Derrick Harris of GigaOM reports that NASA has launched a series of Big Data challenges aimed at finding innovative solutions to some of the nation’s most pressing Big Data problems. He writes, “Some of the U.S. government’s most research-intensive agencies want your help to come up with better ways to analyze their expansive data sets. NASA, along with the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy, launched a competition on TopCoder called the Big Data Challenge series. Essentially, it’s a competition to crowdsource a solution to the very big problem of fragmented and incompatible federal data.” Read more

SemanticWeb.com has become a media sponsor of the Linked Open Data in Libraries Archives and Museums Summit in Montreal, Quebec, from June 19-20, 2013. According to the Summit website, “The Second International Linked Open Data in Libraries, Archives, and Museums Summit (“LODLAM Summit”) will convene leaders in their respective areas of expertise from the humanities and sciences to catalyze practical, actionable approaches to publishing and consuming Linked Open Data, specifically: (1) Identify the tools and techniques for publishing and working with Linked Open Data. (2) Share, consider and publicize precedents and policy for licensing and copyright considerations regarding the publishing of library, archive, and museum metadata. (3) Share and promote use cases that will give LAM staff the tools they need to begin implementing Linked Open Data in their institutions.” Read more

Forbes has published an article that points out an opportunity for Semantic Technology companies. The article discusses the lack of understanding in companies around big data. Author Gil Press writes, “Listening to Gartner analysts Sheila Childs and Merv Adrian talking yesterday about big data infrastructure challenges, I was reminded of a story Mike Ruettgers, former EMC CEO, liked to tell about similar challenges in the early 1990s. At the time, the reigning buzzword was ‘client/server computing,’ signaling a shift to relatively inexpensive servers based on the UNIX operating system. The early adopters were not the people in the glass houses, the data center managers. Rather, they were marketing managers and other business executives.” Read more

Early in 2011, I wrote a piece here on SemanticWeb.com which explored the relationship between Semantic Technologies and super-computing’s venerable rock star, Cray. Then, earlier this year, Cray spun out a new division to focus upon exploring massive graph databases; something which should resonate with the semantic technology community. The new division — YarcData — differentiates itself quite clearly from its parent, leading with a data-led proposition and typically operating at quite a different pricepoint to its eye-wateringly expensive parent.

I sat down with YarcData President Arvind Parthasarathi during the Semantic Technology & Business Conference in San Francisco, to get an update on YarcData and to hear why the company is investing $100,000 in prizes for a new ‘Big Data Graph Analytics Challenge.’ Read more

Europeana, a collection of digital resources from Europe’s countless museums, libraries, and archives has launched data.europeana.eu as part of its “ongoing effort of making its metadata available as Linked Open Data on the Web. It allows others to access metadata collected from Europeana providers, via standard Web technologies, enrich this metadata and give this enriched metadata back to the providers. Links between Europeana resources and other resources in the Linked Data Web will enable discovery of semantically related resources, as, say, when two artworks are created by artists who are related to each other.” Read more

Nerd Collider has issued a challenge to the public: “What would you change about Data.gov to get more people to care?” The question is a pressing one given the recent announcement that Data.gov and six other open government initiatives started by the Obama administration are set to shut down by the end of May. Read more

Software developers have a new opportunity to test their abilities and help researchers in the process: “Elsevier is offering $35,000 in prizes and challenging software developers to help more than 15 million researchers, medical professionals, librarians and students navigate scientific content, improve scientific search and discovery, visualize sophisticated data in more insightful and attractive ways and stimulate collaboration.” Read more

The Institute of Metadata Management (IMM) has announced a new linked data mash-up challenge: “The aim of this challenge is to create an incentive for linking information in novel and ingenious ways to foster the knowledge discovery process and deliver end-user benefits. The challenge will also demonstrate to delegates the potential value in linking datasets. We are now inviting submissions of web applications that perform mash-ups on raw and / or linked data, via novel mechanisms or technologies, and that showcase the benefits of Linked Data to end-users.” Read more

A Quora user posed this challenge to the network: “How do you explain semantic web to a nine-year old child in one sentence?” The challenge was followed by a quote from Albert Einstein: “If you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it yourself.”

Some of the best responses so far include, “A web where computers better understand the real meaning of the words we use to communicate with them.” “Hi Timmy, the web is like one giant big book written by a lot of people. And the semantic web is another book describing how the first book should be read.” And, “Semantic web is like the magic mirror in Shrek – you ask it, ‘Can I go to a pool?’ and it tells you, ‘Yes, you can, because the weather is good and the pool you like to go to is open.’”

We at Semantic Web recently offered up a challenge of our own: give us your best elevator pitch answering the question, “What is the Semantic Web?” We’ve received some great pitches so far (listed below) and we’re still accepting new pitches.

Sandro Hawke, W3C – for a general audience

David Wood, Talis – for journalistic research

Mark Montgomery, Kyield – for enterprise decision makers

Gordon Brown, UK Prime Minister (not an official pitch) – for government and citizenry

Image: Courtesy Flickr/ ricardodiaz11