Last week, the Second Linked Data Meetup London was held at the University of London Union. There were several compelling presentations discussed on Twitter  including the BBC’s use of Linked Data for their Wildlife Finder app. One of the many promising topics to emerge from the day was the introduction of a new Linked Data API. While there have been other Linked Data APIs (Pubby and irON), this API has the more narrow goal of lowering the bar for non-SemWeb developers to access these rich data collections. It is intended as a simple RESTful layer that returns JSON representations of RDF collections backed by a SPARQL endpoint. The API was primarily developed by Dave Reynolds, Jeni Tennison and Leigh Dodds. At the "How the Web of Data Will Be Won" talk by Jeni Tennison and John Sheridan, they emphasized that extending their successes on exposing government data in a linked fashion will require a focus on usability to attract new developers.

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SAP, the international enterprise software vendor, is just one of the many large companies whose core needs in a globally connected business environment can be addressed in part by the development of a multi-lingual semantic web.

Web services are the heart of SAP’s software, and its requirements to make those services searchable in different languages is one of the use cases for the new European project Monnet (Multilingual Ontologies for Networked Knowledge), whose goal is to provide a semantics-based solution for integrated information access across language barriers. As the Germany-based company’s development work expands further into other parts of the world where the European country’s native language isn’t widely known—India now and probably China in the future—it’s important for programmers there to be able to access the description of SAP’s web services in their native languages, or perhaps English. Making it possible to deal with information at the semantic level will help solve this challenge, allowing for more advanced and uniform integration, aggregation, querying and presentation of information across languages.

The need to deal with such global business issues is just one reason the tech industry is soon to have its First Workshop on the Multilingual Semantic Web, set for April. But it’s not the only one. International non-profit organizations such as the United Nations are seeing the benefits of transforming their systems to semantic web technologies, and it’s very important to them that the semantic web be able to manage multi-lingual information so that they can communicate with users all over the world who have very different levels of comfort with the English language. “We have the special enterprise, and business intelligence, and certain international organizations that need not only to manage information in many different languages, but also need to customize the information for those different linguistic communities,” says Elena Montiel-Ponsoda, Ontology Engineering Group, Departamento de Inteligencia Artificial Universidad Politécnica de Madrid in Spain. She is one of the members of the workshop’s organizing committee.

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During September and October 2008, the financial markets had their meltdown moment. It was scary as hell for anybody who was even remotely close to the action. As a precipitator of the Great Recession, it has impacted us all. But that is all history, right? The stock market is up and everything is back to normal? Wrong. Politicians will regulate the markets so we can get back to normal? Wrong. What is happening under the surface is a much bigger wave, driven by the Internet that is fundamentally shifting the economics and power structures of the financial services business.

This is the first of ten markets in our Semantic Wave series (click here for the introductory posts that set the scene).

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