Even as semantic web concepts and tools are underpinning revolutionary changes in the way we discover and consume information, people with even a casual interest in the semantic web have difficulty understanding how and why this is happening.  One of the most exciting application areas for semantic technologies is online publishing, although for thousands of small-to-medium sized publishers, unfamiliar semantic concepts are too intimidating to grasp the relevance of these technologies. This three-part series is part of my own journey to better understand how semantic technologies are changing the landscape for publishers of news and information.  Read Part 1.

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News and Media Organizations were well represented at the Semantic Technology and Business Conference in San Francisco this year.  Among the organizations presenting were the New York Times, the Associated Press (AP), the British Broadcasting Co. (BBC), Hearst Media Co., Agence France Press (AFP), and Getty Images.

It was interesting to note that, outside of the New York Times, which has been publishing a very detailed index since 1912, many news organizations presenting at the conference did not make the extensive classification of content a priority until the last decade or so.  It makes sense that, in a newspaper publishing environment, creating a detailed and involved index that guides every reader directly to a specific subject mentioned in the paper must not have seemed as critical as it does now– it’s not as though the reader was likely to keep the newspaper for future reference material– so the work of indexing news content by subject as a reference was left for the most part for librarians to do well after an article was published.

In the early days of the internet, categorization of content (where it existed) was limited to simple taxonomies or to free tagging.  News organizations made rudimentary attempts to identify subjects covered by content, but  did not provide much information  about relationships between these subjects.   Search functions matched the words in the search to the words in the content of the article or feature.   Most websites still organize their content this way.

The drawbacks of this approach to online publishing is that it doesn’t make the most of the content “assets” publishers possess.    Digital content has the potential to be either permanent or ephemeral– it can exist and be accessed by a viewer for as long as the publisher chooses to keep it, and many news organizations are beginning to realize the value of giving their material a longer shelf life by presenting it in different contexts.   If you have just read an article about, say, Hillary Clinton, you would might be interested in a related story about the State Department, or perhaps her daughter Chelsea, or her husband Bill….   But how would any content management system be able to serve up a related story if no one had bothered to indicate somewhere what the story is about and how these people and/or concepts are related to one another?

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Laura Campbell, CIO of the Library of Congress, spoke at the recent SemTech Conference about how the world’s largest library leverages semantic technology to help manage the vast resources of the LoC.

The Library of Congress is “more than just a library,” said Campbell, pointing out that the LoC has “the Congressional Research Service, the Copyright Office of the U.S., and the Law Library in addition to the National Collection.” With over 146 Million items in 470 languages, represented in both analog and digital content, and with newly gathered material regularly being added from around the world, there is undeniably a lot of content to manage.

In her keynote address, Ms. Campbell spoke about how the Library of Congress is leveraging linked data technologies in three key areas:

1. Managing existing collections
2. Maintaining the LoC’s role as a leader in the distribution of canonical information
3. Fulfilling the mission to collect, preserve, and provide access to a more digital collection

The keynote in its entirety, is presented below.

To read more about one specific linked data initiative at the Library of Congress, check out this recent series about the Recollections Project.

For more great keynotes, case studies, and insight into how Semantic Web can make a difference in business, consider attending SemTechBiz UK, SemTechBiz DC, or the Semantic Media Summit in NYC.

At the 2011 SemTech San Francisco, there was a special presentation by Aditya Kalyanpur, of IBM Research. Kalyanpur was part of the algorithm team on the Watson project. You remember Watson, right? The computer who won Jeopardy earlier this year?  We covered the story, if you need a reminder of what happened.

Here is the full presentation by Kalyanpur. (Slides were not made available to the general public):

Following this presentation, our own Jennifer Zaino caught up with Kalyanpur for this interview.

“The Secretary of Defense is responsible for a half-trillion dollar enterprise that is roughly an order of magnitude larger than any commercial corporation that has ever existed. DoD estimates that business support activities—the Defense Agencies and the business support operations within the Military Departments—comprise 53% of the DoD enterprise.”

This was one of the realities put forward by Dennis Wisnosky, CTO and Chief Architect, Business Mission Area, U.S. Department of Defense, during his Keynote at the 2011 Semantic Technology Conference San Francisco. Mr. Wisnosky was speaking about how the US DoD leverages Semantic Technology across systems to meet the goal of having an “executable, integrated, consumable, solution architecture.” In particular, he spoke about using the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) standard by OMG for their Business Process Modeling efforts, in conjunction with systems built on RDF, OWL, and SPARQL.
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Brand Niemann, who this year with Mills Davis restarted the Semantic Interoperability Community of Practice (SICoP), at SemTech in June explained the building of the SemTech 2011 agenda and the SemanticWeb.com archive in the cloud with Linked Open Data. The process involved structuring content in MindTouch to create site maps; screen scraping the agenda and articles into Excel; importing data into TIBCO Spotfire self-service BI tool and creating an interactive dashboard from which users can sort/filter/search the data, download it, and share it via Web Player and an iPad app.

