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OKF Launches School of Data

Angela Guess — Wed, 23 May 2012 16:30:11 +0000

Laura Newman of the Open Knowledge Foundation reports, “Earlier this year, we announced plans to launch the School of Data. Thanks to the generous support of Open Society Foundations and the Shuttleworth Foundation, we’re now ready to go! We’re holding a kick-off sprint next week, and we invite you to get involved. The School of Data is led by the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN) and Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU). The School will provide online training for data ‘wrangling’ skills – the ability to find, retrieve, clean, manipulate, analyze, and represent different types of data.” continued…

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All The Way To Semantic, Model-Driven Computing

Jennifer Zaino — Wed, 23 May 2012 14:00:38 +0000

Attend the upcoming SemTech session that’s dubbed Using Semantic Technologies to Deliver Industrial Strength Healthcare Benefits Administration, and you’ll hear about how semantics- and model-driven computing is the future – and how it’s a future that’s already gotten underway at The Central Administrative Agency of the Netherlands (CAK).

First, a little bit about the bigger picture. “What can happen when you go all the way to semantic, model-driven, knowledge computing [is that] … it changes the game for development,” says Mills Davis, managing director of Project 10X and one of the session’s presenters. “It enables new categories of capabilities and levels of user experience (think SIRI for the rest of us). It brings about quantum changes in all stages of lifecycle value. It enables cost-effective strategy-driven approaches to enterprise transformation. This last sentence is worth some reflection.”

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Ambitious Plans for the Open Data Institute

Angela Guess — Wed, 23 May 2012 11:05:10 +0000

Olivia Solon reports that Professor Nigel Shadbolt has shared an outline of the plan for the UK’s Open Data Institute. She writes, “Shadbolt told Wired.co.uk: ‘Open data is not just about transparency and accountability; there is potential for economic innovation and value to come from it.’ The Institute’s remit is fairly broad, but will primarily focus on helping private and public organisations understand how to make the most of open data. It will not actually store any data itself, but it will provide business incubation for startups, providing mentoring, advice and potentially space. Shadbolt says that the aim is to cultivate and incubate 12 companies a year.” continued…

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New UMBEL Release Supports schema.org, GeoNames

Angela Guess — Tue, 22 May 2012 18:00:17 +0000

Mike Bergman reports that the latest UMBEL release includes schema.org and GeoNames support. He writes, “We are pleased to announce the release of version 1.05 of UMBEL, which now has linkages to schema.org and GeoNames . UMBEL has also been split into ‘core’ and ‘geo’ modules. The resulting smaller size of UMBEL ‘core’ — now some 26,000 reference concepts — has also enabled us to create a full visualization of UMBEL’s content graph.” continued…

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Facebook Gets Some Karma (in an App)

Angela Guess — Tue, 22 May 2012 16:30:39 +0000

Facebook is buying Karma, a social gifting app that we have covered before. According to Om Malik of GigaOM, “The news was released via Karma’s blog. As we first posted, Karma was founded by Lee Linden and Ben Lewis who in their past life were co-founders of Tapjoy, that was acquired by Offerpal Media after reaching more than $100 million in revenue. Investors in Karma include Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Sequoia Capital, and Evan Williams and Biz Stone’s Obvious Corp.” A Facebook spokesperson commented, “We’ve been really impressed with the Karma team and all they accomplished in such a short time. This acquisition combines Karma’s passion and innovative mobile app with Facebook’s platform to help people connect and share in new and meaningful ways.” continued…

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Data.gov Celebrates Third Anniversary

Angela Guess — Tue, 22 May 2012 15:32:37 +0000

Today Data.gov celebrates its third anniversary. An announcement on the site noted, “The first national open data site, Data.gov led the way in opening government data around the world. Now 30 countries host open data sites and they are key tools in the global open government movement. Growing from 47 datasets in 2009 to nearly 450,000 datasets today, Data.gov reaches across 172 federal agencies to bring data to innovators, developers, analysts and citizens across the nation. The data shows up in smart phone apps, websites, and information that lets people buy smarter, use energy more efficiently, and find better health-care solutions each day.” continued…

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More Expert Panels at SemTechBiz SF

Angela Guess — Tue, 22 May 2012 13:00:28 +0000

Yesterday we announced an expert panel on schema.org that will be featured at next month’s SemTechBiz Conference in San Francisco. But schema.org won’t be the only hot topic at SemTechBiz. Two other expert panels are also happening on Wednesday, June 6: a panel on Wikis & Semantics as well as a panel on Semantic Analysis of Big Data.

