Karen Coyle recently analyzed a new release of OCLC metadata records. She writes, “OCLC recently released a file of 1.2 million metadata records for the most widely held items in its catalog. These are all items with 250 library holdings or more. I created a list on WorldCat of the top 50, mostly out of curiosity. I was quite surprised at the results, however. Here’s how it breaks down: 16 periodicals, with Time and Newsweek being numbers 1 and 2, respectively; 29 kid and YA books, four of which (and very high even in this small list) from the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series; 5 adult books.”

Coyle goes on, “The five adult books are: (1) McCullough, D. G. (1992). Truman. New York: Simon & Schuster. (2) Brown, D. (2003). The Da Vinci code: A novel. New York: Doubleday. (3) Johnson, S. (1998). Who moved my cheese?: An a-mazing way to deal with change in your work and in your life. New York: Putnam.  (4) Haley, A. (1976). Roots. Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday.  (5) Peters, T. J., & Waterman, R. H. (1982). In search of excellence: Lessons from America’s best-run companies. New York: Harper & Row. This small set gives me many ideas of things to investigate in the full set.”

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Image: Courtesy OCLC

According to a new article, “Tom Sawyer Software, the premier provider of software for building high-performance data visualization and social network analysis applications, announces the company’s product roadmap for supporting online geospatial data services. The first of these services to be provided is the Oracle Fusion Middleware MapViewer. Tom Sawyer Software‘s support of web-based geospatial services is in response to the growing need for visual analysis applications that integrate geospatial data with business data. With the added support for Oracle MapViewer, Tom Sawyer Software customers can now more quickly integrate complex data from disparate sources with different geospatial data services in their visual analysis applications.” Read more

A new report is available for purchase from Frost & Sullivan entitled Semantic Web – Funding Analysis. The report “offers insights on the funding trends within this space and recommendations for investors and stakeholders interested in venturing into this segment. In addition, semantic start-ups that might potentially require funds to take their technology to the next stage could benefit by getting a glimpse of key venture capitalists and other funding bodies.” Read more

Last year we reported on semantic technology’s future in national intelligence. A new article points to semantic web technology as the future key to finding and eliminating new terror threats. Brooke Aker, author of the article, comments, “As a former intelligence analyst, I know the frustration of lacking both complete information and computer systems capable of aiding the analysis process. Almost a decade after 9/11 and untold dollars later, the nation still struggles with effective intelligence sharing.” Aker argues that semantic technology finds its optimum use in aiding national intelligence. Read more

Your guide to building working solutions for the Semantic Web.

We wrote Semantic Web Programming to offer a useful guide to get the Semantic Web to do stuff – such as data integration and rich data analysis. We are active developers in this space and directly see its potential.  We outline the key concepts, tools, and methods you need to program the Semantic Web to achieve these goals.  Our book is filled with practical, easy-to-follow, examples using working code to illustrate how to take advantage of the many data sources and services available today, especially non-semantic ones like instant messaging, relational databases, and web services such as those offered by Facebook. 

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