The schema.org official blog has announced support for enumerated lists. Adding this support allows developers using schema.org to use selected externally maintained vocabularies in their schema.org markup. According to the W3C-hosted schema.org WebSchemas wiki, “This is in addition to the existing extension mechanisms we support, and the general ability to include whatever markup you like in your pages. The focus here is on external vocabularies which can be thought of as ‘supported’ (or anticipated) in some sense by schema.org.”

In other words, “Schema.org markup uses links into well-known authority lists to clarify which particular instance of a schema.org type (eg. Country) is being mentioned.”

For example, consider a list of countries of the world. A developer could use this URI from Wikipedia to reference the USA or this one from the UN FAO, or this one from GeoNames.

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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 !

Lance Ulanoff of Mashable reports, “Bing has been reinvented, offering enhanced search results that tap into the power of social media. Microsoft has done this by pulling people out of search results and putting them in their place: A right-hand social column that will eventually include Facebook, Twitter, Google+ Quora and LinkedIn integration, as well as people who may know something about your most recent Bing query. It even offers a way to ask questions on your favorite social network, directly through Bing.”

Ulanoff continues, “It’s something of an about-face for the Number 2 search engine, which up until earlier this year has been slowly but surely integrating Facebook information (like “Likes”) directly into Bing Search results. Read more

Sharif Sakr of Engadget reports that Google has started to peek-a-boo it’s evolving semantic search capabilities. Sakr writes, “So, Google wasn’t merry-dancing when it promised to update its search engine with new ‘semantic’ algorithms. One of our readers sent in the screen grab above, which shows what happens when they search for ‘Howard Carter.’ In addition to all the regular links, there’s a box on the right that seems to be distinctly aware of who that poor fellow was (er, happy birthday old bean).” Read more

Randal Jackson recently reported how New Zealand company SYL Semantics is helping governments tackle Big Data with semantic search. Jackson reports, “SYL has signed up three government departments so far, but [chief executive Sean] Wilson says he is not allowed to name them at this stage. That’s not bad going for a company which was launched less than a year ago… SYL has a New Zealand patent for its technology and is applying for a US patent. Wilson describes SYL Enterprise Search as the next generation of enterprise search applications.” Read more

Mastufa Ahmed recently interviewed Luc Barthelet, Executive Director of Wolfram|Alpha to learn more about the company’s search algorithm. Asked about what semantic web technologies Wolfram uses, Barthelet responded, “Wolfram|Alpha is not searching the Semantic Web per se. It takes search queries and maps them to an exact semantic understanding of the query, which is then processed against its curated knowledge base. The main technology used is Mathematica whose language is used to describe the semantic queries, and Mathematica technology is used to build up the natural language parser, the data curation pipeline and perform the data processing, computation and visualization.” Read more

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

Update: Yandex today (April 26th) reported that net income in the first three months of 2012 rose 53 percent from the same period last year to 1.26 billion rubles ($43 million) as text-based advertising revenue rose, according to Bloomberg. Sales gained 51 percent to 5.9 billion rubles.

In November Russian search engine Yandex joined Google, Microsoft Bing, and Yahoo! to collaborate on schema.org. The Semantic Web Blog recently caught up by email with Alexander Shubin, Yandex product manager and head of strategic direction, to discuss this and other developments.

The Semantic Web Blog: Can you update us about how Yandex is doing? We know it’s still leading search traffic in Russia, but do you see more competition there, and how have international expansion plans been proceeding?

Shubin: Yandex is the leader in Russia with 59 to 60 percent market share. Russia is one of the few countries where a local search engine keeps a leading position, in spite of international players’ expansion.

Last year Yandex was launched in Turkey, where we suggest 12 services (including web search) so far. According to our statistics, yandex.com.tr processes more than 1 million queries daily. Turkey is the first non-Russian speaking market for us and we have done a lot of work to deliver services that would be interesting for the local community.  The main target for Yandex in Turkey, where one search engine still keeps 90 percent of search market, is to become the Number 2 player and to deliver more local search results and services than our competitor does.

Turkey is more or less an experiment for us: If we meet our target there, we can potentially do the same on any other non-Russian speaking market. But it is too early to make any conclusions or announcements so far as we have worked in Turkey only half of year. Stay tuned!

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Ivan Herman recently offered some insight into how Watson actually works. Herman reports, “I was at Chris Welty’s keynote yesterday at the WWW2012 Conference. His talk was on Jeopardy/Watson and, although this is not the first time I heard/saw something on Watson, some things really became clear only at his keynote. Namely: what is really the central paradigm that made the question answering mechanism so successful in the case of Watson? Well… query answering in Watson is not some sort of a deterministic algorithm that turns a natural language question into a query into a huge set of data. This approach does not work.” 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

Holovision has been granted a US patent for context-driven semantic search. According to the company, “Context-driven search analyzes the semantic context for query phrases in web pages or other documents and clusters these sources into groups of results with similar meaning. This provides results that are organized by query phrase context. Search users no longer have to wade through pages of results to pick out those entries that relate to the semantic context in which they are interested.” Read more