JPMorgan Chase is searching for a Linked Data Integration Engineer in New York, NY. According to the post, “The Engineer will focus on analysis, design, and development of a firm-wide linked open data solution. The Engineer will work with architects, application developers and systems analysts to construct and implement a set of solutions and tools that support multiple lines of business across JPMC. These solutions will involve the integration of various disparate systems within a common information model and disparate data sources.”

It continues, “Candidates should be well versed in Java and various components of the J2EE stack and application servers, including J2SE, Tomcat, Weblogic, jDBC, Spring, Eclipse, Ant, Maven, RMI, Java Server Faces, JUnit, and JMS. Read more

Early in 2011, I wrote a piece here on SemanticWeb.com which explored the relationship between Semantic Technologies and super-computing’s venerable rock star, Cray. Then, earlier this year, Cray spun out a new division to focus upon exploring massive graph databases; something which should resonate with the semantic technology community. The new division — YarcData — differentiates itself quite clearly from its parent, leading with a data-led proposition and typically operating at quite a different pricepoint to its eye-wateringly expensive parent.

I sat down with YarcData President Arvind Parthasarathi during the Semantic Technology & Business Conference in San Francisco, to get an update on YarcData and to hear why the company is investing $100,000 in prizes for a new ‘Big Data Graph Analytics Challenge.’ Read more

Ian Dickinson recently pointed to a valuable use of linked data: monitoring the quality of swimming water. He writes, “Is is safe to go back in the water? In the movie Jaws 2 the risk to avoid was a giant shark, but fortunately this is not a threat we have to worry about in the UK. There are, however, other reasons to be careful. One of these is water quality: we would prefer to swim in water that is relatively clean, and not contaminated by sewage. For England and for Wales, the duty of monitoring bathing waters to assess water quality falls to the Environment Agency of England and Wales (EA).” Read more

Joe McKendrick of ZDnet recently argued that Linked Data is the next frontier for service-oriented businesses. He turns to a paper in the Semantic Web Journal for support. McKendrick writes, “Data is the extremely valuable commodity that the business needs to manage, digest and share, but the challenge of data integration hasn’t been fully resolved by XML, Web services or service oriented architecture. The paper, co-authored by a team led by Philipp Frischmuth and Jakub Klímek and posted on the Semantic Web Journal site, observes that classic SOA implementations to date have focused on transaction processing, but organizations seeking to being together their disparate data silos need to move on to the next step: linked data.” Read more

The Cabinet Office of the United Kingdom has published an Open Data command paper. According to the office, the paper “sets out how we’re putting data and transparency at the heart of government and public services. We’re making it easier to access public data; easier for data publishers to release data in standardised, open formats; and engraining a ‘presumption to publish’ unless specific reasons (such as privacy or national security) can be clearly articulated. From the Prime Minister down, central Government is committed to making Open Data an effective engine of economic growth, social wellbeing, political accountability and public service improvement.” Download the full paper here. Read more

Orbis is looking for Software Developers in Annapolis, MD. The post states, “We are currently seeking Software Developers at all levels to join the team in our Annapolis, MD Office. This position supports development, implementation, and test of advanced semantic technology solutions for commercial and government clients. The position includes developing semantic applications using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) and Open Source software to create custom solutions for our clients. Potential Applications include: MapReduce programming and Semantic Text Analytics.” Read more

World wide web expert and frequent SemTechBiz speaker Professor Jim Hendler has become the new head of the Department of Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The school reports, “Hendler is currently a senior constellation professor in the Tetherless World Constellation and program director of the Information Technology and Web Science (ITWS) program at Rensselaer. He will be stepping down from his leadership of the ITWS Program to assume the department head post.” Read more

(Editor’s Note, June 29: The SparQLed project URL now is available here.)

SindiceTech today released SparQLed, the SindiceTech Assisted SPARQL Editor, as an open source project. SindiceTech, a spinoff company from the DERI Institute, commercializes large-scale, Big Data infrastructures for enterprises dealing with semantic data. It has roots in the semantic web index Sindice, which lets users collect, search, and query semantically marked-up web data (see our story here).

SparQLed also is one of the components of the commercial Sindice Suite for helping large enterprises build private linked data clouds. It is designed to give users all the help they need to write SPARQL queries to extract information from interconnected datasets.

“SPARQL is exciting but it’s difficult to develop and work with,” says Giovanni Tummarello, who led the efforts around the Sindice search and analysis engine and is founder and CEO of SindiceTech.

Read more

Tim Herzog recently reported on World Bank’s efforts to make its data more open and accessible. He writes, “One of our goals in the next year is to make World Bank open data easier to find and use. As a start, we recently redesigned the country pages on data.worldbank.org to showcase other open data resources, such as Projects, Finances, Mapping For Results, Microdata, and the Climate Change Knowledge Portal. From any country page, you can now preview the data and navigate to the corresponding country page on any of these other sites. If you’re a developer or data geek and you’re interested in how this works under the hood, then read on.” Read more

[Editor's Note: This interview, conducted by guest Sean Golliher, is our first in the new series entitled "Innovation Spotlight." It's part of our initiative to introduce the semantic web community to innovative companies working on important problems using Semantic Technologies.

If you would like your company to be considered for an interview please email editor[ at ]semanticweb[ dot ]com.]

Pingar Interview:

Alyona Medelyan ( @zelandiya ) joined Pingar ( @PingarHQ ) in 2010 and is the chief research officer at Pingar. She has a PhD in Natural Language Processing that was completed at the University of Waikato and funded by Google. Her expertise areas are Keywords and Entity Extraction, as well as Wikipedia Mining.

In this interview we find out more about Pingar’s research, their products, and the clients they work with.

Sean: Hi Alyona. Thanks for speaking with us today.  When was Pingar founded and can you explain a little bit about what Pingar does?

Alyona: Pingar was founded in 2007 and in the past 5 years we have developed innovative software for document management and text analytics. I joined the company in 2010 and have been focusing more specifically on automated metadata assignment by adding keyword extraction, named entity recognition and taxonomy mapping capabilities.

Sean: What techniques do you use for keyword extraction and named entity recognition? Are you using any existing databases to aide with entity recognition?

Read more