A new article reports, “the Guardian announced the birth of @GuardianTagBot, the living, tweeting, occasionally sleeping Twitter account that serves as the public face of the Guardian’s content API explorer. Tweet @GuardianTagBot with a search term — or a whole group of search terms — and it’ll @-reply you with a link to Guardian content that matches your query. Whether you’re looking for Nieman Lab mentions in the Guardian (who isn’t?), or wondering what Nick Clegg is up today (ditto), or concerned that David Cameron may be a lizard (um)…the bot probably has your answer.” Read more

Bill Ives recently discussed the advancements of Salience 5.0 with Lexalytics CEO Jeff Catlin. Ives writes, “Semantic technology differs from most computing as it learns on the job. This can provide great benefits but it can also be time consuming… [Lexalytics] came up with a clever idea to reduce the learning curve. They had their semantic engine digest Wikipedia to gain an understanding of human thought and build their Concept Matrices™. This allows it to do things that most computer technology would struggle with such as understanding that pizza is a food even though the word food was never associated with pizza in the text it was looking at.” Read more

[Editor's Note: This is Juan Sequeda's final report from the International Semantic Web Conference in Bonn, Germany. See his other reports here:
Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5 ]

Day 5 of ISWC 2011 was the third full day and last day of the conference. It started with a keynote from Gerhard Weikum title “For a few more triples“. The rest of the day consisted of sessions on Outrageous Ideas, Social Web, In-Use: Content Management,  Ontology Evaluation, Ontology Matching and Mapping, User Interaction and In Use: Applications. The highlight of the day was the Closing Ceremony, where the winners of several prizes were announced.
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Photo Courtesy: Flickr/ Sarah_Ackerman

It’s that spooky time of year again – in your neighborhood and on the Semantic Web, too. Put on your goblin getups, and see how some semantic webbers and related sites are getting Halloween treats into their mix:

• We’ll start with a response we got to a query we posed about how you might have some fun with Halloween-oriented SPARQL queries. From Bob DuCharme, solutions architect at TopQuadrant, comes a query to extract a SKOS taxonomy of horror movies from DBpedia.

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Orbis Technologies is searching for a Senior Software Systems Engineer in Warner Robins, GA. The post states, “The position will integrate commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) and open source software to create custom solutions for commercial and government clients. The ideal candidate will be experienced in Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), DoD Architecture Framework (DoDAF), and working with vendors to successfully customize solutions. The candidate should possess leadership and project management skills to report project status to the customer, stakeholders, and company management.” Read more

Skimlinks has released the latest version of its in-text monetization solution: “SkimWords 2.0 is the first real-time, fully automated content monetization solution to feature in-text product and price comparison across multiple verticals – including consumer electronics, fashion, beauty, mothering, automotive, and lifestyle categories.  With SkimWords 2.0, publishers earn incremental revenues, consumers are directed to the optimal retail site to make their purchases, and advertisers receive highly qualified traffic.” Read more

At midnight Eastern US Time on October 31, 2011, the Call For Presentations ends for the first Berlin Semantic Technology & Business (#SemTechBiz) Conference.

About the Conference

The 2012 Semantic Tech & Business Conference (#SemTechBiz) will be held at the Seminaris CampusHotel Berlin in Berlin, Germany on 6-7 February 2012.

The conference is two days of presentations, panels, case studies and conversations. The conference is designed for business and technology executives who need to learn what semantic technologies are and how to take advantage of semantics in their enterprise and web-based systems. Attendees will further their technical understanding in introductory sessions and learn from our expert Keynote speakers how to integrate the technology into their organization and how to benefit from it. Discovering all the latest tools while providing an unprecedented opportunity to network, talk shop and share ideas among like-minded industry peers and influencers is what the conference is all about.

If you have not yet submitted a proposal and have a good story to tell about a business application of Semantic Technologies, now is your chance. Begin the submission process here:

http://semtechbizberlin2012.semanticweb.com/cfp.cfm?pgid=40

According to a new article, “HighWire Press, Stanford University’s provider of hosting and web publishing platforms to scholarly publishers, has partnered with TEMIS, a leading provider of Semantic Content Enrichment enterprise solutions. Under the strategic technology and business partnership, HighWire will integrate the full suite of Luxid software within its ePublishing Platform to provide automated content annotation, enrichment, and linking to its customers.” Read more

Antidot, which makes the semantically-powered Information Factory and Antidot Finder Suite software, this month released its db2triples as open source component software, available here, which implements the W3C RDB2RDF Working Group’s proposed R2RML language and Direct Mapping, covered here.

Antidot, in fact, shared with the W3C its experience leveraging Direct Mapping and R2RML to, in just half a day, fetch information from hundreds of tables in a client’s Magento ecommerce database to transform it to a graph model. That’s normally a complex task, says Antidot founder and CEO Fabrice Lacroix, which would involve data transformation and database content indexing of an unknown database model. “No one [here at Antidot] knows the complex, dynamic data model from Magento, and it’s very difficult to reverse-engineer these sort of models,” he says.

“So with Direct Mapping and R2RML it is very easy to go directly from the database to the graph you need…and then extract just the business objects we need. We did it in just half a day. Imagine that. For such complex stuff that’s a very short timeframe.” Lacroix says that the company thought it only fair, after that success, to send something back to the community.

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The W3C has announced the publication of the Library Linked Data Incubator Group Final Report; Use Cases; and Datasets, Value Vocabularies, and Metadata Element Sets. Coralie Mercier, the Incubator Activity Lead, commented, “The mission of the Library Linked Data Incubator Group was to help increase the global interoperability of library data on the Web by focusing on the potential role of Linked Data technologies.” Read more