Semantic technology is scoring more goals in the sports world. The BBC, for example, which created the FIFA World Cup 2010 website that leveraged semantic technology, is at it again as London prepares for the 2012 Summer Olympics. Brazil has gotten into the action, too, with an Internet portal there taking soccer to the semantic web set. At the upcoming SemTech conference in San Francisco, attendees will have an opportunity to hear the latest details about both efforts.

Over at the BBC, for example, the 2012 Olympics site accompanies a completely redesigned BBC Sports site, both based on technology including Fluid Operations’ Information Workbench to support the editorial process for the BBC’s Dynamic Semantic Publishing strategy, from authoring and curation to publishing of ontology and instance data following an editorial workflow. The BBC environment since the World Cup also has been updated to use the MarkLogic document store for managing rapidly changing statistics, navigation and ultimately all content objects, as lead architect Jem Rayfield described it in this blog posting. Today, the triple store that’s been behind the BBC’s past work is extended to cover every team, athlete, venue, discipline, country and so on, Rayfield told The Semantic Web Blog.

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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 !

Mo McRoberts of BBC recently shared a few data guides that have emerged as part of the Digital Public Space project, a project “which uses Semantic Web technology as a way to help unlock the value in the archives of the BBC and other publicly-funded institutions.” McRoberts writes, “When we spoke with project partners – and others – about publishing data in a form which makes it possible to have journeys through machine-readable catalogue data similar to the journeys through human-oriented documents that we normally experience on the Web, the reaction was overwhelmingly positive, but organisations weren’t necessarily sure about the nuts and bolts of actually doing it.” Read more

The BBC has been working on automatically tagging their audio archives with DBpedia identifiers. Yves Raimond explains how the broadcast company is handling the project. Raimond writes, “One dataset we are looking at within this project is the World Service archive. This archive is isolated from other programme data sources at the BBC, like BBC Programmes or the Genome Project, and the associated programme data within it is very sparse. It would therefore benefit a lot from being automatically interlinked with further data sources which makes it such a particularly interesting use-case. The archive is also very large: it covers many decades and consists of about two and a half years of high-quality continuous audio content.” Read more

In 2005, I started learning about the so-called Semantic Web. It wasn’t till 2008, the same year I started my PhD, that I finally understood what the Semantic Web was really about. At the time, I made a $1000 bet with 3 college buddies that the Semantic Web would be mainstream by the time I finished my PhD. I know I’m going to win! In this post, I will argue why.

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Yes you are right, one of the prime reasons for this post is an excuse to show some stunning pictures from nature.  However, there is also good reason to explore a Linked Data example, provided by Pete DeVries of the Department of Entomology at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, in his recent submission to the W3C public-lod mailing list.

Pete shows a good example of the benefits of Linked Data.  He provides links to information about the Monarch Butterfly (Danaus plexippus) from several Linked Data datasets, each of which provide different, but overlapping views.

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Cait O’Riordan recently explained the many changes to the BBC Sport Website. O’Riordan writes, “This redesign is the first major launch of many this year as we get ready to cover the Olympic Games this summer. We are working on some really exciting developments, which will be showcased on the new BBC Sport website. This redesign has concentrated on doing four main things: (1) Creating a fresh website that better showcases the range of content we offer. (2) Prominent promotion of our fantastic live coverage from across the BBC. (3) Making it easier for our users to talk about our sport coverage. (4) Making it faster for our users to find our great content. We have tried to do this in a way that makes the site easier to use for the millions of people from across the UK and around the world who use the site every week and are confident it will. But we know that, initially at least, the site will take a bit of getting used to.” Read more

Jake Berger recently compared the developing Digital Public Space project to an ancient temple called the Metroon. He writes, “Around 500 BC in the Ancient Greek city-state of Athens the state archive was housed in a building called the Metroon, or ‘mother building’. This temple, dedicated to the goddess Demeter, was filled with papers relating to the day-to-day civic, legal, commercial and cultural life of its citizens. The Metroon was open to every citizen, and all were entitled both to read and to make copies of anything held there, giving them a level of access to the building blocks of their society that is unrivalled in the modern age despite our Freedom of Information laws and open data initiatives.” Read more

The first Semantic Technology and Business Conference in the United Kingdom (#semtechbiz) wrapped up in London this week, and there are some themes that emerged from the presentations and networking conversations.

We heard a lot about the benefits of using Semantic Technology solutions. There were strong case studies and experiences shared, and we will be diving deeper into some of these in coming weeks here at SemanticWeb.com.  Sometimes these solutions were in place of — and sometimes in conjunction with — RDBMS databases, spreadsheets, XML files, and other data management systems.  While there was a nice diversity of companies, industries, and products represented, there seemed to be consensus around some of the following benefits of using Semantic Tech for business applications:

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I hate to even mention how quickly Summer is passing, but as we head into August, it’s time to start making plans for the busy Fall event season. September is particularly full of Semantic Tech events.

September 14, in New York City, the Semantic Web Media Summit will take place. A half-day meeting focused on uses of Semantic Web in media, advertising, and publishing, the event is produced by SemanticWeb.com, Lotico.com and our parent company, MediaBistro. With a keynote by Mike Dunn, CTO of Hearst Interactive, and contributions from a stellar group of presenters, the program promises to be a must-attend event for anyone in the New York area interested in how Semantic Technology is changing the media world.  OpenAmplify is sponsoring the conference.

September 21-23, DC-2011, the eleventh International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications, will take place at the National Library of the Netherlands in The Hague.

Also on Sept. 21, the folks at Schema.org are planning a workshop in Silicon Valley. There are still few details available about this event.

September 26-27, The London Semantic Technology and Business Conference (#SemTechBiz) takes place at the Hotel Russell. This two-day executive conference is designed for business and technology executives who need to learn what semantic technologies are and how to take advantage of semantics in their enterprise and web-based systems. Attendees will further their technical understanding in introductory sessions and learn from the Keynote speakers John O’Donovan (Press Association), Martin Hepp (Hepp Research), Steve Harris (Garlik), and Dennis E. Wisnosky, U.S. Department of Defense.

On Monday, June 20, a group of Semantic thought leaders from around the globe met with their host and colleague, Paul Miller, for the seventh installment of the Semantic Link, a monthly podcast covering the world of Semantic Technologies. This episode includes a discussion about schema.org and a review of some of the goings-on at the recent SemTech: Semantic Technology Conference. Read more