Our discussion of Big Data at SemTechBiz, begun here, continues:

The Enterprise Linked Data Cloud Needs Semantics, And More

Another exploration of Big Data’s intersection with semantic technology will take place at this session, where Dr. Giovanni Tummarello, senior research fellow at DERI and CTO of SindiceTech, will talk about the former becoming an enabler for the latter to be really useful in enterprises. “A lot of people say it’s via Big Data that semantic technologies like RDF will see a coming of age and clear applications in certain industries,” he says. There’s value to adding data first and understanding it later, and to that end, “semantic technologies give you the most agile tool to deal with data you don’t know, where there’s a lot of diversity, and you don’t know what of it particularly will be useful.”

Read more

According to a new article, “Expert System, the semantic software company, today announced the full integration of its Cogito semantic platform with the Apache Solr™ open source enterprise search platform. Through the integration with Cogito, organizations using Solr will be able to enhance their technology investment by delivering faster, more precise access to big data and enterprise content. Cogito exceeds the limits of traditional search and provides a deep understanding of words by fully understanding their meaning in context. Backed by a powerful semantic network enhanced by vertical knowledge for the most important sectors (finance, security, oil and gas, etc.), Cogito ensures higher precision and recall than traditional systems.” Read more

Photo courtesy: Flickr/ glen edelson

You know Volkswagen as Das Auto company. But perhaps it’s time to start thinking of it as “Das Semantic Web Company.”

William Greenly is the Volkswagen Technical Lead for the auto vendor’s Volkswagen.co.uk online platform at integrated communications agency Tribal DDB. In that capacity he is taking the partnership the companies have had for more than four decades to a new level. His role there has encompassed managing data around Volkswagen’s products, its retailer and web site content, and its interfaces with social networks and many third-party back-end systems, including those germaine to the auto industry such as manufacturer consortiums.

Now, the focus is on using semantic web technology to drive a more elastic, flexible and streamlined digital world for “The Car” company.

The journey began as a strategic brief about contextual search engines serving content based on context within the site and possibly across affiliate sites, a big idea that was quite quickly bound to something more tactical. That being improving site search, Greenly says. “So the objectives were about site search and improving it, but in the long-run it was always the idea to contextualize content, to facet content, to promote it in different contexts.”

Read more