The News Storyline Ontology wants to make it easier for journalists to deal with the world as they understand it – that is,  in terms of stories and curated narrative arcs over world events. The ontology aims to be a generic model for describing and organizing the stories news organizations tell, while supporting whatever their approach is to handling those stories. It provides, in other words, a model for the news itself: how different stories relate to each other, how breaking news evolves and how the commonplace entities of people, places, organizations and events relate to news stories.

“The first benefit is for the news organization itself to organize things, but it also lets them put together web pages more flexibly and closer to the way we access information as humans,” says Jarred McGinnis, one of the authors of the ontology. Formerly head of research, semantic technologies at Press Association, he is now an independent consultant in semantics at his firm Logomachy Ltd. Fellow authors are Jeremy Tarling, BBC News data architect, and a former BBCer, Paul Wilton, previously technical lead, semantic publishing and now founder and technical architect at Ontoba, which specializes in semantic publishing.

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Basis Technology is looking for a Natural Language Processing Architect in Cambridge, MA. The post states, “Are you a hands-on natural language processing expert who is ready to play a leading role in the design, development and deployment of cutting edge natural language processing products? If so, Basis Technology would like to talk with you about our current opening for an NLP Architect in Cambridge, MA. If you thrive on leading teams providing advanced text analysis for mission critical systems, then we should talk.” Read more

One sector that has been very active in the adoption of Linked Data is that of libraries. In an effort to highlight this activity, SemanticWeb.com, supported by OCLC and LITA, put out a call last month for work that promoted or demonstrated the benefits of linked data for libraries.

After receiving a number of excellent nominations, we are pleased to announce that Kevin Ford, from the Network Development and MARC Standards Office at the Library of Congress, was selected to showcase his work with the Bibliographic Framework Initiative (BIBFRAME) and his continuing work on the Library of Congress’s Linked Data Service (loc.id). In addition to being an active contributor, Kevin is responsible for the BIBFRAME website; has devised tools to view MARC records and the resulting BIBFRAME resources side-by-side; authored the first transformation code for MARC data to BIBFRAME resources; and is project manager for The Library of Congress’ Linked Data Service. Kevin also writes and presents frequently to promote BIBFRAME, ID.LOC.GOV, and educate fellow librarians on the possibilities of linked data.

Congratulations to Kevin!

If you want to learn more about BIBFRAME and the role Linked Data is playing in the world of libraries, join us at Semantic Technology & Business Conference, June 2-5 where Kevin’s colleague from the Library of Congress, Nate Trail, will deliver a lightning talk on BIBFRAME, and Richard Wallis of the OCLC will present From Record to Graph – Exposing a Legacy.

Ritka Puri of Business2Community reports, “Big data is transforming industries. From education to tech, retail, and healthcare, sophisticated analytics are helping organizations make intelligent decisions to maximize key goals. ‘From Facebook to Netflix, companies are tracking and analyzing our searches, our purchases, and just about every other online activity that will give them more insight into what we are and who we want,’ wrote Jim Fruchterman for Harvard Business Review. ‘The more we use technology in our education and health systems, the more data we collect about how people learn and what keeps us healthy or what makes us sick.’ For financial firms that face challenges of increased governance, risk, strict compliance guidelines, and worldwide economic instability, the need for data-driven decisions is even more crucial.” Read more

Frederic Lardoinois of Tech Crunch reports, “Maluuba, the Waterloo, Canada-based Siri competitor and TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2012 Battlefield finalist, today announced that it has added two new features to its voice-powered personal assistant app for Android and Windows Phone: sports and TV schedules. With this, Maluuba users in the U.S. and Canada can now ask it for near real-time sports results and query the service for TV listings in their area by name, genre or channel. One aspect of the service the Maluuba team has always been proud of is the fact that it has managed to add additional domains to the service quickly. The service started out with 18 domains, including restaurants, movies and general knowledge queries, but the team has continued to expand the range of topics it can handle since then. It has also rapidly expanded internationally since its launch and launched its Windows Phone 8 app earlier this year, too.” Read more

David Amerland of Imassera recently wrote, “It seems that $1 billion plus change these days is what’s required to buy a photo-sharing app (if you’re Facebook), a global phone manufacturer (if you’re Google) or a microblogging site (if you happen to be Yahoo). Beyond the jaw-dropping numbers that are casually bandied around for these acquisitions lies a game plan that has every major player struggling to position themselves for relevance and longevity in the semantic web. This ‘new’ web is characterized by two related things: data and connectivity and these happen to be the exact same building blocks out of which web verticals are created.” Read more

AT&T is looking for a Machine Learning & Big Data professional in Florham Park, NJ. According to the post, “The position is in a group within our Research organization, in the Greater NY City Metro area, that enhances, extends, and productizes a range of research technologies through the innovative application of software engineering. The successful candidate will work closely with our experts in machine learning, statistics, and distributed computing to identify and experiment with useful algorithms, extend them for application to high-value use cases, enhance them to take advantage of large scale distributed computing platforms (e.g. hadoop), and create APIs and toolkits that open them to use by a large community of analysts. Read more

The upcoming Semantic Technology and Business Conference in San Francisco (June 2-5) will feature a number of sessions, panels, and keynotes focused on semantic web start-ups. The Start-Up Competition will highlight some of the most promising new companies in the world of semantic technology today, and other events will expound the strengths and successes of companies that have made it past the term “start-up” to full-fledged “competitors.” Read more

Robin Wauters of The Next Web reports, “Seattle startup GraphLab claims it is building the ‘fastest machine-learning analytics engine for graph datasets’, based on the popular open-source distributed graph computation framework with the same name, and it has just raised capital to come through on its promise. Founded by scientists from the University of Washington, Carnegie Mellon and UC Berkeley, GraphLab today announced that it has secured $6.75 million in a financing round led by Madrona and NEA.” Read more

Ben Cole of SearchCompliance recently interviewed information management expert Jeffrey Ritter about the latest e-discovery breakthroughs and best practices. Asked about the biggest breakthroughs in e-discovery, Ritter replied, “There are four of them worth mentioning. The first breakthrough that has never been appreciated in the legal community is the use of visualization patterning technology… The second… is the development and implementation of audit management tools in the field of e-discovery and the related legal services.” Read more