It’s been a couple of weeks now since the terrorist attack at the Boston Marathon, and since then the media and others have been questioning whether there was an intelligence failure at the FBI. It’s not an easy question to answer, given how many suspicious persons and activities government agencies must have on their radars, and all the data there is to deal with.

It’s undeniably hard work. Semantic technology does come into play to help the government connect the dots on information related to threats and other intelligence issues. For example, Dennis Wisnosky, formerly CTO and Chief Architect, Business Mission Area, U.S. Department of Defense, discussed semantic technology’s role in that institution at SemTech in San Francisco in 2011. (Wisnosky now is spending more time with FIBO in his role providing technical strategy and operational guidance to help the The Enterprise Data Management Council finalize and implement Financial Industry Business Ontology standards – see story here.) It’s also been reported that the FBI and CIA are practicing and developing semantic processing techniques to analyse social media to improve situational awareness and identify emerging threats.

Semantic tech is being applied by military intelligence, too, in services like the Air Force and Marine Corp., which are testing or have live deployments of semantic systems developed by Modus Operandi.  The Air Force is involved with analyzing email traffic on a 24/7 basis, while the Marine Corp. works with it as part of the cyber portion war games exercises. The Office of Naval Research also is utilizing it as part of its lab exercises, says Modus Operandi president Rick McNeight.

Read more

Glen Fest of American Banker reports, “The use of semantics often is a way to evade the issue at hand (i.e., Bill Clinton’s parsed definition of ‘is’). But in David Saul’s world of bank compliance and regulation, it’s something that can help get right to the heart of the matter. Saul, the chief scientist at State Street Corp. in Boston, views the technology of semantics—in which data is structured in ways that it can be shared easily between bank divisions, institutions and regulators—as an ends to better understand and manage big-bank risk profiles. ‘By bringing all of this data together with the semantic models, we’re going to be able to ask the questions you need to ask to prepare regulatory reporting,’ as well as internal risk calculations, Saul promised at a recent forum held at the New York offices of SWIFT, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication.” Read more

Alissa Lorentz of Wired reports, “With all the hype around Big Data, we’ve become extremely proficient at collecting data – be it from enterprise systems, documents, social interactions, or e-mail and collaboration services. The expanding smorgasbord of data collection points are turning increasingly portable and personal, including mobile phones and wearable sensors, resulting in a data mining gold rush that will soon have companies and organizations accruing Yottabytes (10^24) of data… So it’s all dandy that we’re getting better and better at sucking up every trace of potential information out there, but what do we do with these mountains of data? Move over Age of Content, enter the Age of Context.” Read more

Ryan Lawler of Tech Crunch reports, “Infer has raised $10 million in Series A funding led by Redpoint Ventures, with other investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Social+Capital Partnership, Sutter Hill Ventures, and individual angels including Pejman Nozad. Along with the funding, Redpoint partner Satish Dharmaraj joined the Infer board. The platform works by ingesting all sorts of corporate sales data from various CRMs and other sales and marketing databases, and combines that proprietary internal data with various signals available on the web. Read more

The cloud’s role in processing big semantic data sets was recently highlighted in early April when DERI and Fujitsu Laboratories announced a new data storage technology for storing and querying Linked Open Data that resides on a cloud-based platform (see our story here).

The cloud conversation, with storage as one key discussion point, will continue to be an active one in Big Data circles, whether users are working with massive, connected Linked Data sets or trying to run NLP across the Twitter firehose. CloudSigma, for example, recently publicly disclosed that it is using an all solid-state drive (SSD) solution for its public cloud offering that lets users purchase CPU, RAM, storage and bandwidth independently. The use of SSD, says CEO Robert Jenkins, avoids the problem that spinning disks have with the randomized, multi-tenant access of a public cloud that leads to storage bottlenecks and curbs performance.

That, combined with the company’s approach of letting customers size virtual machine resources as they like, as well as leverage exposed advanced hypervisor settings to optimize for their particular applications, he says, brings the use of the public cloud infrastructure closer to what companies can get out of private cloud environments, and at a price-performance win.

Read more

John Kennedy of Silicon Republic reports, “Ireland’s State broadcaster RTÉ, as part of its strategy to preserve the memories of a nation in digital form, is to collaborate with SFI’s recently announced mega CSET the Insight Centre to employ big data and the semantic web to make hundreds of thousands of hours of audio and video content available at the touch of a button. In a collaboration announced at the European Data Forum in Dublin this morning, RTÉ will work with the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) in Galway and the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) to make sure that content going back over 60 years can be accessed digitally.” Read more

CWI reports, “Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica has cooperated with OpenLink Software, to help apply advanced database methods developed at CWI in the Virtuoso database product of OpenLink. The cooperation between CWI and OpenLink Software, was established in the European research project LOD2 (www.lod2.eu), that aims at strengthening the tools and technology for semantic data management. As a result of this cooperation, techniques pioneered at CWI like vector execution and column compression have now been included into the Virtuoso product by OpenLink, leading to breakthrough improvements in database performance.” Read more

TEMIS, the leading provider of semantic content enrichment solutions for the enterprise, and MarkLogic Corporation, provider of the only enterprise NoSQL database, have announced they are extending their partnership to deliver world-class content enrichment over unstructured Big Data. With new, enhanced integration capabilities, TEMIS’ Luxid® and MarkLogic® Server can now help organizations do more with their content. Read more

Enterprise NoSQL database platform provider MarkLogic has come into some cash: a $25 million round of growth capital from investors including Sequoia Capital, Tenaya Capital, Northgate Capital, CEO Gary Bloom and other corporate executives. Yesterday, at the company’s MarkLogic World 2013 conference, Bloom also prepared the audience to hear more today from company executives about MarkLogic’s next steps in semantics for its MarkLogic Server technology that ingests, manages and searches structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data.

“The way to think about this is that when we look at semantics, we didn’t … say we just want to check a box on semantics,” Bloom said, by working with partners on some low-hanging fruit – although it will be collaborating with them on various semantic enrichment capabilities. “We think semantics is critical technology, and more interesting I believe is that it is a critical technology that is both a search technology as well as a database technology.” Others in the marketplace will focus on changing their search engines to do semantics, but optimum results won’t come if all that’s being done is layering in semantics at the search level, he said.

Read more

Alex Pierre-Traves of Forbes reports, “The International Data Corporation (IDC) predicts the volume of data will grow by 40 percent over the next seven years. That’s a lot of data to manage, analyse and ultimately integrate into your business decisions. It’s unsurprising, then, to discover that analytics is the next big thing in marketing expertise. Today, data is used primarily to inform and analyse marketing campaigns, which is great for those of us in the agency business; however, what’s missing is meaningful analysis for our clients’ businesses to develop products and services that are relevant to their customers and, in turn, build brand loyalty. As the data we have at our disposal grows, new hires in marketing departments will increasingly need to have a technical, data or analytics background in order to deliver the strategic insights necessary for the business.” Read more