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.”

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 !

uma has announced a new instillation of their product, uma SKIN (Semantic Knowledge Information Network). According to a release, the company has installed SKIN “at Bally’s presentation of its Autumn/Winter 2012 men’s collection in Milan, which was unveiled to the press on Sunday, January 15th. The 2.5 meter multi-user multitouch wall, integrated in the Scribe Made to Order showroom concept, presents an interactive World of Bally that enabled users to access custom curated content, as well as Bally’s innovative Scribe Configurator App.” Read more

This post was co-authored with Kevin Lynch.

In October, BioBlitz 2011 took place in Tucson’s Saguaro National Park East and West. Thousands of volunteers worked together to discover the biodiversity of this marvelous place I call home. This blog entry outlines the work we’ve done the last few months, the reasons why BioBlitz matters (they might surprise you), and makes a call to photographers to help us test our crowdsourced image classification process.

The Team – National Geographic, National Park Service, Encyclopedia of Life, National Park Foundation

People from around the country worked hard to make BioBlitz successful. There were – and still are – a lot of moving parts. The Park is over 100 square miles, 70% of which is officially “wilderness,” which means, among other things, no wheels allowed! Read more

Seevl, the music discovery service built on Semantic Technology that I wrote about a few months ago, has released a significant update to their plugin for YouTube. The plugin is still only available for the Google Chrome browser, but other browser plugins are in the works. You can grab the Chrome plugin here.

Once the plugin is installed, the user has new options available when visiting YouTube. First, there’s a new search option next to the standard YouTube search bar.

Read more

The Semantic Web Media Summit on September 14 in New York was a great success, a recent article reports. This review of the event covers several sessions including Michael Dunn’s keynote and Mike Petit’s “call to action.” According to the article, Petit noted that “(1) The Semantic Web and its associated technology have become tangible and effective tools for publishers, and (2) Social media have complicated the publishing model and have become indispensable.” Read more

A new article reports on the development of ViewChange.org, “an online portal built on the foundation of semantic Web technology that connects documentary stories to news and social actions in global poverty. In other words, in one place, people can watch character-driven stories, read the latest news about issues covered in the films, and then connect directly to action campaigns around each social issue. It’s a site and tool that’s primed for grassroots awareness and action.” Read more

A recent article discusses the growing trend of semantically powered “leanback” video players. The article begins, “When you are sat on the sofa at the end of the day relaxing and watching TV, maybe eating food and not in the mood to have to keep constantly making decisions about what to watch you might not think that you are in a situation where Linked Data and SPARQL queries could be useful. Yet the flexibility of the data that can be obtained from data sources supporting these technologies makes them ideal candidates to power a Leanback TV experience. With the right query it is possible to curate a collection of video podcasts that can be played one after each other to keep the TV viewer happy. They still have control, they can still go to any podcast in the collection, but they are not faced with a decision every ten minutes about what to watch, allowing them to relax and discover new content.” Read more

Yesterday, I wrote about how I’ve been using Seevl as a music discovery service. Today, I catch up with Dr. Alexandre Passant, CEO and Founder of Seevl.net, for a deeper look at the music discovery service.

Q: How would you describe Seevl?

A: We initially defined ourselves solely as a music discovery website, and we’re now developing several products around the data we gathered for building it. Our main focus is to bring context to music, and we want to help people to know more about the cultural and musical universe of the bands they like, to discover new ones and most importantly, to understand the connections between all.

Q: Where does the name “Seevl” come from?

Read more

“Hello my name is Eric and I am addicted to music.” Needless to say, I was thrilled when I received one of the early invitations to join Spotify (http://Spotify.com) when it launched recently in the US (if you’re not familiar with Spotify, here’s a good introduction). The service offers a catalog of +15,000,000 tracks, and the audio quality has been consistently excellent.

However, there is one area where I find Spotify severely lacking – discovery.  Fortunately, I work in the Semantic Web world, and I recently had the opportunity to play around with Seevl.net, a music discovery service that leverages semantic technology.  It’s impressive, and I often find myself using Seevl.net to augment Spotify.

So what is Seevl?
Read more

I hate to even mention how quickly Summer is passing, but as we head into August, it’s time to start making plans for the busy Fall event season. September is particularly full of Semantic Tech events.

September 14, in New York City, the Semantic Web Media Summit will take place. A half-day meeting focused on uses of Semantic Web in media, advertising, and publishing, the event is produced by SemanticWeb.com, Lotico.com and our parent company, MediaBistro. With a keynote by Mike Dunn, CTO of Hearst Interactive, and contributions from a stellar group of presenters, the program promises to be a must-attend event for anyone in the New York area interested in how Semantic Technology is changing the media world.  OpenAmplify is sponsoring the conference.

September 21-23, DC-2011, the eleventh International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications, will take place at the National Library of the Netherlands in The Hague.

Also on Sept. 21, the folks at Schema.org are planning a workshop in Silicon Valley. There are still few details available about this event.

September 26-27, The London Semantic Technology and Business Conference (#SemTechBiz) takes place at the Hotel Russell. This two-day executive conference is designed for business and technology executives who need to learn what semantic technologies are and how to take advantage of semantics in their enterprise and web-based systems. Attendees will further their technical understanding in introductory sessions and learn from the Keynote speakers John O’Donovan (Press Association), Martin Hepp (Hepp Research), Steve Harris (Garlik), and Dennis E. Wisnosky, U.S. Department of Defense.