Q-Sensei Corporation has announced version 2.0 of Q-Sensei Enterprise, the company’s enterprise search platform. According to the company, the new version is “designed to rapidly and flexibly develop tailored search-based applications (SBAs) tapping the wealth of data from enterprise Intranets, social media, third parties and the Internet. The new platform features ontology-based data processing and configuration, and a new API to increase time-to-market, flexibility, scalability and efficiency in handling Big Data.” Read more

SemTechBiz is Less Than 2 Weeks Away

The Semantic Tech & Business Conference (SemTechBiz) is coming to San Francisco on June 3-7! Join us for case studies, innovative panels, tutorials, and keynotes that will provide you with practical advice, hands-on guidance, and breakthrough approaches to solving business problems with semantic technology. Passes go up $200 at the door. Sign up now and save !

Phil Windley, CTO of Kynetx, recently shared his insights regarding data abstractions and the cloud. Windley writes, “One of the primary services of a cloud OS (COS) will be data abstraction. Traditional operating systems provide data abstraction services by presenting programs and users with a file system view of the data stored in the sectors of the disk. We have the same kind of data abstraction opportunities in the cloud, although we aren’t talking about translating sectors into files, of course. And like the access control problem we discussed earlier, the problems that a cloud OS faces are made more complex by the distributed location and control of the data we want to access.” Read more

John Sheridan recently shared how APIs are being utilized by the United Kingdom. He writes, “Mention the word ‘API‘ to the wrong audience and blank looks shortly follow. For the uninitiated, an API, or ‘Application Programming Interface’, is a way for one computer to use information or services held on another computer, often across the internet. The strategists say that developing high quality APIs has the potential to transform public services. One example where this is proving to be the case is legislation.gov.uk, the official UK legislation website, operated by The National Archives.” Read more

Last week the New York City Council gave its nod of approval to legislation that would require city agencies to publish public data sets in a common format on an online portal for the public’s use. Mayor Bloomberg just signed off on it, with the Open Data Bill legislation to be phased in over six years.

But semantic tech startup Ontodia hopes to help speed up the development of the Big Apple as the Digital City of the Future with NYCFacets, a Smart Open Data Exchange for the developer community just released that catalogs all the NYC-related data sources already present in the New York City Open Data Catalogue.

“There are about 900 data sets in the New York City Open Data Catalogue,” says Ontodia co-founder Joel Natividad. Last year, while at TCG Software Services, he was part of a team that won the Large Organization Recognition Award at BigApps 2.0 – the city-sponsored contest for developers to use NYC Open Data – for participating in creating NYC Data Web, which integrates the NYC.gov data sets into a single web of data for developers. The team also included Revelytix and Spry. “Now that the Open Data Bill just passed, there will be a tsunami of data,” he says.

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Richard Wallis continues his coverage from SemTechBiz Berlin with a recap of the first day of the conference. Wallis writes, “Something that struck me throughout the day was the number of references to the Kasabi Data Marketplace during the day.  Well yes, you might say, you are a Kasabi Partner and Kasabi Staff members Knud Möller and Benjamin Nowack gave presentations.  Of course you would be right.  However, I also noticed references to it in other presentations and in general conversations.” Read more

Wikimeta, the semantic tagging and annotation architecture for incorporating semantic knowledge within documents, websites, content management systems, blogs and applications, this month is incorporating itself as a company called Wikimeta Technologies.  Wikimeta, which has a heritage linked with the NLGbAse project, last year was provided as its own web service.

Dr. Eric Charton, Ph.D, MSc at École Polytechnique de Montréal, is project leader and author of the Wikimeta code. The NLGbAse project was conducted by Charton at the University of Avignon as part of his Ph.D. Thesis.  The Semantic Web Blog recently hosted an email discussion with him to learn more about the Wikimeta architecture and its evolution.

 

The Semantic Web Blog: Tell us about the NLGBase project and Wikimeta’s relationship to it.

Charton: NLGbAse is an ontology extracted from Wikipedia. It is used in Wikimeta as a resource for semantic disambiguation. For each Wikipedia document (aka Semantic Concept), NLGbAse provides various ways of word-writing (for example, “General Motors” can be written “GM Company”, “GM”, “General Motors Corp” and so on), used for detection.

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Want web sites to run as smooth as silk? So do the developers behind Silk, who’ve been working the last couple of years to make it easy to apply semantics to create more powerful web sites, with information that can be used more effectively.

Silk, which The Semantic Web Blog previously has covered here and here, now is in the process of testing its WYSIWYG Silk Editor with a select user set, and is slowly inviting more interested parties to get involved. It expects to release it publicly soon. The simplicity of the Silk Editor, says Sander Koppelaar, head of business development, is that it looks very much like familiar environments – think a graphical Wiki – while supporting tagging information on a page, such as the population or capital of Amsterdam, if that were the subject.

“That way you first create pages that are very handy for users because they are built for humans, containing text and images you’d see on a normal web site,” he says. “But more or less without noticing it you build on your data model and can start to use that to create the great overviews and answer actual questions about the data.”

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Former Paypal and Intuit CEO Bill Harris these days is heading up financial advisory service Personal Capital, which now is adding an independent media property to its portfolio to aggregate and deliver financial news to individuals. That new property, Daily Capital, launches today and is powered by Eqentia’s semantic technology. Eqentia offers a content discovery and knowledge management portal for consumers, and also has other enterprises using its technology for their backbone portal infrastructures. But Eqentia CEO William Mougayar thinks this deal is likely the biggest one so far in terms of how much visibility it’s going to get and its potential to grow.

As Harris explains to The Semantic Web Blog in an email interview, Personal Capital provides clients with a holistic view of their complex financial lives, “and the mission of Daily Capital is the same: to cut through the clutter and highlight the best financial content from around the Web.”

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A recent article reports, “Many newspapers and other traditional media entities still think of themselves as delivering their content in a specific package… But few are thinking about their businesses in radically different ways — as content-generating engines with multiple delivery methods, or as platforms for data, around which other things can be built. USA Today appears to be moving in this direction, by opening up its data for others to use and even commercialize, following in the footsteps of The Guardian and its ground-breaking open platform.” Read more

A few short years ago, a group of semantic technology companies rode a wave of venture capital and inflated expectation. They were going to change the world. They were going to bring semantic technologies to the mainstream. They were going to make people very rich. They were the must-have keynotes of the conference circuit. And then, one by one, they disappeared. Powerset vanished inside Microsoft, to do something for Bing. Twine vanished inside Evri, amid rumours of a fire sale and investors covering their backs. Freebase vanished inside Google, and bits of Freebase DNA routinely pop up across Google’s sprawling empire. And Siri vanished inside Apple, as we scrambled to understand whether the Cupertino money machine was after semantic smarts or ‘just’ speech recognition technology. Now, though, the rumours suggest that Siri may be back, and that it’s going to be the thing that makes the next iPhone a compelling buy. Read more