Courtesy: Flickr/ Vince Viloria

Out with the old, in with the new. We’ve covered (here and here) the year past for the semantic web. So now let’s see what might be in store for the year ahead.

Also, don’t forget to listen to our podcast here for more insights into what 2012 may hold.

• Interest in sentiment analysis exploded with the growth of the social Web, although its reputation suffered due to the prevalence of low-grade Twitter-sentiment toys, simplistic, wildly inaccurate systems that misled many into criticism of the concept where it was the cheap implementations they’d tried that were faulty.  In 2012, sentiment analysis will come into its own: Automated (and crowd-sourced!) mining of attitudes, opinions, emotions, and intent from social and enterprise sources, at the “feature” level, linked to real-world profiles and transactional data. — Seth Grimes, founder, Alta Plana Corp

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The small city of Cluj in Romania, of some half-million inhabitants, is responsible for a 2.5 million triple store, as part of a Recognos-led project to develop a “Linked City” community portal. The project was submitted for this year’s ICT Call – SME initiative on Digital Content and Languages, FP7-ICT-2011-SME-DCL. While it didn’t receive funding from that competition, Recognos semantic web researcher Dia Miron, is hopeful of securing help from alternate sources in the coming year to expand the project, including potentially bringing the concept of linked cities to other communities in Romania or elsewhere in Europe.

The idea was to publish information from sources such as local businesses about their services and products, as well as data related to the local government and city events, points of interest and projects, using the Linked Data paradigm, says Miron. Data would also be geolocated. “So we take all the information we can get about a city so that people can exploit it in a uniform manner,” she says.

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The Harvard Boston Research Initiative [HBRI], in conjunction with the City of Boston, has announced that it is seeking applicants for a part-time graduate fellowship. The fellowship runs from February 1, 2012 through August 31, 2012 and applications are due January 1, 2012. The announcement states, “The fellowship is funded by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, but doctoral students from any school in the greater Boston area with strong skills in data management and analysis, and an interest in computational social science are encouraged to apply.”

“Fellows will work 15-25 hours/week, mainly at Boston City Hall, and will be paid $20/hour. While at City Hall, fellows will spend much of their time working closely with a team of policy makers and researchers interested in using new types of data to carry out analyses that can improve both public policy and scholarship about key urban issues. ” Read more

Courtesy: Flickr/ myaimistrue

We recently rounded up some thought leaders’ perspectives on the big semantic trends of 2011 – most (if not all) of them positive. Here’s some further perspective about where hopes and expectations fell a little short of reality:

• The biggest lost possibility was not rethinking the whole RDF stack. Instead of actually reducing complexity, it seems the direction is hiding complexity. This makes its proposition unattractive for web developers. – Andraž Tori, Founder and Director, Zemanta

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The Semantic Technology and Business Conference is headed to Berlin, Germany, in 2012 for the very first time. SemTechBiz Berlin will be held February 6-7, 2012 at the Seminaris Campus Hotel. Packed with case studies and real-world perspectives, SemTechBiz Berlin offers two comprehensive days of fresh insight and immersive learning from global experts in technology, financial services, insurance, healthcare, publishing, government, automotive and enterprise data.

The highly anticipated conference will feature an array of speakers at the forefront of semantic web technologies in business applications. These speakers will discuss how semantic technologies are being used in organizations today to make money, save money, leverage existing resources, and solve problems in innovative ways.  In coming weeks, we will focus on several of these stories. Read more

Yahoo! has opened up their content analysis technology to web developers. According to the company’s blog, “The newly launched Yahoo! Content Analysis service replaces Yahoo!’s popular Term Extraction service and now provides advanced content analysis on either text or a URL, leverages Yahoo!’s state of the art machine-learned ranking (MLR) technology to extract key terms from the content, and, more importantly, to rank them based on their overall importance to the content. The output you receive contains the keywords and their ranks along with other actionable metadata.” Read more

Today, Experian, the global information services company, announced that it has acquired Garlik Limited, a provider of web monitoring services based in the United Kingdom. Garlik uses Semantic Web Technologies to help consumers protect themselves from the risks of identity theft and financial fraud.  At the last SemTechBiz UK Conference, Steve Harris, CTO of Garlik, presented “Combatting Online Crime with RDF.” Mr. Harris presented a compelling case of Garlik’s use of Semantic Technology throughout its offerings to support business-critical, highly sensitive production systems to financial institutions worldwide. Read more

Karen Hanna recently informed business analysts about a few things they should know about Facebook Timeline. Hanna writes, “The “old” Facebook profile shows a user’s posts in order from new to old, and information such as photos and videos are organized in a tabular fashion. Timeline is a broader, more visual view of each user, where updates may be highlighted for their importance. Users may also “fill in the blanks” to include significant past events. Users can potentially provide a lot more content, something that is of interest to advertisers and businesses.” Read more

An app to discover 44,000 French monuments. Completed in four days. By one person. Without coding.

Head over to this demo from Antidot, publisher of Information Factory and Antidot Finder Suite software, and you can see the search mash-up it says was created by simply assembling existing components using its technology. Information Factory handled the data processing work flow that resulted in a data mesh outputting an RDF graph containing more than 4.5 million tripesl, with about 450,000 inferred from open data sources.

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Semantic advertising web service ADmantX has announced a partnership with adBrite, “the largest independent ad exchange, to offer brand safety, greater ad engagement and page-level, cookie-less targeting to advertisers and publishers.” The article states, “In today’s complex and rapidly evolving online advertising landscape, audience targeting is at the heart of any attempt to maximize online ad effectiveness. Semantic-based analysis and dynamic categorization provided by ADmantX will now be available through adBrite, allowing them to leverage the combination of emotional intelligence and contextual and semantic targeting in real time.” Read more