Semantic technology can help rectify the situation. In fact, it’s already doing so in France, where Olivier Curé, an associate professor in computer science at the University of Paris-Est in France, created a web application based on the book by pharmacology expert and educator Jean-Paul Giroud Médicaments sans ordonnance: Les bons et les mauvais!, of which he is a co-author with Catherine Cupillard. The app is made available to their consumers via three big insurance companies there, in order to help the companies save costs on reimbursing them for buying drugs that won’t actually help their condition, or direct them to the appropriate drugs at pharmacies with which the insurers may have relationships to supply them at lower costs. An iPhone version of the app was just released to accompany the web version.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

That company is the creation of four Italian entrepreneurs – CEO Michele Barbera, president Gabriele Antonelli, partnerships director Andrea Di Benedetto, and Luca Pieraccini – who lived first-hand the frustrating experience of trying to find and leverage useful data for the custom web and mobile apps they were developing while running and working in small IT consulting companies. In an attempt to reverse the ratio of finding and cleaning data to actually building apps, says Barbera, the founders began participating in several EU-funded research projects and in the Open Data movement in Europe and Italy, including founding the non-profit Linked Open Data Italy. They also started experimenting with Semantic Web technologies.

“Open Data helps us to find valuable data and to build value-added web and mobile apps,” says Barbera. “So, let’s say that we solved partly the first problem of finding data, but not the second one, normalizing and cleaning data, since it is still very difficult to merge different data sources to put data in context.” continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Right now that’s just on the wish lists of Matthias Palmér and Hannes Ebner, co-founders of MetaSolutions AB, a spin-off from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and Uppsala University focused on semantic and scalable web apps. But a solid start has been made through their work with Nobel Media AB, which develops and manages programs, productions and media rights of the Nobel Prize within the areas of digital and broadcast media, including the Nobelprize.org domain, on the Nobel Prize Linked Data set.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

It’s possible to build one, but that’s a big job and a costly one, too – especially for many enterprises, where there hasn’t traditionally been a focus on structuring content and so the skills to do it aren’t necessarily there. While industries like publishing, oil and gas, life sciences, and pharma have that bent, many other verticals do not. In fact, Riley notes, they may realize they have a content organization problem, but not that what they’d benefit from to address it even goes by the name ‘taxonomy.’

Pingar’s looking to help out those enterprises that want to bring organization to their content, whether or not they’re familiar with the concept of a taxonomy. It just launched its automated Taxonomy Generator Service that uses an organization’s own content to build a taxonomy that mirrors its own way of talking about things and its understanding of relationships between child and parent terms.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

This week, it will begin a one-year effort under a European Commission-funded project to align its work with the Nokia Maps database of places, so that mobile users of the app can quickly get pictures of these venues that were taken by users with EventMedia’s help.

A project of EURECOM, a consortium combining seven European universities and nine international industrial partners, EventMedia Live has its origins in the “mismatch between those sites specializing in announcing upcoming events and those other sites where users share photos, videos and document those events,” explains Raphaël Troncy, assistant professor at the EURECOM: School of Engineering & Research Center, Multimedia Communications, and one of the project’s leaders.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

DBpedia has begun an Evaluation Campaign with the aim of “evaluating DBpedia resources in order to assess and thereby improve the quality of DBpedia.” It works like this: “First, please authenticate yourself with a google account. This will not only help prevent spam but also help us keep track of how many resources you evaluated. After you click ‘Start’, you will be provided with a list of classes from DBpedia wherein you may choose the ones you are most familiar with. There are three options: (1) Any: where a completely random resource will be retrieved, (2) Class: where you have the option to choose any class from the DBpedia ontology and a random resource belonging to that class will be retrieved, (3) Manual: where you can manually put in the DBpedia URI of a resource of your choice.” continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Leveraging the open source software, libraries and best practices that were outcomes of the project, Sourcesense has continued to move forward to deliver a commercial, scalable Web API platform that offers semantically enriched user profiles built from users’ activities performed on the Social Web. One of the first customers of its efforts is one of the largest Italian broadcast companies, RAI, which was also involved in the EU project.

Beancounter is powering a second- screen service on top of the platform to provide its 5 million viewers information on related content that may be of interest to them based on profiling their social activities (with their permission).