“Essentially everything is in the same format and linked underneath so that it is semantically interoperable,” said Niemann, formerly senior enterprise architect at the EPA and now director and senior data scientist at Semanticommunity.net, in a presentation at SemTech.

Read more

Bill Guinn, CTO Product Enablers, Amdocs Product Business Unit, delivered a keynote at the 2011 Semantic Technology Conference in San Francisco. His talk was one of the highlights for anyone interested in how Semantic Technology can be used in enterprise systems.

“I truly believe that semantics can be a game changer in just about any B2C model.” – Bill Guinn, Amdocs

Amdocs, a company focused on innovating in the space of Customer Experience Systems, is a $3 Billion company that provides customer care, revenue management, and operational support for large telecommunications companies. To do this requires heavy duty transaction processing systems, with Amdocs processing a few billion transactions per day, resulting in petabytes of information. In his keynote, Mr. Guinn addressed how Amdocs leveraged Semantic Technology to “improve revenue, reduce cost, and improve customer satisfaction.”

The full keynote is presented in the video below. Read more

MODERATOR:
Wen Ruan, TextWise

PANELISTS:
Ronald M. Kaplan, Powerset division of bing
Christian F. Hempelmann, RiverGlass, Inc.
Riza Berkan, hakia

Semantic Search technology in the Semantic Web community is often understood as retrieval of knowledge from tagged data such as RDF sources, which require substantial formatting and markup to realize. Understanding unstructured query and document text and conducting searches according to their meaning is another approach, exemplified by linguistically rooted semantic matching, ontological knowledge-based semantic interpretation, and statistically based semantic similarity search.

This panel will look at different ways to tackle semantic search as a problem of text understanding. Powerset division of bing’s natural-language processing engine does deep syntactical analysis to determine the meaning of a query or a sentence. Hakia relies on a language-independent ontology model and an ontology-based English lexicon to translate text into a representation of its meaning. RiverGlass has developed an ontological semantic approach to search and text analytics, emphasizing the in-context, linguistic meaning of textual content in order to return truly relevant results in response to information requests. TextWise’s Semantic Signature matching looks for similarities between a query and text at the topic level.

Semantic Search Beyond RDF from Semantic Universe on Vimeo.

PRESENTER:
Holger Knublauch
Vice President
TopQuadrant

The current generation of Semantic Web languages is well suited to link data and to define domain concepts and relationships. However, real-world applications that operate on those linked data models typically need higher expressivity than what is provided by OWL and RDF Schema alone. SPIN is an open-source framework that supports the use of SPARQL to define business rules and constraint checks on Semantic Web models with object-oriented modeling techniques. This simple yet powerful mechanism makes it possible to define self-describing domain models that can then be used by generic software components such as user interface renderers, schema mappers and workflow engines. Instead of hard-coding behavior in languages like Java, SPIN makes it possible to declaratively define complex business rules and processes. SPIN can also be used to define new higher-level modeling languages with built-in semantics.

This talk:

• Sets the stage with a quick review of SPARQL (incl. CONSTRUCT keyword)
• Introduces SPIN as a mechanism to attach SPARQL queries to class definitions
• Shows how to define new SPARQL functions and reusable query templates with SPIN
• Demonstrates the use of SPIN for tasks ranging from unit conversion to computer games
• Shows how the ideas of SPIN give rise to a new software development paradigm around self-describing linked data models

SPIN: An object-oriented framework for business rules using SPARQL from Semantic Universe on Vimeo.

MODERATOR:
Steve Bastasini, Cerebra

PANELISTS:
Eghosa Omoigui, Intel Capital
Peter Rip, Crosslink Capital
Michael S. Dunn, Hearst Interactive Media
Shawn Carolan, Menlo Ventures

After a period of caution about the viability of semantic technologies, investors seem more willing to fund semantic start-ups right now. And even with the economy in distress, semantics is managing to create excitement amongst the VCs. Semantic search has been hot for a couple of years – the possibility of finding the next Google being just too enticing – but the focus seems now to be shifting to enterprise and consumer apps where as Jim Hendler famously said "a little semantics goes a long way." Money is going into enterprise software, such as business intelligence tools, and innovative consumer apps based around social networks, smarter information filtering and productivity enhancement.

So what do the VCs want to see in the business plans for semantic start-ups now? Are there still plenty of good opportunities out there for entrepreneurs or have the best ideas already claimed their share of available capital?

Panel: Venture Capital Outlook from Semantic Universe on Vimeo.

MODERATOR:
Greg Stuart, gregstuart.com

PANELISTS:
Keith DeWeese, Tribune Company-Tribune Interactive
Evan Sandhaus, New York Times Company
Paul Berry, HuffingtonPost.com
Jim Stanley, CBS Interactive – Technology & News
Michael S. Dunn, Hearst Interactive Media

This discussion features representatives from major media companies who are seriously investigating or presently using semantic technologies in their sites. The conversation will focus on the business and operational benefits of using semantic technologies in publishing and media sites.

Publishers Panel from Semantic Universe on Vimeo.