussions with non-tech employees, and enjoy the fact that they’re equally comfortable using it themselves.

DeWeese has been with the company since 2007, putting in place a sophisticated semantic system for auto-tagging and indexing content using natural language processing and controlled vocabularies, and leveraging its taxonomy for projects such as providing advanced search functionality. Thanks to building a collaborative communication channel with Tribune executives, producers, and editors, “now I actually am in meetings with executives who say how exciting it is that we now can be part of a community of people applying semantic technologies to content,” he says. “The other day I was at a meeting where a top executive used the word ontology all the time. I kept smiling and later I thanked her.”

Closely engaging with his business customers also is helping make it possible to push the semantic vision further at the company.

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Bob DuCharme, author and speaker, has provided an excellent example of one of the benefits RDF has over XML. In his example, DuCharme shows how to perform a simple federated query with RDF across two different address books. He writes, “Once, at an XML Summer School session, I was giving a talk about semantic web technology to a group that included several presenters from other sessions. This included Henry Thompson, who I’ve known since the SGML days. He was still a bit skeptical about RDF, and said that RDF was in the same situation as XML—that if he and I stored similar information using different vocabularies, we’d still have to convert his to use the same vocabulary as mine or vice versa before we could use our data together.” Read more

These days, it’s not just the traditional publishing community that has reason for leveraging the content syndication model. As more and more companies across vertical sectors themselves become content providers, syndication makes sense for them, too.

NewsCred has a new – and semantic – take on content syndication, with content partners ranging from Reuters to The Guardian to The Economist. Recently-added customers that leverage the service’s fully licensed text, image and video content include traditional publishers such as the New York Daily News (and NewsCred is in talks with it about becoming a content provider, too). But other recent customers point to the importance of quality content to the consumer and corporate brand market:  For example, insurance provider Zurich recently signed on. NewsCred also just closed a deal with Johnson & Johnson to be a subscriber of its syndication services for content related to the health care products and pharmaceuticals space.

Brands, says NewsCred CEO Shafqat Islam, are responding to consumers getting smarter and more demanding. “They have so much access to information that brands are starting to realize they can’t just sell products or services anymore,” he says. “They need more authentic, engaging conversations with their customers and the best way to build these authentic relationships is with highly-engaging, trusted, high-quality content.”

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Q-Sensei Corporation has announced version 2.0 of Q-Sensei Enterprise, the company’s enterprise search platform. According to the company, the new version is “designed to rapidly and flexibly develop tailored search-based applications (SBAs) tapping the wealth of data from enterprise Intranets, social media, third parties and the Internet. The new platform features ontology-based data processing and configuration, and a new API to increase time-to-market, flexibility, scalability and efficiency in handling Big Data.” Read more

Mo McRoberts of BBC recently shared a few data guides that have emerged as part of the Digital Public Space project, a project “which uses Semantic Web technology as a way to help unlock the value in the archives of the BBC and other publicly-funded institutions.” McRoberts writes, “When we spoke with project partners – and others – about publishing data in a form which makes it possible to have journeys through machine-readable catalogue data similar to the journeys through human-oriented documents that we normally experience on the Web, the reaction was overwhelmingly positive, but organisations weren’t necessarily sure about the nuts and bolts of actually doing it.” Read more

Careerimp has created a new semantically-powered service to help job seekers find positions that match their unique personality. Sarah Mitroff of VentureBeat reports, “Careerimp figured out that job hunting is hard and launched ApplyApp.ly, a job search tool that matches you with job postings based on your Myers-Briggs personality type and your LinkedIn profile. You probably remember the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator from freshman psych in college. The assessment was designed to pinpoint your attitudes, functions, and lifestyle… ApplyApp.ly hopes that by using a psychological metric to find job matches, people will weed out irrelevant jobs from their hunt.” Read more