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The project, which began at MIT (see our earlier story here), has advanced to the application stage, and the software is moving from a JAVA to a browser-based interface. Rong says the team also is developing a web services API for the system.

“Current XBRL technology primary collects financial data for reporting, and secondarily, as more XBRL-based financial data becomes available, it will need to effectively extract financial data for value,” says Rong. Semantic web technology lets the focus be on the latter.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

A project led by members of the GRIHO (Human-Computer Interaction and data integration) research group that is assigned to the Computer Science and Industrial Engineering Department of the University of Lleida, where Garcia is associate professor, the initiative also has led to projects including ReDeFer, a set of tools to move data in an out of the Semantic Web, and various ontologies for multimedia, e-business and news. As for Rhizomer, it accommodates publishing and exploration of Linked Data, with data-set exploration helped by features including an overview to get a full picture of the data-set at hand; zooming and filtering to zoom in on items of interest and filter out uninteresting items; details to arrive at concrete resources of interest; and visualizations tailored to the kind of resource at hand, as the site explains.

In other words, its features are “organized so they support the typical data analysis tasks,” he says. “We are more a contributor from the user perspective of how you interact with that data.”

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

I am on the long flight back from the Semantic Tech & Business Conference in San Francisco to the good ol’ UK, to see how they got on with the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee festivities.  I am reflecting on what my week at the conference has told me.  It has told me that things are a changing – I got that impression last year too, but more so this year.  Obviously, from the title of this post, it has something to do with Schema.org, Wikidata, and the Google Knowledge Graph….

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Paul Wilton was Technical and development lead for semantic publishing at BBC News and Sport Online during the 2010 World Cup.  Currently he is the Technical architect at Ontoba.  In this interview, a supplement to “Dynamic Semantic Publishing for Beginners”, Paul describes the current landscape for DSP as it applies to news organizations.

Q. Are you seeing a wide disparity in the way that news organizations have approached the creation and use of semantically-linked (or annotated) content?

A. Actually the pattern and often the (general) technical architecture is surprisingly similar. Where things differ are the applications, models used and instance data. This is undoubtedly bleeding edge technology, and typically the impetus to begin investigating the use of linked data, RDF and semantics in the technology stack has come from within the Information Architecture and R&D teams, not from the offices of the CTO/CIO. Maybe this is starting to change now.

Q. Do many news organizations have the resources (staff and/or Content Management Systems) that are able to publish and use semantic data?

A. Not in our experience, but this shouldn’t be a barrier to integrating semantic technologies and publishing linked data.

The key components to adopting semantic publishing – a semantic repository (triple store); appropriate linked data sets; and the ability to semantically annotate your content – can be built alongside an existing Content Management System. continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

A new article reports

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Wikipedia is far from perfect, and some of the concern around its role in a wider dumbing down of thought and argument may be justified. But, despite that, it’s a remarkable achievement and a wonderful resource. Those who argued that it would never work have clearly been proven wrong. Carefully maintained processes and the core principle of the neutral point of view mostly serve contributors well.

With Wikimedia Deutschland‘s recent announcement of Wikidata, many of the early concerns about Wikipedia itself have resurfaced once again. continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

NautiLOD

Programmers daily use the wget tool to specify and retrieve data on the Web. However, wget is limited since it cannot dig into the semantics of Web data to do the job. What if you were to add semantics to wget? This is the question that Valeria Fionda, Claudio Gutierrez and Giuseppe Pirró asked themselves. They took that question to the next level: imagine a semantic wget on top of Linked Data. They wanted to create a language to declaratively specify portions of the Web of Data, define routes and instruct agents that can do things for you on the Web. All this by exploiting the semantics of information (RDF data) found in online data sources. For example, find all the Wikipedia pages of directors that have been influenced by Stanley Kubrick and send them to my email; retrieving information about David Lynch from different information providers only gives a hint of what can be done. The researchers developed a simple, generic declarative language, NautiLOD and implemented it in swget (semantic wget). swget comes in two flavors: a simple command line tool (to give the Web back to users) and a GUI. This is not a fantasy anymore. Check it our for yourself (http://swget.wordpress.com).

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Eileen Brown recently reported

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.