Adrian Pohl reports that the German National Library has decided to go Linked Open Data and publish the national bibliography. Pohl writes, “Good news from Germany. The German National Library (1) changed its licensing regime for Linked Data to CC0 which makes the data open according to the open definition, (2) has begun to publish the German national bibliography as Linked Open Data.” Pohl translates an email announcing this development thus: “In 2010 the German National Library (DNB) started publishing authority data as Linked Data. The existing Linked Data service of the DNB is now extended with title data. In this context the licence for linked data is shifted to Creative Commons Zero.” Read more

Accenture is looking for a Data Management R&D Consultant in San Jose, CA. According to the post, “The Data & Platforms Consultant will work to develop, implement and market innovative solutions which change how information is used by organizations to gain competitive advantage and drive new, differentiated outcomes.  The candidate will be expected to contribute to the group’s ongoing efforts in thought leadership, solution architecture, business case development and technology evaluation and implementation, bringing a spirit of creative and collaborative problem solving to the team.  The candidate should establish themselves as experts in one or more of the core technologies relevant to our asset development work.  The consultant will lead small teams to deliver projects on time and on budget, transforming early stage proof-of-concept research into commercially deployable assets.” Read more

The Journal of Web Semantics has released volume 10, a special issue on Scalability edited by Jeff Heflin and Heiner Struckenschmidt: “Preprints from the issue, which includes a short introduction and four research papers, are available on the Journal of Web Semantics preprint server.” The preprints include an editorial by Heflin and Struckenschmidt entitled Web-Scale Semantic Information Processing.

Other preprint articles currently available online include the following: Scalable Distributed Indexing and Query Processing over Linked Data by Marcel Karnstedt, Kai-Uwe Sattler and Manfred Hauswirth; Searching Web Data: an Entity Retrieval and High-Performance Indexing Model by Renaud Delbru, Stephane Campinas and Giovanni Tummarello Read more

A new article reports that Siri has found its first real competitor in Evi: “Evi, which went live on Monday evening, is not the creation of a Google or a Microsoft. It’s the brainchild of William Tunstall-Pedoe, a British start-up entrepreneur who until a few years back taught computer science at the country’s august Cambridge University. ‘Evi Lives!’, his start-up, True Knowledge, announced on its blog Monday evening, as the app first became available for download for iPhone and Android users. Within hours it had shot to being the top download in the lifestyle category of Apple’s App Store, crashing True Knowledge’s servers.” Read more

Elf Sternberg recently proposed a Grand Unifying Theory to make Backbone and RDFa compatible. He writes, “Last night, I was working on a little demonstration project, teaching myself the intricacies of Backbone/CouchDB interaction. I wrote my first CouchDB views and figured out what they’re for, which is a massive step toward world domination and all that. I was working on the retrieval layer, and thinking about the create/update features, when I said to myself, ‘Hey, Self, can you use that sexy new RDFa stuff to handle the create/update feature?’ I’ve been thinking about this because I have a different project that’s very RDFa-heavy, and the details of implementation have been challenging. But no, I had to come to a different conclusion: RDFa and Backbone.js are incompatible.” Read more

Cityon is looking for a Senior Software Developer in Houston, TX. According to the post, “This is an 8-month contract, to begin as soon as possible. This person will design, develop and communicate software architecture models with a primary focus on J2EE platforms, Service Oriented Architecture and integration technologies.” This position will “Perform Analysis, Design, Implementation and Testing of various components for the Semantic Technology Initiative and related applications of the Research Station program.” Read more

Paul A. Houle, founder of Ontology2 recently reported that his company has announced “the beta release of the Ookaboo RDF Dump, which contains metadata for nearly 1,000,000 public domain and Creative Commons images of more than 500,000 specific topics from Dbpedia and Freebase. The Ookaboo RDF dump is released under a CC-BY-SA license that is friendly to both academic and commericial use. With precision in excess of 0.98, Ookaboo enables entirely new applications for image search and classification.” Read more

Over the last two years Wikipedia has benefited from a number of Wikipedians in Residence, people who make data from the cultural institutions they work at available to Wikipedia. The article states, “It was just under two years ago when Liam Wyatt proposed a concept that seemed so bold, it required the British Museum to run a risk assessment before they’d agree to it. Liam suggested that he serve as the ‘Wikipedian in Residence,’ a role that would allow him to put into practice the idea that cultural institutions should share their knowledge with Wikipedia.” Read more

Digital Reasoning, developers of the Synthesys platform for discovering the meaning in unstructured data at scale, has on the roadmap exposing to and packaging up for its customers a simplified version of its internal technology for teaching the system new grammatical structures so that it can quickly understand custom or otherwise specific data sets.

The company has quickly added support for new languages such as Arabic, traditional and simplified Chinese, Farsi and Urdu (with more languages on the way) to Synthesys using the tool. The tool gets the software up to speed on each one in just a few weeks by teaching it the grammatical structure and then letting it go off and figure out what the words mean for its work of transforming unstructured (and structured) data into the underlying facts, entities, relationships, and associated terms.

“In the same way we teach it languages you may have a data set that is highly scientific, for example, and this tool essentially makes it easier for our customers to make Synthesys even more accurate for that specific set of data,” says Dave Danielson, VP of marketing.

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Mike Bergman recently asked the deceptively simple question, what do things mean on the semantic web? He explains, “The crowning achievement of the semantic Web is the simple use of URIs to identify data. Further, if the URI identifier can resolve to a representation of that data, it now becomes an integral part of the HTTP access protocol of the Web while providing a unique identifier for the data. These innovations provide the basis for distributed data at global scale, all accessible via Web devices such as browsers and smartphones that are now a ubiquitous part of our daily lives.” Read more