Kas Thomas recently commented on Adobe’s Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) which he thinks is on its way becoming an ISO standard. Thomas writes, “for at least three years I’ve been saying that it would be in Adobe’s best interest to hand oversight over this ostensibly open standard to a bonafide Standards Body (rather than let adoption languish as people continue to associate XMP with ‘Adobe-proprietary’). Happily, Adobe is in fact now doing the right thing: XMP is in the process of becoming ISO-16684-1, via an effort led by my colleague Frank Biederich. This effort couldn’t have come at a better time. The content world is in desperate need of an industry-standard way to represent rich-content metadata, and I strongly believe XMP is the right technology at the right time.” Read more

Jive Software recently unveiled Jive 5, “the most advanced and powerful Social Business platform in the industry. With this launch, Jive sets a new standard of Social Business excellence, further extending its market leadership. Jive 5 helps organizations harness the power of their most powerful asset, the social network. Businesses are driven by ideas, conversations, expertise, knowledge and connections created in the networks of their employees, customers and partners. Jive 5 captures this knowledge into a collaborative, social platform that transforms the way people work.” Read more

On Saturday, I once again board a plane from London to San Francisco; the first of two trips to the city in June, and my fourth (or possibly fifth?) time attending the Semantic Technology Conference.

The conference itself is in its seventh year, and now seems settled into its San Francisco home after a number of years further down the Bay in San Jose. As in previous years, the programme is rich, varied, and packed with so many parallel tracks that it can at first seem daunting for both newcomers and old hands alike. In a bid to make things a bit easier for people, we’re gathering the friendly team from the monthly Semantic Link podcast, and sticking them up on stage on Sunday evening to pick out their highlights for the week ahead. I’m sure they’ll also offer hints and tips for navigating the corridors and session rooms, and possibly even flag up the best of the secret roof-top parties. Read more

The W3C recently interviewed Jeanne Holm, Chief Knowledge Architect at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Cal Tech. Holm also leads the Knowledge Management team at NASA. In the interview, Holm stated, “The goal of our project was to make it easy find expertise within an organization, or, as you’ll see, across organizational boundaries. The project is called POPS for ‘People, Organizations, Projects, and Skills.’ The acronym does not include E for Expert for a good reason: we tried three times to create a system with data specifically about expertise, but failed each time for different social reasons. Each attempt relied on self-generated lists of expertise. In the first attempt, people over- or under-inflated their expertise, sometimes to bolster their resumes. The second attempt prompted labor unions to get overly involved because greater expertise could be tied to higher pay. The third approach involved profiles verified by management, and that led to a number of human resources grievances when there was a disagreement. In all cases, the data became suspect.” Read more

Ensuring national security is often a matter of connecting the dots – of discovering and digging into the relationships between individuals (recent evidence: Osama bin Laden being tracked down through one of his couriers), and among people and organizations. Businesses might want to take a page from that playbook, finding within their own data and that of external sources such as social media unexpected relationships that can lead to new markets, clients, or even employee leads.

Data Intelligence Technologies is hoping to exploit the data relationship expertise it developed in the national security consulting arena — “building bad guy networks,” as founder and CEO James Kraemer puts it — to the commercial enterprise space (as well as continuing to serve the national security market). “On a high level we allow business intelligence where you get insight into data. All BI offers that,” Kraemer says. What sets this solution apart, he says, is supporting knowledge networks with targeting features that an organization can use to search, look for profiles, and discover additional relationships inside the data.

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Maryland-based semantic technology company Revelytix will be presenting a number of their most promising products at the Semantic Technology Conference in a few weeks. One of their sessions will focus on Interactive Visualization Tools for Ontologies: “They say ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ and it is Revelytix’s belief that the lack of meaningful visual representations of ontologies makes the whole idea of using them harder for the masses to adopt. In our efforts to create a robust interactive ontology visualization tool we have met many challenges… We will demonstrate our current visualization tool and how we have dealt with these issues.” Read more

80 Legs is looking for a Systems Operations Engineer and a Data Engineer in Houston, TX. A qualified candidates for the Systems Operations Engineer position “Takes on the challenge of understanding and monitoring a complex, high-performance back-end infrastructure. Is constantly looking for ways to improve the performance of back-end operations and make monitoring those systems more efficient. Has a combination of development and systems experience.” The Data Engineer candidate “Understands and has experience with big data technologies (e.g., NoSQL, Hadoop). Has a solid understanding of data structures. Gets excited when working with unfathomably large data sets and computational challenges they present.” Read more

According to a recent article, “Russia’s most popular search engine, Yandex, is seeing its shares slide in its second day of trading… Yandex, which attracted 38.3 million unique users in March and secured 64 percent of all Russian search traffic, priced its initial public offering at $25 per share. Almost immediately, the company’s shares soared, and continued to rise throughout the day. At the close of trading yesterday, Yandex shares settled at $37.75 after reaching a high of more than $42.” Read more

A recent interview with Marcus Ebner, a geologist working as a domain expert in knowledge management at the Geological Survey of Austria sheds some light on semantics and data management. The article begins, “The Geological Survey of Austria is a public sector research institution that is affiliated with the Austrian Federal Ministry for Science and Research and as such the premier advisory body for the Austrian Government for geosciences. The core program covers diverse activities in a wide range of geosciences, such as geoscientific mapping, basic research, environmental monitoring including natural resources and water management and maintenance of extensive databases and archives. PoolParty Team had the chance to talk with Mr. Ebner about the role of SKOS and other standards in the context of the INSPIRE Directive and other scenarios for data harmonisation.” Read more

What do the Open Travel Association, the Filoli historic site of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and the Ontology Platform Special Interest Group (PSIG) at the Object Management Group all have in common? Ontologies, of course!

Starting at the most obvious point, the Ontology PSIG developed the Ontology Definition Metamodel (ODM), and at the upcoming SemTech conference, Elisa Kendall, CEO of Sandpiper Software, co -editor of ODM and co-chair of the Ontology PSIG, will discuss some of the latest work underway there. Of which, she tells The Semantic Web Blog, there is “a ton.”

Among the efforts underway are making ODM current with W3C specs including support for OWL 2 (which should be available towards year’s end), and others that depend to some degree on the standard and building on that baseline.

These include vertical industry efforts such as Common Terminology Services (CTS) 2 from the health care sector’s HL7 standardization body. Kendall says this builds on the first version of ODM, with the focus on using ontologies and depending on semantics for providing the terminology, translation and cross-correlation of the maze of hospital and insurance codes to enable interchange of this data among parties.

The CTS2 effort has been generalized so that it can support terminology services for other verticals as well, which the OMG Ontology PSIG group hopes will make it more broadly useful. “We’ll have to see how that plays out in practice, since it’s only just being published this summer,” Kendall says.

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