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

Oversight Systems is in the business of Big Data analytics. Come June, it also will be in the business of having its technology serve as a platform behind third-party business intelligence and analytics applications on-demand – including its ontology approach for integrating data from disparate enterprise systems.

The company currently provides packaged solutions that let front-line employees involved in processes such as procure-to-pay or order-to-cash conduct continuous transaction analysis for insights into transactions that violate business rules, so that the business can take action to close gaps and assure compliance to operational and regulatory requirements. The ontology it’s developed over the years, which includes proprietary semantic and relationship information and infers some additional information, is there to help with the acquisition and preparation of data.

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John Walker of NXP recently discussed Linked Data as the future of data integration in the enterprise. He writes, “The main business drivers for this have, so far, been mostly internal: how to ensure product data is available across internal systems in an easy-to-use and efficient manner. In many areas simple XML messages and other B2B standards are applicable, but within a portfolio of over 20,000 products across a broad variety of functions and technology it simply is not possible to describe the complex properties of an electronic component with a handful of standard XML elements. Also the tree-based XML DOM soon starts to become a limitation when dealing with a highly-interlinked web of information. The answer (as it turns out) is quite simple: think graph.” Read more

Concept Searching reports that the company is now working with Aeturnum, “a global provider of enterprise-class application development services and solutions, to deliver integrated collaboration and search solutions to both the commercial and federal sectors. A Concept Searching integration partner, Aeturnum provides custom solutions to businesses across industry verticals, utilizing best-fit technology platforms offered by leading software companies. Aeturnum has integrated its expertise in business portals, and enterprise software implementation and integration, with Concept Searching’s intelligent search and classification capability. Find full details in the Aeturnum Case Study.” Read more

Courtesy: Flickr/epSos.de

At the Semantic Technology and Business Conference in New York City last week, attendees got to hear a lot about how semantic technology is influencing various sectors, such as government (see our stories here and here) and media (see this article and this one). Another prominent one on display: pharmaceuticals.

Pharma, for example, was the driving use case for the update to Callimachus that focuses on helping users deal with data that’s external to the framework for data-driven applications, David Wood, CTO of Callimachus project sponsor 3 Round Stones, told The Semantic Web Blog at the event. (To learn more about the update, see our story here.)

A session on Tuesday last week saw Lee Feigenbaum, vp of marketing at Cambridge Semantics, which makes the Anzo express and Anzo Enterprise solutions,  put forth a case for semantic tech as being key to data integration and interoperability in the sector, as well. “Can semantic web technologies break down enterprise data silos just as they break down document silos on the web?” he said. “The answer to the question is, “Of course.” Compared to the web, the data silo challenges of even the largest pharmaceuticals organization is relatively minor.”

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Jindrich Mynarz recently shared a demonstration of how linked data improves information recall via data integration. He writes, “Linked data is an approach that materializes relationships in between resources described in data. It makes implicit relationships explicit, which makes them reusable. When working with linked data integration is performed on the level of data. It offloads (some of) the integration costs from consumers onto data producers. In this post, I compare the integration on the query level with the integration done on the level of data, showing the limits of the first approach as contrasted to the second one, demonstrated on the improvement of recall when querying the data.” Read more

The PROOF (Prevention of Organ Failure) Centre at St. Paul’s Hospital, hosted by the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, is one of those leading-edge research organizations aiming to move us a little closer to the world of precision medicine, with the help of semantic technology. In the process, it also hopes to have a positive impact on the high costs of health care.

That’s a problem not just in the U.S., but also in Canada where provincial governments bear the burden of rising health care costs, which make up 45 percent of the budget for British Columbia alone.

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The latest version of the StreamGlider iPad news reader app for providing consumers with topic-oriented streams of information debuted this week. It brought with it the capability to limit hashtag or keyword searches in a Twitter, YouTube, or Flickr frame to a local area and turn on geo-awareness at the user’s request. But the bigger and more semantic event will be StreamGlider’s upcoming move to the enterprise, with the consumer app serving as a showcase to those potential customers.

StreamGlider CEO Bill McDaniel – also CEO of SemantiStar, which developed the application that The Semantic Web Blog first covered here and here – says to expect in the enterprise edition a very interesting semantic search/semantic relations engine in the background for correlating up to three data sets of semi-structured, unstructured and structured data. The company already is working with one client on a specific application of the generic technology for its custom needs, and talking to a second customer about a pilot around the idea.

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How to help the bench biologist get value out of the wealth of life sciences Linked Data sets? Startup Metaome Science Informatics proposes to offer some help with its DistilBio semantic search and data integration technology, by streamlining the approach to posing user queries. The Distil in DistilBio stands for Data Integration using Semantic Technologies in the Life Sciences.

Metaome, which was founded by CEO Kalpana Krishnaswami and CTO Ramkumar Nandakumar as a bioinformatics services provider before transitioning to a product vendor, contains a few more than a dozen life sciences public data sets so far. Infomaticians in the life sciences space have the expertise to query such data across sets via SPARQL, but the front-line biologist isn’t necessarily an infomatician. So, DistilBio has created a query interface that makes it easier for them to ask large and complex questions in a simplified way across data sets while building a graph in the process.

“How does a user say what are the drugs used for Alzheimer’s disease and do have they have certain protein targets and are those protein targets implicated in other diseases?” says Krishnaswami. “To ask that in one shot right now is hard without working through a SPARQL endpoint using all the SPARQL syntax.”

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Researchers from the University Hospitals of Geneva, Switzerland, have published a new paper entitled Interoperability Driven Integration of Biomedical Data Sources. The paper, published in Studies in Health Technology and Informatics, introduces “a data integration methodology that promotes technical, syntactic and semantic interoperability for operational healthcare data sources. ETL processes provide access to different operational databases at the technical level.” Read more