Manufacturers, utilities, health care and other industrial and services organizations have an opportunity to develop applications that model and draw upon the capabilities of the increasingly connected physical world around them. Seems, after all, as if almost everything already is or soon will be connected to a sensor of some sort, reeling in data to private intranets and, phase by phase, to the Internet, and creating opportunities to create smart grids, smart parking, and smart cities.

Thingworx may be able to help them take advantage of that opportunity. The start-up today plans to formally launch its application platform in Downingtown, Pa. (hopefully bringing a bit of cheer to state residents still getting over last night’s Pittsburgh Steelers Super Bowl loss). It leverages its semantic definitions for this “Internet of things” world to help those organizations – and not just the techies within them – to search, query, and analyze data, and then build mash-ups using the results.

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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 day may come when you might not need a team of developers to write data-driven or data-aware apps that themselves can be described in just a few words. Ideally, that would mean companies would spend a lot less money on, and speed up, a long-winded process that encompasses everything from understanding requirements to discovering data sources and normalizing results, to managing data coordination across front-end and back-end teams.

That day isn’t here yet, but  SemantiNet is trying to move things a step closer to that point. The company this month has introduced an open-ended alpha API that has as its centerpiece the idea of the data flow graph.

Its purpose is to enable easy querying of a collection of Web Services, Wikipedia, Linked Data and the unstructured web, and culminating in “one-liner” search bar apps, including mashups, built in minutes. Some examples: drawing out from dbPedia objects within a 50-kilometer radius of the Eiffel Tower that are somehow related to Napoleon and displaying the results as video; breaking down the revenue of the world’s major car companies listed in Wikipedia and providing a pie chart with that data and also mashing into the results the age of the companies in a table, its locations pinpointed on a map, and company snapshots called out in a graph; or finding out which pizza places close to your current location have some lunch deals on. For good measure, throw in some tweets and analyze them for sentiment, just to make sure that we’re talking about tasty pizza.

Or check out some of the output at left for the Keith Richards Guitar Gallery app, built on combining the unique DBpedia URI for Keith Richards; a fuzzy matching of the free-form text “instrument” with a predicate of dbpedia:Keith_Richards to get a list of the instruments he played; and a rendering of  this list of instruments using a SemantiNet template called videolist.html.

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This is the second of a two-part series discussing how Semantic Web Technology can enable Dynamic Business Applications in the enterprise. Read Part 1 of the article here.

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