During the first discussion, Wikis & Semantics, the panelists will discuss their experiences with combining wikis and semantic technology. continued…

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Bridging Words and Meaning at Google

Angela Guess — Tue, 22 May 2012 11:00:27 +0000

Valentin Spitkovsky and Peter Norvig of the Google Research Team have posted an article about their new paper on dictionaries for linking text, entities, and ideas. They write, “Human language is both rich and ambiguous. When we hear or read words, we resolve meanings to mental representations, for example recognizing and linking names to the intended persons, locations or organizations. Bridging words and meaning — from turning search queries into relevant results to suggesting targeted keywords for advertisers — is also Google’s core competency, and important for many other tasks in information retrieval and natural language processing. We are happy to release a resource, spanning 7,560,141 concepts and 175,100,788 unique text strings, that we hope will help everyone working in these areas.” continued…

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“Top Semantic Start-Up” Contenders Announced!

Eric Franzon — Tue, 22 May 2012 09:00:32 +0000

We are pleased to announce the start-ups that have been selected to participate in the 2012 SemTechBiz “Top Semantic Start-Up” competition. These companies will give demonstrations/pitches before a panel of expert judges at the Semantic Technology and Business Conference June 3-7.

Judges

Our panel of judges includes (Left to Right): Phil Aucutt, CEO, TeamPatent; Mike Dunn, CTO, Hearst Interactive; James Hendler, Professor, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Mark Johnson, CEO, Zite; Chris Shipley, CEO, Guidewire Group (former Executive Director, DEMO Conference)

The Envelope Please!

The companies, presentations, and speakers for the start-up competition are…

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New Report: Sharing and the Semantic Web

Angela Guess — Mon, 21 May 2012 18:00:07 +0000

A recent report asked the question, is the future of sharing the Semantic Web? The abstract states, “Current information sharing is based mostly on using so-called Web 1.0 search tools and Web 2.0 tools such as social media to collect and display data and information on the Web and make it easier for people to access. The next generation of Web technologies — collectively called the Semantic Web — will move sharing into the era of Web 3.0.”

It goes on, “Semantic Web technologies are already used in government sites such as Data.gov and Recovery.gov, which are part of the Obama administration’s push for open government. continued…

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The Future of Siri

Angela Guess — Mon, 21 May 2012 16:30:41 +0000

Christian Zibreg recently reported on the future of Siri and how the service intends to become even more personalized. Zibreg writes, “Digital secretary Siri was, and still is, the headline feature of the iPhone 4S. It owes some of its allure to the vast processing power of Apple’s servers that run a remarkably sophisticated voice recognition software licensed from Nuance, a Burlington, Massachusetts-based provider of arguably the best voice technology money can buy. According to Nuance’s marketing honcho, you can bet on Siri to improve over time.”

He continues, “Upcoming developments in personal assistants will enable new stuff, such as more accurate voice recognition and personalization. So yeah, eventually you’ll be able to ask Siri ‘Is my favourite movie on tonight?’ continued…

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Expert Schema.org Panel Finalized for #SemTechBiz San Francisco Program

Eric Franzon — Mon, 21 May 2012 14:42:58 +0000

Q: What do Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Yandex, the New York Times, and The Walt Disney Company have in common?

A: schema.org

On June 2, 2011, schema.org was launched with little fanfare, but it quickly received a lot of attention. Now, almost exactly one year later, we have assembled a panel of experts from the organizations listed above to discuss what has happened since and what we have to look forward to as the vocabulary continues to grow and evolve, including up-to-the-minute news and announcements. The panel will take place at the upcoming Semantic Technology and Business Conference in San Francisco.

