Image Courtesy: Flickr/Patrick Hoesly

The financial services industry is taking to semantic tech in an important way, and that’s in the form of the Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO), which aims to standardize the language used to precisely define the terms, conditions, and characteristics of financial instruments; the legal and relationship structure of business entities; the content and time dimensions of market data; and the legal obligations and process aspects of corporate actions. Attendees at SemTech Biz in San Francisco will get a deep dive on the how’s and why’s, at this session, while the FIBO Technology Summit invitation event will present an opportunity for working collaboratively to continue advancing the effort that has its roots in The Enterprise Data Management Council and communities of interests.

Leading that event will be Dennis E. Wisnosky, founder of Wizdom Systems, Inc. and former CTO and Chief Architect of the DoD Business Mission Area, who was recently named to provide technical strategy and operational guidance to help the Council finalize and implement FIBO standards, and David S. Newman, SVP & Strategic Planning Manager Enterprise Architecture at Wells Fargo, and Chair of the EDM Council’s Semantics Program. (Newman, with Enterprise Data Management Council Head of Semantics and Standards Mike Bennett, will also host the SemTech FIBO session.)  Speaking of the upcoming event, Wisnosky explains that a goal is to cast a wide net to find the new tech ideas and developments that both can bring benefits to FIBO in the short term and influence the longer-term research agenda to help the financial industry.

As FIBO stands now, in June the second draft of the FIBO Foundations ontology and the conceptual FIBO Business Entities ontology will be presented at a meeting of the Object Management Group in Berlin. By year’s end it is expected that the OMG will have ratified these as formal standards. “We are on the path to turn the corner from thinking of what FIBO will be to delivering it,” says Wisnosky. Read more

Facebook is integrating into its platform Rovi Video’s descriptive information on millions of TV shows, movies, celebrities, sports events and more. The partnership should help users flesh out more details in their entertainment likes and status updates that tag their movie, TV, and other media experiences in their profiles, and aid app developers in leveraging a standardized set of entertainment data for new apps and user-engagement.

Rovi Corp.’s media metadata Video Data set boasts standardized, structured data on more than 4 million programs, including theatrical, DVD and Blu-ray releases.

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The cloud’s role in processing big semantic data sets was recently highlighted in early April when DERI and Fujitsu Laboratories announced a new data storage technology for storing and querying Linked Open Data that resides on a cloud-based platform (see our story here).

The cloud conversation, with storage as one key discussion point, will continue to be an active one in Big Data circles, whether users are working with massive, connected Linked Data sets or trying to run NLP across the Twitter firehose. CloudSigma, for example, recently publicly disclosed that it is using an all solid-state drive (SSD) solution for its public cloud offering that lets users purchase CPU, RAM, storage and bandwidth independently. The use of SSD, says CEO Robert Jenkins, avoids the problem that spinning disks have with the randomized, multi-tenant access of a public cloud that leads to storage bottlenecks and curbs performance.

That, combined with the company’s approach of letting customers size virtual machine resources as they like, as well as leverage exposed advanced hypervisor settings to optimize for their particular applications, he says, brings the use of the public cloud infrastructure closer to what companies can get out of private cloud environments, and at a price-performance win.

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Today marks International Women’s Day 2013, and Dow Jones & Company is marking the date with a video and infographics that looks at women’s evolution in business. The data informing these elements comes from its Factiva information service, which recently enhanced its metadata and taxonomy credentials with MarkLogic Corp.’s search technology (see our story here).

Factiva was used to map media mentions of women executives in search of the top 20 over the past ten years. The featured individuals are ranked in the infographic according to the number of mentions received in publications ranging from The Wall Street Journal to Barron’s to China’s People’s Daily.

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There’s more than one way to get a taxonomy. A company can go out and buy one for its industry, for instance, but the risk is that the terms may not relate to how it talks about content in its own organization, and the hierarchy may not be the right fit either. That sets up two potential outcomes, says Chris Riley, VP of marketing at Pingar: You wind up having to customize it, or with users who just ignore it.

It’s possible to build one, but that’s a big job and a costly one, too – especially for many enterprises, where there hasn’t traditionally been a focus on structuring content and so the skills to do it aren’t necessarily there. While industries like publishing, oil and gas, life sciences, and pharma have that bent, many other verticals do not. In fact, Riley notes, they may realize they have a content organization problem, but not that what they’d benefit from to address it even goes by the name ‘taxonomy.’

