RightNow is looking for a Computational Linguist in California: “As a computational linguist you will work on the intersection of linguistics and computer science. The ideal candidate understands the structure of languages and is able to encode linguistic information for automated processing. As a computational linguist you deliver customer projects, but also contribute to the general improvement of the RightNow Intent Guide, which offers consumers outstanding web self-service by truly understanding what they ask for. You develop linguistic resources, such as dictionaries, grammars, and semantic hierarchies, which are tuned for specific languages, verticals or customers, you continuously improve the performance of our Natural Language Processing technology in specific customer projects, and you advise on the best way to further advance the technology and the linguistic resources it uses.” Read more

Cloudera has announced that Digital Reasoning (who our own Jennifer Zaino recently spoke with) “has integrated Cloudera’s Distribution including Apache Hadoop (CDH3) along with support of HBase, the open-source, distributed, column-oriented store into the upcoming Version 3.1 release of Synthesys. The integration allows Digital Reasoning to achieve extreme scale capabilities and provide complex data analytics to government and commercial markets.” Read more

LinkedIn recently handed out free coffee to residents of New York and San Francisco in an effort to promote their new semantically powered online news portal, LinkedIn Today: “Sort of like Paper.li on steroids, the network aggregates popular news items that bubble to the top by its 100+ million users. Similar to what the Huffington Post is doing in the semantic technology space (or what many are calling Web 3.0), LinkedIn is employing artificial intelligence or the ‘wisdom of machines’ to curate the ‘wisdom of (its) crowds’ to surface news that is relevant and in real-time.” Read more

A recent article from LibConf.com discusses the implementation of semantic web technologies in public libraries. The article begins, “Why do we need a new Web?  We often forget the kinds of problems we have with the tools available to us, such as high recall and low precision with Google.  The web is very vocabulary dependent.  Today’s Web search engines do not group web pages, pull out concepts, or understand them.  There is no access to the deep web.”

This is where the semantic web comes in: “We do have tools that can handle complex queries such as Scopus.  These search engines can do this because they have clearly tagged relational databases on the back end.  The semantic web solution is to turn the Web into something like a database, with structured data, controlled vocabularies, and linking.  The point is to create machine-actionable data because computers visit websites as often as people do.” Read more

Lyris Technologies is looking for a Director of Web and Communities in Emeryville, CA. According to the job post, “We desire an accomplished digital leader with more than 10 years experience building and managing best-in-class corporate websites and executing innovative web marketing and community programs. The ideal candidate has clear marketing expertise combined with an exemplary understanding of web tech, user experience, persona-based design, project management, Web 2.0/3.0 and social media networks. Inspirational leadership combined with significant global business skills is the benchmark for success.”

Image: Courtesy Lyris

NoTube, a European research project exploring semantic web and television, recently noted that, “The W3C has now issued a summary of the 2nd workshop on Web and TV, which took place this February in Berlin. NoTube was present at this event and project representatives Libby Miller and Dan Brickley pushed for the use of semantic technology, especially Linked Data, in the TV space as well as for the provision of shared APIs for interacting with the TV playout device.” Read more

One of the issues organizations confront when they take to semantically processing data is how to handle all the results of that work. The output of extracting entities, tagging concepts, classifying page topics and parsing sentiment makes its way to a data store that can get pretty big, making for intense storage and analytics demands.

Orchestr8’s NLP- and machine learning-based AlchemyAPI service, which just last week added sentiment analysis to its retinue, gives content providers, social media monitoring companies, and contextual advertising sectors the tools for all of the above that leads to those big data stores, and now it has in beta a solution for dealing with the demands that creates, too. Its Alchemy SAS (Semantic Analysis System) – a name that is subject to change, by the way – processes content, takes what is generated thanks to the functionality within the AlchemyAPI, and stores and organizes the content analysis and meta-data results into a cloud data store for customers to query and discover patterns in.

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The Semantic Web Journal is putting out a special issue on the semantics of microposts: “The aim of this special issue is to publish a collection of papers covering the range of topics relevant to the analysis, use and reuse of Micropost data. This should cover a wide scope of work that represents current efforts in the fields collaborating with the Semantic Web community to address the challenges identified for the extraction of semantics in Microposts, and the development of intuitive, effective tools that make use of the rich, collective knowledge.” Read more

Ivan Herman – a regular contributor in our monthly SemanticLink podcast – posted his thoughts on an interesting new paper by M.A. Gallego and others entitled “Empirical Study of Real-World SPARQL Queries.” Herman explains, “What they did was to analyse the SPARQL queries as issued by various clients to the DBPedia and the Semantic Web Dogfood dataset to see if some general features appear that RDF triple stores and SPARQL implementers can take into account. This is a workshop paper, i.e., work in progress, so the results must be taken with a pinch of salt. E.g., it seems that DESCRIBE and CONSTRUCT queries are very rarely used (not a big surprise), that the OPTIONAL and UNION are used quite a lot, so their optimization is important, that most of the queries are dead simple, but around half of them rely on FILTER (albeit with one variable only), etc.” Read more

MTV Networks is looking for a Web Applications Developer, Social Games for their Nickelodeon brand. The position is located in San Francisco. The responsibilities include, “Develop new technology for high availability, high demand consumer facing web applications that are changing the face of entertainment and gaming. Translate technical requirements into specifications by working closely with Project Managers as you create new features and functionality for our products. Own and be accountable for multiple development projects in a dynamic iterative release cycle. Define updates, issues and communicate same to key stakeholders in the process. Manage the quality of your code using standard coding guidelines and version control to track changes. Manage resource allocation to meet deadlines and shifting priorities.” Read more