Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

American Tower, an owner and operator of communications sites for the wireless and broadcast industries, announced this week that it is moving from using Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services for its data warehousing application to use Expressor Software‘s semantic data integration system.

What is semantic data integration? In Expressor’s case, it’s a patent-pending solution that leverages what it calls smart semantics for data mapping. The traditional path to data integration—combining data from different sources into some sort of unified view of the information that the business requires—relies on mapping sources to targets against technical or physical metadata, and then writing business or transformation rules that are more or less tied to these physical metadata constructs. The result is that there’s too much time spent on mapping over and over again to each and every application a business needs, and as the volume of data grows exponentially the challenge does as well.

“We looked at our space and said how, for so many years people did data integration over and over the same way, mapping sources to targets, physical metadata to physical metadata, and it’s not the right way of doing it because there’s no abstraction,” says Michael Waclawiczek, VP of Marketing at Expressor.

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Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Got a question about the semantic web? There’s a new site that aims to help you answer it: SemanticOverflow launched this week. It follows the model of stackoverflow.com for asking programming-related questions, leveraging wiki, newsgroup, social media and reputation-ranking features to spur community involvement and good discussion.

Created by The Wandering Glitch blogger and programmer Andrew Matthews, the site aims to help both the technical and non-technical semantic web community pose questions on topics that run the gamut from development to broader explorations of where the field is going.

One of the interesting questions posted on the site is what web site would you use to show someone the power of the semantic web. Here are some of the answers SemanticWeb.com might provide, based on some of the sites (both in the upper- and lower-case versions of Semantic Web) we’ve noted in the past and a few new ones to add to the mix:

▏ DailyMe: DailyMe processes articles from hundreds of news sources, using OpenCalais’ semantic web technology to help power the categorization behind its personalized news web site and delivery service. It enables a more fine-grained understanding of content and the entities users have expressed interest in, from people to companies, through their reading habits, to enable continual and dynamic news personalization.

▏ BooRah: Spokane, Charlotte, and Honolulu have recently joined the list of metro areas whose restaurants are subject to the “Boos” and the “Rahs” of the users who visit and care to comment about them. The site applies semantic and patented natural language processing technology to map any entity on any web page it crawls and associate that with the correct local business, then extract sentiment terms around food, ambiance or service to contribute to overall ratings in those areas.

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