Semantic technology firm Publishing Technology has been chosen to design GSE Research’s academic publishing platform. The article states, “The new online platform for research into governance, sustainability, and the environment will be built using Publishing Technology’s semantic web-based publishing software, pub2web. The new platform will be among the first of its kind offering the option of an open peer-review model alongside the traditional peer-review system. This new publishing model aims to speed up the submission process and encourage heightened engagement and collaboration among users.” Read more

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 New York Times has launched a new platform called beta620 for testing and collaborating on experimental NYT projects. “For years,” the article notes, “the NYT’s systems and technology team has had a blog, Open, where they’ve shared data and coding projects with the public. But Open primarily targeted other developers, particularly those using the NYT’s data APIs to build their own tools. beta620 is aimed at nytimes.com’s broader readership. It’s a chance to test how new prototypes work, generate community input, figure out how they can best add value to the company, and build and iterate on the fly.” Read more

A recent article discusses the proliferation of open data sets over the last several years and how these sets are being utilized. The article begins, “More than two years after President Obama’s memorandum on his open government initiative, thousands of public authorities and organizations worldwide have embraced the main idea behind it. Opening up data and making them publicly available on the Web has been recognized as a key to fostering transparency and collaboration within public administrations and with citizens. From census data, to cadastrial maps, everyday a new data set pop ups on the Web.” Read more

The Flemish government is pushing for ‘open innovation’ with the help of Collibra, Atira, and IBM. The article states, “Prosperity in a knowledge-based economy will benefit from a well-oiled innovation engine. With the advent of the Web, companies and research institutions have come to realize that they can no longer rely on their own research to innovate. Open innovation is a new practice in which stakeholders trade ideas and results for the benefit of themselves and others; a digital information market place for innovation may then naturally emerge.” Read more

What’s the tone of your corporate email or text communications? There might be some important reasons to have a better understanding of how employees’ words might be interpreted, before they hit the send button.

Sentiment intelligence in the corporate setting is the focus for Lymbix, whose ToneCheck add-in for Microsoft Outlook 2007 and 2010 tags content across eight emotional layers (funny, exciting, angry, and so on) to make sure that it conveys actual intent. “We built a large emotive lexicon repository to essentially understand more of what people feel with respect to emotive context,” says Josh Merchat, co-founder and CTO. “We had to create a more advanced sentiment system because knowing just that something is positive or negative doesn’t give you a good understanding of where there could be misinterpretations in tone.”

In fact, in addition to software algorithms for tone analysis, it’s leveraging the crowd-sourcing model with its Tone-a-Day application. This lets real people (some 10,000 registrants so far who have to meet quality specs in terms of language understanding) rate the tones of words and phrases against its various categories of emotion to win points and prizes, as well as fees for service for its top community members. “We leverage what we believe is an important component to sentiment, which is the human approach,” Merchat says. Human subjectivity, he says, is where sentiment analysis technologies often fall down.

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Ensuring national security is often a matter of connecting the dots – of discovering and digging into the relationships between individuals (recent evidence: Osama bin Laden being tracked down through one of his couriers), and among people and organizations. Businesses might want to take a page from that playbook, finding within their own data and that of external sources such as social media unexpected relationships that can lead to new markets, clients, or even employee leads.

Data Intelligence Technologies is hoping to exploit the data relationship expertise it developed in the national security consulting arena — “building bad guy networks,” as founder and CEO James Kraemer puts it — to the commercial enterprise space (as well as continuing to serve the national security market). “On a high level we allow business intelligence where you get insight into data. All BI offers that,” Kraemer says. What sets this solution apart, he says, is supporting knowledge networks with targeting features that an organization can use to search, look for profiles, and discover additional relationships inside the data.

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Last week the OpenSpending platform received its first Italian contribution, OpenSpending Italy: “A step forward was made in accessibility to data. A very important, well maintained, comprehensive dataset on public spending is now accessible through advanced, interactive visualization, easy to compare with analogous international data. Even more interesting, it was published in widget form: anybody can copypaste the embed code anywhere .” Read more

A new article discusses the difficulties of managing controlled vocabularies in a collaborative setting: “The creation and management of controlled vocabularies in companies often takes place in a distributed manner. Different departments in different branch offices often rather create their own vocabularies, than have one large central knowledge model, where everyone contributes. Such a central model is not only much harder to manage, but there is also the general problem that different departments like marketing, quality assurance, R&D, etc. will have divergent views on the model and its concepts. These different perspectives on one and the same concept are hard to unify in a single model.” Read more

Andy Powell recently responded to the semantic web community’s feedback on his and co-writer Pete Johnston’s draft of Metadata Guidelines for the UK RDFT. According to the draft, the purpose of the document is to provide “a set of guidelines for how metadata associated with library, museum and archival collections should be made available for the purposes of supporting resource discovery in line with the JISC/RLUK Resource Discovery Taskforce (RDTF) Vision.”

Powell’s personable response to the comments of his peers gives insight into the collaborative attitude of semantic web professionals Read more

Of all the areas where Semantic Technology may help to transform current practices, no one area may be impacted more than Science.

I’ll distinguish empirical science from the myriad of other sciences by stating that it is characterized more by processes designed to facilitate discovery – the scientific method. The goal of empirical science is to solve problems, it does so through answering a series of questions, often through use of experimentation. Of the IT domains I’ve discussed previously the one that is most involved in pure science is Healthcare, so let’s take a look at that for moment.

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