Pingar’s looking to help out those enterprises that want to bring organization to their content, whether or not they’re familiar with the concept of a taxonomy. It just launched its automated Taxonomy Generator Service that uses an organization’s own content to build a taxonomy that mirrors its own way of talking about things and its understanding of relationships between child and parent terms.

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What’s new with Freebase? Well, aside from its data now being used by Bing to provide information about entities in a similar way to Google’s Knowledge Graph, a new design of its web client is being tested here.

Its post about the new design highlights these as a few of the client’s biggest changes:

* A search bar at the top of the screen lets you filter the topic display and show any by domain, type or property. When you filter by domain, the page will show all of the types and their properties linked to the current topic. When filtering by type, it will show just the properties within that type and filtering by property will show just that property.

Following successful runs in London and New York City, the Semantic Technology & Business Conference (#SemTechBiz) is returning to San Francisco June 2-5, 2013. Today, we are pleased to announce that the Call For Presentations is open for submissions.

The deadline to enter is January 18, 2013, and we are currently seeking proposals for:

• Conference Sessions – 45 minutes
• Panel Sessions – 45 minutes (must propose moderator and panelists, even if not finalized)
• Tutorials – 3 hours
• Lightning Talks – 5 minutes

What are we looking for?

We are interested in a wide variety of presentations, from business and consumer applications through to fundamental technology discussions.  Over the years, the emphasis of the program has gradually shifted more towards practical experience as Semantic Technologies have matured and gained adoption both on the web and in enterprise systems, so we’re very much looking for semantic case studies and project experience. If you are developing a tool, or using semantics to create an exciting new start-up company, we want to hear from you as well.  Keep in mind that precedence will be given to sessions that offer an interactive element and are designed to provide actionable ideas (get to the heart of the matter!). And having said all that, we still keep time-slots available for cutting edge research and thought-leadership.  So SemTechBiz really is an all-inclusive program for the community.

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Dr. Graham G. Rong, founder of IKA LLC, and senior industrial liaison officer at the MIT Corporate Relations Office, leading collaboration between the institute and industry, has been working on a semantic web approach to social and financial analysis based on digital financial data and other information related to companies that can be found on the Internet. The approach first turns XBRL data from SEC reports into RDF format, and then links that with the relevant social information in the company’s ecosystem, to deliver more business value.

The project, which began at MIT (see our earlier story here), has advanced to the application stage, and the software is moving from a JAVA to a browser-based interface. Rong says the team also is developing a web services API for the system.

“Current XBRL technology primary collects financial data for reporting, and secondarily, as more XBRL-based financial data becomes available, it will need to effectively extract financial data for value,” says Rong. Semantic web technology lets the focus be on the latter.

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As the opening ceremony for the London Olympics gets underway tonight, sentiment on the event can be gauged nightly in a big way: The EDF Energy London Eye Ferris Wheel, the largest in Europe, will turn colors depending on the sentiment analysis of tweets coming out of the U.K. mentioning the Olympics.

Sosolimited, an art and technology studio helmed by three MIT grads, has written software to capture these tweets and then uses sentiment analysis algorithms to assess their emotional content. SentiStength, a program that itself hails from the U.K., is reportedly the source of the algorithms. During the day, that will be charted on a large LED next to the London Eye, and each night the data will guide the sequence of a visual lightshow around the Eye.  “That data is played back out across full color architectural lighting fixtures around the Eye and with large ground based search beams,” according to a blog posting from founder Justin Manor. It’s been reported that yellow will be the dominant color to express positive sentiment, while purple will showcase negative sentiment.

Expectations: Early on, at least, probably a lot of yellow, even if traffic is a nightmare, from a lot of outraged Brits who want to have their say over Mitt Romney’s comment about how well-prepared the city is for the Games.

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Ecosystem image via Shutterstock

As the Semantic Web Blog recently noted, 3RoundStones’ Callimachus Enterprise emerged as the winner of the Top Semantic Technology Start-up competition that was held at the Semantic Tech & Business Conference (#SemTechBiz) in San Francisco a few weeks ago. The commercially supported Linked Data Management system, now being piloted by eight companies, will this summer be released to the general public as Version 1.0.

Callimachus Enterprise is distinguished not only by its technology, but by CTO David Wood’s presentation that spoke to the real business needs of the enterprise today – including rapidly demonstrating value, in its case around exposing, connecting and visualizing disparate enterprise content – and also in that it provides a way for organizations to deal with their enterprise information in an entirely cloud-based solution. It leverages the Amazon cloud.

“A lot of companies are using cloud-based solutions for travel and expense tracking,” says CEO Bernadette Hyland. “But this is the beginning of a new wave.”

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