Oracle is looking for Software Developers in Hillsboro, Oregon. This position will “Design, develop, troubleshoot and/or test/QA software. Specifically, write design specifications. Provide scoping, estimation of bugs/enhancements. Perform software development tasks associated with developing, debugging, or designing software applications or operating systems according to provided design specifications. Build enhancements within an existing software architecture and occasionally suggest improvements to the architecture. Work with Quality Assurance team to review QA test plans for projects being developed. Work with documentation team to review documentation for relevant areas. Work with development manager and other Oracle team members on assigned projects. Utilizes graduate-level research and analysis skills.” Read more

Emil Eifrem, CEO of Neo Technology recently wrote an article highlighting the recent rise in graph database adoption. He writes, “Graph databases are the most scalable, high performance way to query and store highly interconnected data. They help improve intelligence, predictive analytics, social network analysis, decision and process management – which all involve highly connected data with lots of relationships. A relevant use case for graph databases is the social graph. The social graph leverages information across a range of networks to understand the relationships between individuals. Facebook, LinkedIn and Amazon are all examples of companies that derived tremendous value from leveraging social and professional graphs and providing a deeper analysis of the data they collect every day. The biggest challenge that companies face is the ability to handle the exponential growth and massive connected data challenges associated with the social graph.” Read more here. Read more

InternetRetailing features a new article discussing Whisk.co.uk, the brainchild of Nick Holzherr, keynote speaker of next month’s SemTechBiz UK conference. The article states, “A new website that promises to turn online recipes into supermarket shopping lists and online food orders is set to launch this autmn. Nick Holzherr, a former runner-up in BBC television series The Apprentice, is behind Whisk.co.uk. He aims to have all the UK supermarkets that trade online – Asda, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Ocado and Waitrose – operational on the site by the end of the year. At soft launch, set to be in about two months time, the site will feature two or three supermarkets.” Read more

At the Semantic Web Business and Technology Conference in San Francisco in 2011, a company called Pragmatech presented a prototype of its CTRL semantic engine. Now, a little more than a year later, it’s launching products and services, as well as an API, for business and general public use.

The Daily Star, an English language news publication in the Middle East, is one of the early adopters of CTRL for its web site. The semantic technology powers the news site’s surfacing of topically related stories, summaries of an article, and entities extracted from it. Soon, readers also will be able to follow topics related to articles as well.

“Many semantic technologies do entity extraction at a shallow level,” says Dr. Walid Saba, who leads the R&D team at Pragmatech. “We go deeper.” As an example, readers of The Daily Star wanting to explore stories by following a key topic – a particular world figure as a diplomat, rather than in his or her other past role as a businessperson, for instance – will be directed to stories specific to that. Within the first couple of weeks of deployment, the news site more than tripled user engagement, Saba says.

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Dirk Willem van Gulik, Chief Technical Architect of the BBC recently discussed the company’s multiple uses of the BBC’s archive. He writes, “It is an enormous collection of building blocks for creativity , and it has been used for many years by programme makers inside and outside the BBC to provide inspiration and material. For some time now I’ve been part of the team driving a move to digital storage and distribution for the archive, and I can see clearly that this creates entirely new opportunities for making the BBC’s history more widely available – where we have the rights to do so – as well as new ways to use it for public benefit.” Read more

Autodesk (NASDAQ: ADSK), “a world leader in 3D design, engineering and entertainment software” announced today that it has acquired assets of Inforbix. Inforbix is a Semantic Technology-based product lifecycle management (PLM) company. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Inforbix was co-founded  in 2010 by CEO Oleg Shilovitsky and CIO Anatoly Savin to answer the problem of how to retrieve product data located in different places in manufacturing companies that affects development, supply chains and manufacturing systems. Our own Jennifer Zaino interviewed Shilovitsky last year about this.

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Hyperion is looking for a PLM Computer Scientist in Gaithersburg, MD, to work with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Responsibilities of the position include the following: “Context Identification – Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is performed with a tremendous number of frameworks corresponding to diverse contexts. For the purpose of this project, the employee will identify relevant contexts for evaluation. The contexts identified shall be aligned with on-going NIST efforts, and shall be selected with consultation of NIST SIMCA Program manager and staff. PLM Standardization Framework Selection – identify current and under-development standards that enable interoperability among heterogeneous and proprietary application systems used to manage and store product data along the product life cycle.” Read more

RiseSmart has been named an Innovative Company of the Year finalist by the Golden Bridge Awards for the second consecutive year. The article states, “The awards recognize the world’s best in organizational performance, products and services. RiseSmart is one of only 20 companies selected as finalists in the ‘Best Companies and Organizations’ award categories. Other finalists include the social networking giants Facebook and LinkedIn.” Read more

Nathan Eddy of eWeek reports that, according to Gartner analysts, open data is “far more consequential for increasing revenue and business value” than Big Data. He writes, “Open data, according to the research firm, refers to the idea that certain data should be freely available to everyone to use and republish as they wish, without restrictions from copyright, patents or other forms of control.” Read more

Libby Miller and Chris Newell of the BBC recently introduced the ViSTA-TV project. They write, “ViSTA-TV (Video Stream Analytics for Viewers in the TV Industry) is a two-year collaborative research project about linked open data, statistics and recommendations for live TV, involving online TV viewing data, programme metadata and other external sources of data. We are working with three research institutions (University of Zurich, TU Dortmund University, and the VU University Amsterdam) and two companies (Zattoo and Rapid-I) to create: (1) Real-time TV recommendations for viewers. (2) Highly accurate low-latency audience research. (3) A high-quality, linked open dataset about TV. (4) A marketplace for audience metrics.” Read more