Looked into WebID lately? Maybe it’s time. The open standard for identity and login seems to be gaining more momentum following the spring W3C Workshop on Identity in the Browser. That’s when W3C WebID Incubator chair Henry Story presented a position case on the standard; that was followed up by the Berlin Social Web event that included an explanatory video of WebID that he created. Recently The Semantic Web Blog also has noticed some positive commentary in the Twittersphere about WebID’s progress, too.

It’s been a few years since Story hit upon the Subject Alternative Name field in x.509 certificates as an appropriate way to accommodate an owner’s WebID URL. (A URL to name things, says Story, webizes trust.) Since then work has been underway to ensure implementations work across browsers and web servers and different systems, and earlier this year the WebID Incubator Group was born to further advance the protocol. “The biggest part of the battle until now was just to get people to realize there is a way of solving these issues they’ve wanted to solve for a long time that was completely open, built into browsers, and could work,” says Story. “So now people are enthusiastic about the concept because it is so simple.”

The problem having been that, without the aid of the Semantic Web, using a client-side certificate will only work with one web site, making it not much more useful than relying on a user name and password at each one anyway. “So that gives a whole lot of hassle for nearly no value, until we discovered how when you merged this with the Semantic Web …you can use this technology people think of as centralized in a de-centralized way,” he says. “And suddenly it works because you use the web in a webbish way, and you distribute trust around the web.”

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Semantic Tech & Business Conference Returns to San Francisco

Semantic Tech & Business Conference returns to San Francisco in June! Join us from June 3-7 for complete coverage of Big Data, Linked Data, Extreme Information Management, and Semantic Web. From breakthrough approaches to solving business problems to the big data implications of fast–evolving technologies, SemTechBiz provides you with an unparalleled interactive experience and delivers tangible business value. We're offering a special early rate when you register by February 17. Sign up now!

The University of Iowa Libraries is looking for a Web Application Developer in Iowa City: “The Web Application Developer provides application development and support for central library systems, including some commercial and several locally developed solutions. The incumbent will provide programming support to develop web 2.0 semantic Web and other emerging Web technologies and assist with integrating them into software systems. The position is in the Applications and Web Services Unit of the Library Information Technology Department and reports to the Unit Head.” Read more

We’ve seen the big three players in the search engine space honing their semantic edge, and we may soon see one of them deploying semantic technology to sharpen image searches, too. nachofoto says it is in discussions with one of the giants (which it declines to name for now) that could result in a licensing deal to bring its ‘semantic, time-based vertical image search engine,’ currently in beta, to the big-time.

CTO Anuj Agarwal and CEO Vineet Agarwal, the co-founding brothers behind nachofoto and its focus on delivering the most recent image results, decline to name which major search engine we’re talking about.

It would, of course, be pure speculation to draw any conclusions from the fact that the Agarwals both consider the best analogy for what they’re doing as “Powerset for image search” (Microsoft acquired that semantic search engine in 2008 and it’s believed to be powering Bing Wikipedia).

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Empire is an implementation of the Java Persistence API (JPA) for RDF and the Semantic Web. Instead of another implementation of relational databases, Empire implements JPA for RDF and SPARQL, thus allowing developers who are familiar with JPA, but not with semantic web techologies like RDF, to make an easy transition into this brave, new world. JPA is a specification for managing Java objects, most commonly with an RDBMS; it’s industry standard for Java ORMs.

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Executive Summary

Today, one of the biggest challenges in web technologies is information retrieval in digital resource repositories such as digital libraries and the Internet. To cope with this information growth, existing search methods will need to be enhanced to continue an acceptable level of relevancy and efficiency in the results returned. In this paper two search methods are compared: fulltext search and search enriched with a query reformulation based on semantic technologies. Both of these are implemented in a search module – SQE Semantic Query Expansion.

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Entity Extraction is the process of automatically extracting document metadata from unstructured text documents.  Extracting key entities such as person names, locations, dates, specialized terms and product terminology from free-form text can empower organizations to not only improve keyword search but also open the door to semantic search, faceted search and document repurposing.  This article defines the field of entity extraction, shows some of the technical challenges involved, and shows how RDF can be used to store document annotations. It then shows how new tools such as Apache UIMA are poised to make entity extraction much more cost effective to an organization.

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The vast majority of today’s enterprise applications owe their genesis to a period very different from today. Even the most apparently innovative share perhaps unnecessary heritage with their ancestors, preventing them from fully exploiting the potential of an ever-more connected world.

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