Moderated by Ivan Herman, the Semantic Web Activity Lead for the World Wide Web Consortium, the panel includes representatives from each of the core search engines involved in schema.org, and two of the largest early implementers: The New York Times and Disney. Among the topics we will discuss will be the value proposition of using schema.org markup, publishing techniques and syntaxes, vocabularies that have been mapped to schema.org, current tools and applications, existing implementations, and a look forward at what is planned and what is needed to encourage adoption and consumption.

Panelists:

	Moderator: Ivan Herman Semantic Web Activity Lead, World Wide Web Consortium		Dan Brickley Contractor, schema.org at Google
	John Giannandrea Director Engineering, Google		Peter Mika Senior Researcher, Yahoo!
	Alexander Shubin Product Manager, Head of Strategic Direction, Yandex		Mike Van Snellenberg Principal Program Manager, Microsoft/Bing
	Evan Sandhaus Semantic Technologist, New York Times Company		Jeffrey W. Preston SEO Manager, Disney Interactive Media Group

These panelists, along with the rest of the more than 120 speakers from SemTechBiz, will be on-hand to answer audience questions and discuss the latest work in Semantic Technologies. You can join the discussion by registering for SemTechBiz – San Francisco today (and save $200 off the onsite price)

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Start Up Treum Makes Sense of Social Media Data

Angela Guess — Mon, 21 May 2012 11:00:41 +0000

Andy Tebay of The Next Web recently reported on Treum, a Korean company that is cutting through the noise to find value from social media data. Tebay writes, “A major challenge, when trying to do market research or analyze social media trends, is the massive amount of information you have to sort through. Korean startup Treum is a social intelligence company which specializes in providing high-profile companies with solutions for analyzing various elements of social media. This information can then be used to improve marketing, customer relations and more.” continued…

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Legally Linked: Linked Open Data Principles Applied To Code Of Federal Regulations

Jennifer Zaino — Mon, 21 May 2012 09:16:29 +0000

The Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School is about making law accessible and understandable, for free. It’s been engaged in that mission since the early ’90s, and semantic web technology today plays a role in furthering that goal.

The organization this month published a new electronic edition of the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), which contains a bevy of rules across 50 titles that impact nearly all areas of American business. Work underway at LII, dubbed the Linked Legal Data project, seeks to apply Linked Open Data principles enhances access to the CFR, with capabilities such as being able to search its Title 21 Food and Drugs database using brand names for drugs (such as Tylenol), and receiving the generic name for the drug (acetaminophen) as a suggested term. “You cannot look for regulatory information on Tylenol in the CFR because Tylenol will never be there,” says Dr. Núria Casellas, who is a visiting scholar at the LII spearheading work on the project. “That is a brand name. What you actually want to look for are components, such as acetaminophen.”

While the general citizenry might find reasons to leverage the fruits of this effort, businesses that must comply with these requirements are a more likely target – not just the lawyers and paralegals, but those responsible for tasks, for example, such as storing and caring for products their company exports or imports, including understanding the safety regulations that apply to it. The Tylenol-acetaminophen example, she says, is very interesting because it showcases how using the wrong word or the incorrect approach can hamper a company from being able to find the relevant regulatory or safety information it needs to take into consideration.

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MarkLogic Names Gary Bloom CEO

Angela Guess — Fri, 18 May 2012 16:30:05 +0000

MarkLogic has a new CEO. According to the company, “Gary Bloom, a proven technology executive who was most recently the CEO and president at eMeter, has been named president and chief executive officer. Gary brings an exceptional background that includes more than two decades of successful leadership in enterprise software. He was the CEO and president at eMeter, which provides smart grid management software for electric, gas, and water utilities. eMeter was recently acquired by Siemens Corporation. Prior to that, Gary was a consultant of TPG, a leading global private investment firm.” continued…

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