Guillermo Moncecchi of the Open Knowledge Foundation recently shared his argument as to why governments have a responsibility to go open. He writes, “The most common argument in favor of open data is that it enhances transparency, and while the link may not always be causal, it is certainly true that both tend to go hand-in-hand. But there is another, more expansive perspective on open government data: that it is part of an effort to build public infrastructure.” Read more

Agilex is looking for a Semantic Engineer in Springfield, VA. According to the post the company is seeking “an experienced, detail-oriented software engineer to support a government program office in Alexandria, VA. The successful candidate will be required to be a self-starter with demonstrated experience using machine learning, be a part of a small independent team responsible for building forecast models, develop advanced algorithms to perform network based search and text extraction through entity resolution using structured and unstructured data. Read more

Mike Bergman recently wrote a strong defense for the Semantic Web, stating, “There have been some notable attempts of late to make elevator pitches for semantic technologies, as well as Lee Feigenbaum’s recent series on Are We Asking the Wrong Question? about semantic technologies. Some have attempted to downplay semantic Web connotations entirely and to replace the pitch with Linked Data (capitalized). These are part of a history of various ways to try to make a business case around semantic approaches.” Read more

Nova Spivack recently wrote an article describing a lawsuit waged against him by a shareholder in his former company, Radar Networks, the company behind Twine. Such lawsuits are commonplace amongst entrepreneurs, and Spivack offers advice to others in the same predicament. Spivack writes, “In a nutshell, this one shareholder, out of many that we had, has filed a lawsuit against many of the other shareholders, directors and our acquirer, to try to forcefully regain part of their investment. This kind of lawsuit is unfortunately not that uncommon when companies are sold, or shut down; It’s just not talked about that much.” Read more