Cordis News recently wrote, “An EU-funded project has developed an innovative online tool that will enable web-content providers to automatically create publishing-quality translations. This tool has been calibrated to apply to specific professional fields, yet requires no specific training to use.  A number of online translation tools are currently available to the public. Some programmes are already used by many people worldwide, and improve the quality of their translations through machine learning. In other words, these systems use feedback to learn from their own mistakes. The disadvantage to this, however, is that explicit grammatical rules are the exception rather than the rule.” Read more

The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) is looking for a Knowledge System Software Engineer in Laurel, MD. According to the post, this position will “Make critical contributions as part of a multi-disciplinary team working on novel advanced analytic methods for solving critical homeland security problems using knowledge management and semantic technologies.” Responsibilities include: “Design, lead the development of, test and deploy software applications and knowledge bases (60%). Participate in design reviews to gather critical feedback on system design, integration and testing (15%). Develop documentation and present to sponsor on current research and development activities (15%). Interact with users and gather requirements (10%).” Read more

Back when he was VP and CTO at Hearst Interactive Media, Mike Dunn advocated the use of semantic technologies for media organizations to rocket-boost their control over content, both for internal operations and for presenting a better face to users out there on the web. (See our story with his insights on that here). Now, Dunn has recently made the move to Truecar, an eight-year-young start-up focused on improving the car-buying process. As CTO, his mission is to modernize its data stack.

How do the two worlds of media and automotive connect? “There’s definitely a connection if you think about content as data,” Dunn told The Semantic Web Blog during a few free moments at the recent Semantic Technology and Business Conference. And, TrueCar gets “the importance of data, even though you don’t always have to throw the semantic web [phrase] in there. But things like sentiment-enhancing and context – those are useful words that don’t confuse people.”

Today, says Dunn, much of the data around vehicles, sales processes, and how cars are customized or configured tends to be fairly flat – that is, either unstructured and/or proprietary, but doors open up when it gains meaning — becomes structured, enhanced and openly known and leveraged from an industry perspective. “That transition, which we believe we’ll be able foster, will allow the creation of additional enhancing services to consumers and the industry at large,” he says.

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Our own Jenny Zaino recently discussed the development of the News Storyline Ontology. Now, Robin Pembrooke of the BBC has more on how the new ontology is being used at the BBC. He writes, “The BBC believes in distributing its work to the wider industry in order to benefit users and other online publishers. One aspect of this is the thinking around the use of metadata in BBC News stories, how we tag our articles, pictures and video clips to make our content easier to find and more accessible. This year a group of like-minded data architects from a number of UK publishers, including The Guardian and The Press Association, have been informally working on a data model that supports how stories like these are told and they’ve found a lot of common ground in their thinking.” Read more

Sean Gallagher of Ars Technica writes, “Most of us are okay with what Google does with its vast supply of ‘big data,’ because we largely benefit from it—though Google does manage to make a good deal of money off of us in the process. But if I were to backspace over Google’s name and replace it with ‘National Security Agency,’ that would leave a bit of a different taste in many people’s mouths. Yet the NSA’s PRISM program and the capture of phone carriers’ call metadata are essentially about the same sort of business: taking massive volumes of data and finding relationships within it without having to manually sort through it, and surfacing ‘exceptions’ that analysts are specifically looking for. The main difference is that with the NSA, finding these exceptions can result in Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants to dig deeper—and FBI agents knocking at your door. So what is it, exactly, that the NSA has in its pile of ‘big data,’ and what can they do with it?” Read more

David Amerland of Imassera recently wrote, “Intelligence, at one significant level, relies on semantics. To occur it needs the ability of data nodes that are separate from each other to connect in ways that unleash fresh meaning in the information each contains. Google’s acquisition of Waze for the now customary $1.3 billion plus change is one more significant step towards building the structure of the semantic web that allows data to be integrated in ways that now make much greater sense to both the end user (in terms of results) and the data provider (in terms of services and products).”

Amerland continues, “Waze’s hyperlocalized approach to collecting data plus its strong social element that helps join the figurative data dots within its platform is a powerful piece of the semantic web that Google is helping to structure. Google has promised to ‘leave Waze alone’ for now. That’s because the platform is performing as it should: it is collating data, it is making connections, it is forming a social layer within its environment. Google, right now, has little to offer in either adding or taking away anything that will help refine the experience.”

Read more here.

Image: Courtesy Waze

Peterson Technologies is looking for a Mid-Level Software Engineer in Fort Meade, MD. The post states, “Duties include the development of “on demand” capabilities, functions and applications required to fulfill mission objectives. Additional duties include: the integration of cloud based proxy server network traffic, assist in the advancement of Graphical User Interface and development to support data acquisition requirements.” Qualifications for the position include: “Eight (8) to eighteen (18) years of general experience in computer science, computer engineering, mathematics, or a related discipline, including at least five (5) years of experience in software-intensive projects and programs for government or industry customers. At least three (3) years of experience as a software engineer supporting software architecture development, requirement analysis, process execution and evaluation, selection and evaluation of COTS/GOTS tools, and integration (with both new and existing systems).” Read more

“People are overlooked for a variety of biased reasons and perceived flaws. Age, appearance, personality. Bill James and mathematics cut straight through that. Billy, of the 20,000 notable players for us to consider, I believe that there is a championship team of twenty-five people that we can afford, because everyone else in baseball undervalues them.”

This was the thinking that Peter Brand (played by Jonah Hill in the movie Moneyball) brought to Billy Beane, General Manager of the Oakland Athletics in 2002. In the previous year, Beane’s team had made it to the postseason, but were defeated by the Yankees. The team then lost three star players to free agency, and Beane didn’t have the budget to replace them. But baseball analyst Brand showed him that Beane could do big things with his small budget, and as a result, the A’s went to the World Series the very next year.

Turning to data to find undervalued players didn’t stop with the A’s. Beane and Brand started a trend in baseball that changed the game forever, and the use of data has only gotten more complex and competitive as the types and amount of data have exploded over recent years.

This was the focus of Dean Allemang, Tim Harsch, and Amar Shan’s presentation at the recent SemTechBiz Conference, Big Data Analytics for Baseball. The three men from YarcData showed a roomful of baseball and semantic technology fans how in the current world of Big Data, RDF is not only a great solution for health care, government, and media organizations, but for America’s favorite pastime, as well. Read more

RALEIGH, N.C.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–TopQuadrant™, a leading semantic data integration company, today announced Norwegian based IT consulting company Computas has been selected as its first Global Certified TopBraid Solutions Partner. As a result, Computas will sell and support TopQuadrant solutions products and services across the globe.

TopQuadrant’s TopBraid solutions enable customers to connect silos of data, metadata, systems and infrastructure to build flexible applications from linked data models. Computas is a leading solution provider for both the Norwegian government and the oil and gas industry including many of the foremost companies with significant operations on Norway’s Continental Shelf. Read more