The GeoLinkData Initiative and the Ontology Engineering Group are happy to announce a new version of map4rdf. On the map4rdf website, the creators state, “Recently we have seen a large increase in the amount of geospacial data that is being published using RDF and Linked Data principles. Efforts such as theW3C Geo XG, and most recently the GeoSPARQL initiative are providing the necessary vocabularies to publish this kind of information on the Web of Data. map4rdf is a mapping and faceted browsing tool for exploring and visualizing RDF datasets enhanced with geometrical Information.” Read more

Jacobs Strategic Solutions Group is looking for a Systems Engineer – Enterprise Architecture in Alexandria, VA. This position “will provide support to the CIO of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) enterprise architecture support team, ensuring that all work products and deliverables are delivered in full compliance with client standards for timeliness and quality. Work with government client to identify, define and execute IT strategic goals, objectives and plans for VA Business Operations. This position’s primary focus is to create, articulate and implement IT strategy across VA in close coordination with government clients in the CIO office.” Read more

New Amsterdam... or not?

Earlier this week I spent an enjoyable hour on the phone, discussing the work done by a venerable world-class museum in making data about its collections available to a new audience of developers and app-builders. Much of our conversation revolved around consideration of obstacles and barriers, and the most intractable of those proved something of a surprise.

Reluctance amongst senior managers to let potentially valuable data walk out the door? Nope. In fact, not even close; managers pushed museum staff to adopt a more permissive license for metadata (CC0) than the one (CC-BY) they had been considering.

Reluctance amongst curators to let their carefully crafted metadata be abused and modified by non-professionals? Possibly a little bit, but apparently nothing the team couldn’t handle.

A bean-counter’s obsession with measuring every click, every query, every download, such that the whole project became bogged down in working out what to count and when (and, sadly, that really is the case elsewhere!)? Again, no. “The intention was to create a possibility” by releasing data. The museum didn’t know what adoption would be like, and sees experimentation and risk-taking as part of its role. Monitoring is light, and there’s no intention to change that.

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Wikimedia Deutschland’s latest project, Wikidata, has made some exciting announcements regarding funding and the project’s planned development. According to a new release, “The initial development of Wikidata is being funded with a major donation of 1.3 Million Euros, granted in half by the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence ([ai]²). The institute supports long-range research activities that have the potential to accelerate progress in artificial intelligence. It was established in 2010 by Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen, whose contributions to philanthropy and the advancement of science and technology span more than 25 years.” Read more

The BBC has been working on automatically tagging their audio archives with DBpedia identifiers. Yves Raimond explains how the broadcast company is handling the project. Raimond writes, “One dataset we are looking at within this project is the World Service archive. This archive is isolated from other programme data sources at the BBC, like BBC Programmes or the Genome Project, and the associated programme data within it is very sparse. It would therefore benefit a lot from being automatically interlinked with further data sources which makes it such a particularly interesting use-case. The archive is also very large: it covers many decades and consists of about two and a half years of high-quality continuous audio content.” Read more

Eric Knorr recently interviewed Sanjiva Nath about the rise of semantic technology. Knorr writes, “In an interview with the Wall Street Journal earlier this month, Google Fellow Amit Singhal revealed that Google was infusing its search engine with semantic search technology to dramatically improve the contextual accuracy of Google search results. That same essential technology, based on the Semantic Web model Tim Berners-Lee pioneered over a decade ago, was the inspiration for zAgile, an ALM (application lifecycle management) software company that entrepreneur Sanjiva Nath founded in 2006.” Read more

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is looking for a Director of Web and New Media in Washington, DC. Responsibilities of the position include the following: “Responsible for executing on-line and mobile media projects for OPMS and creating technological solutions to enhance revenues in a technical publishing environment. Provide direction and support to e-media staff and users through training, usability and maintenance, and troubleshooting. Manage aspects of technology design and layout and interoperability between websites, mobile devices and related processes. Evaluate online and mobile products and technologies of competitors. Work with a variety of software and vendors- including but not limited to ad serving, job search and serving, video hosting, semantic technology, web hosting.” Read more

Andy Plesser of Beet.tv recently spoke to Stoke Young, Executive Producer of MSNBC.com regarding how MSNBC is increasing the searchability of their video content through semantic technologies. Plesser writes, “The notion of the ‘semantic web’ championed by the Web’s inventor Tim Berners-Lee and his W3C organization, involves the deep interconnection of text data.  For text-free video, however, this is a challenge, but it has been achieved by MSNBC.com through the creation and syndication of precise captions and other data surrounding news videos.” Read more

One week after closing a $3 million funding round, Mobiles Republic has launched version 2.0 of the company’s popular News Republic app for Android and iOS. Paul Sawers reports, “News Republic is a neat app that lets users curate their own news feed by creating ‘channels’, covering broad subjects such as technology, business and sports, whilst also letting them build more topic-specific feeds, such as ‘football’, ‘Apple Inc.’ or ‘Barack Obama’. With version 2.0 now out of the starting blocks, it has been given a brand new ‘look-and-feel’, and we must say it really is rather nice.” Read more

Semantic ad targeting and brand protection is diving deeper into the online video category. That’s one result of a new deal for React2Media to represent ad pepper media’s display products and services, iSense, SiteScreen and the real-time bidding platform adEXplorer, in the U.S.

iSense is based on Crystal’s Sense Engine semantic analysis technology for supporting content targeting of display advertising, while SiteScreen keeps ads away from objectionable content. Check out this article and this one for more details on how the semantic targeting and protection suites work, and this one for information on the adEXplorer platform that will be integrated into Act2, React2Media’s video ad network. adEXplorer incorporates the precise page-level targeting and brand safety filtering of the iSense and SiteScreen technologies.

Many web sites today, including YouTube and Yahoo Network, operate on the pre-roll model, where embedded video players run an ad in advance of the video that users are waiting to see. React2Media takes the tack that web sites need not have embedded video players, so “you don’t have to be married to the small amount of web sites that have one,” says COO Jordan Galbraith. Its technology also allows, while the video ad plays in the banner, for an expandable companion ad running on the side with more details.

With the ad pepper relationship, “now we can offer ads in a banner across any web site in the world and can match content on the page with the content of our advertising,” in real-time, he says. “We’re one of the first to target page level content to video ads.” That level of dynamism is a switch from manual site-specific media buy approaches.

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