Vienna, Austria, June 14, 2013 –(PR.com)– The new established partnership will combine Digirati’s (http://digirati.co.uk) expertise in delivering high volumes of complex data and content online with SWC’s PoolParty (http://poolparty.biz) product suite. These solutions will aim to break the mould of traditional content managed websites and portals by creating a higher level of content findability as well as flexibility of content delivery. Read more

Journal Star recently shared an article discussing the general topics of Big Data, semantic search, and analytics as well as information on how these tech developments are affecting the job market: “The technology trends are hard to miss: big data is the big new thing, analytics still matter and semantic search is the facilitator. So how well do you know what these terms mean? And more to the point — what do these trends mean for your talent processes, from sourcing to workforce planning? We’ve pulled together some questions and answers on the new talent management game that company executives and HR people are just starting to play.” Read more

A recent release out of Daedalus, a Spanish data analysis company reports, “Business models based on APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) in the cloud are an excellent choice for the commercialization of new software technologies. In the recent API Days Mediterranea held in Madrid, company Daedalus presented its experience in commercializing semantic APIs and how the customer insights gained in this process have led to the development of a new generation of semantic technologies in SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) mode.” Read more

David Amerland of Imassera recently wrote, “Intelligence, at one significant level, relies on semantics. To occur it needs the ability of data nodes that are separate from each other to connect in ways that unleash fresh meaning in the information each contains. Google’s acquisition of Waze for the now customary $1.3 billion plus change is one more significant step towards building the structure of the semantic web that allows data to be integrated in ways that now make much greater sense to both the end user (in terms of results) and the data provider (in terms of services and products).”

Amerland continues, “Waze’s hyperlocalized approach to collecting data plus its strong social element that helps join the figurative data dots within its platform is a powerful piece of the semantic web that Google is helping to structure. Google has promised to ‘leave Waze alone’ for now. That’s because the platform is performing as it should: it is collating data, it is making connections, it is forming a social layer within its environment. Google, right now, has little to offer in either adding or taking away anything that will help refine the experience.”

Read more here.

Image: Courtesy Waze

“People are overlooked for a variety of biased reasons and perceived flaws. Age, appearance, personality. Bill James and mathematics cut straight through that. Billy, of the 20,000 notable players for us to consider, I believe that there is a championship team of twenty-five people that we can afford, because everyone else in baseball undervalues them.”

This was the thinking that Peter Brand (played by Jonah Hill in the movie Moneyball) brought to Billy Beane, General Manager of the Oakland Athletics in 2002. In the previous year, Beane’s team had made it to the postseason, but were defeated by the Yankees. The team then lost three star players to free agency, and Beane didn’t have the budget to replace them. But baseball analyst Brand showed him that Beane could do big things with his small budget, and as a result, the A’s went to the World Series the very next year.

Turning to data to find undervalued players didn’t stop with the A’s. Beane and Brand started a trend in baseball that changed the game forever, and the use of data has only gotten more complex and competitive as the types and amount of data have exploded over recent years.

This was the focus of Dean Allemang, Tim Harsch, and Amar Shan’s presentation at the recent SemTechBiz Conference, Big Data Analytics for Baseball. The three men from YarcData showed a roomful of baseball and semantic technology fans how in the current world of Big Data, RDF is not only a great solution for health care, government, and media organizations, but for America’s favorite pastime, as well. Read more

MODENA, ITALY–(Marketwired – June 11, 2013) - Expert System, the semantic technology company, and GMDE, a systems integrator and solution provider for the publishing market, today announced their collaboration for the successful implementation of an innovative semantic solution for Wolters Kluwer Italy.

Wolters Kluwer Italy, part of the Wolters Kluwer group that makes publishing products, solutions and software, integrated Expert System’s Cogito®, the semantic platform to improve access to information on its online portal for legal and public sector professionals. Read more

Robert Evatt of Tulsa World reports, “In a small office in downtown Tulsa, Moomat is building a different search that goes beyond inserting text into a search bar. Moomat’s new search technology sifts through databases and automatically finds relationships between points of data, such as suggesting that a person who is looking for President Lincoln might also be interested in learning about his Confederate counterpart Jefferson Davis, or automatically showing how many degrees a specific actor is separated from Kevin Bacon.  The company’s goal is to license its technology for use in public and private databases worldwide, but it has now signed on a big-name partner – Spotify, the popular music streaming and discovery service.”

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Jordan Novet of GigaOM reports, “Facebook doesn’t devote thousands of people to its fledgling Graph Search tool, so it needs to make improvements with minimal amounts of engineer effort. In an article slated to go live on the Facebook Engineering blog on Thursday, Eric Sun, a software engineer from the entities team working on Graph Search, describes a few ways in which Facebook boosts the product step by step with the help of external data sets, user input and machine learning.” Read more

Rich snippets – yep, they were a nice start, but Russian search engine Yandex thinks it’s time for something more powerful. Something it’s calling interactive snippets and a feature it’s branding as Islands for its search results pages.

Yandex says the new feature evolves from rich snippets, which CTO Ilya Segalovich refers to in the press release as “mere decoration.” Interactive snippets, in contrast, are actionable, letting users do things like book movie tickets, make reservations or pay bills right from the search page. Webmasters can choose to add this functionality to their web sites if they want to, and while it may get their business customers – especially those using smartphones and tablets – who want to make their transactions as seamless as possible, it does mean those users won’t be making the journey to the business’ own web site.

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Sing along with me to this classic hit from 1980: “Knowledge graphs are everywhere; They’re everywhere; My mind describes them to me.”

Our Daughter’s Wedding’s song Lawn Chairs. But it’s a good description of some of the activity at the Semantic Technology & Business Conference this week, which saw Google, Yahoo and Wikidata chatting up the topic of Knowledge Graphs. On Tuesday, for example, Google’s Jason Douglas provided insight into how the search giant’s Knowledge Graph is critical to meeting a new world of search requirements that’s focused on providing answers and acting in an anticipatory way (see story here), while Wednesday’s closing keynote had Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. project director Denny Vrandecic getting the audience up to date with Wikidata – aka, Wikipedia’s Knowledge Graph For, And By, Everyone.

There are some 280 language versions of Wikipedia for which Wikidata serves as the common source of structured data. Wikidata now has an entity base of more than 12 million items that represent the topics of Wikipedia articles, Vrandecic said during his presentation.

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