David Ramel of ADTmag writes, “What the heck are you doing reading this article? You should be boning up on your Big Data developer skills. Well, if you like making the big bucks, that is. Yes, the Big Data skills shortage shows no signs of shrinking even after several years of hype. That means great opportunities for data developers. ‘By 2018, the United States alone could face a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with deep analytical skills as well as 1.5 million managers and analysts with the know-how to use the analysis of big data to make effective decisions,’ stated a recent McKinsey Global Institute report. And where there’s hype, there’s money. ‘Salaries reported by those who regularly use Hadoop, NoSQL, and Mongo DB are all north of $100,000,’ claimed a recent report from the 2013-2012 Dice Salary Survey.” Read more

The Semantic Web Blog reported last year about a relationship formed between the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) and Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. in Japan, focused on a project to build a large-scale RDF store in the cloud capable of processing hundreds of billions of triples. At the time, Dr. Michael Hausenblas, who was then a DERI research fellow, discussed Fujitsu Lab’s research efforts related to the cloud, its huge cloud infrastructure, and its identification of Big Data as an important trend, noting that “Linked Data is involved with answering at least two of the three Big Data questions” – that is, how to deal with volume and variety (velocity is the third).

This week, the DERI and Fujitsu Lab partners have announced a new data storage technology that stores and queries interconnected Linked Open Data, to be available this year, free of charge, on a cloud-based platform. According to a press release about the announcement, the data store technology collects and stores Linked Open Data that is published across the globe, and facilitates search processing through the development of a caching structure that is specifically adapted to LOD.

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Kevin Fitchard of GigaOM reports, “Yummly is releasing its semantic food search technology into the wild, announcing on Wednesday that it is selling developers access to its database of more than 1 million web-sourced recipes as well as the technology it uses to parse them. The launch is timely, considering Punchfork is shutting down its API at the end of the month after it was bought by Pinterest. Several sites and apps tap Punchfork’s recipe content and search capabilities – for instance, Punchfork powered Evernote Food’s Explore Recipes feature – so it will soon be looking for an alternative.” Read more

Gregg Turner of Blue Claw Search recently discussed the impact of RDFa format data and why developers should implement it. Turner writes, “Rich snippets have become a lot more prominent within the SERPS over the past couple of years, with appealing, feature-rich listings becoming a more and more commonplace. Google refers to these enhanced search listings as “Rich Snippets”, and from a search marketing perspective they are often more appealing to users and increase Click Through Rates (CTR).” Read more

The Facebook Developer Blog recently announced that the company will be cutting back on Open Graph actions in an effort to reduce spam: “Over the past six months we’ve launched new channels, such as App Center with our improved recommendations engine, to drive distribution to the highest quality apps. As part of these ongoing updates, today we’re releasing improvements to how we present Open Graph stories in news feed and on timeline to drive growth and engagement to your app. In order to provide users with experiences that meet their expectations, we will no longer approve custom actions that publish stories as people consume content. These apps must use the appropriate built-in actions or create a different sharing experience. We are also deprecating a handful of features that led to low quality user experiences.”

Kim-Mai Cutler of TechCrunch noted, “Now apps must use authorized actions like ‘Listen,’ ‘Read,’ ‘Watch,’ ‘Like,’ or ‘Follow’ if they want to automatically publish into the ticker or news feed as they consume content. Developers can still create custom actions like ‘run’ or ‘cook’, but a user has to click a button in order for that activity to be shared. The company is also giving additional distribution to news feed updates that have locations or photos tied to them, since these stories can get 70 percent more clicks if they have decent visuals. Facebook’s Henry Zhang wrote that these stories can see up to 50 times more ‘Likes’ than other stories.”

Image: Courtesy Facebook

Common Crawl has announced the winners of their first ever Common Crawl Code Contest. According to the site, “We were thrilled by the response to the contest and the many great entries. Several people let us know that they were not able to complete their project in time to submit to the contest. We’re currently working with them to finish the projects outside of the contest and we’ll be showcasing some of those projects in the near future! All entries creatively showcased the immense potential of the Common Crawl data.” Read more

Last week we reported here on the progress that Nova Spivack’s #OccupyTwitter petition was making in terms of attracting signatures, and on the petition’s request that Twitter clarify just what its intentions for the developer community are around its API. Many semantic and sentiment analysis applications, of course, depend heavily on the Twitter API.

Well, the end of last week saw a blog post from Michael Sippey of Twitter that provided some more information on the API issue. He wrote:

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Benjamin J. Balter recently discussed the need to publish open government data that is developer-friendly. He writes, “Despite increasing public support (as well as a number of executive mandates) publishing public data in a machine-readable format is not as simple as pressing the ‘publish’ button. Why? Equally important as exposing the information itself is fostering a vibrant developer ecosystem around it. By making the publishing agency, not the public, responsible for making information immediately useful, government can lower the barriers associated with consuming its data and introduce additional citizen services at little to no cost to the agency.”

He continues, “Good, clean data may be surprisingly difficult to come by, especially when working with government systems that have been coupled together over decades. Data standards and conventions change, mechanisms of data collection evolve, and the data itself may be interpreted differently as new policies are introduced. Read more

Andrea Di Maio of Gartner recently articulated concerns about open data processing, particularly the divide between data professionals who have the skills to do so and those who do not. Di Maio writes, “Over the last four years open government and open data have been at the forefront of the debate on how governments can become more transparent, participative and efficient. The theory is well known: rather than (or alongside) providing the government’s interpretation or packaging of public data, this data should be made available in raw, open format for people to build their own views and applications… The downside is a deluge of data. People can easily drown in raw open data that is either too much or simply meaningless unless some processing takes place.” Read more

For Web Developers who have been looking for resources devoted to adding Linked Data to HTML, there’s a new site available today: RDFa.info. Visitors are greeted with the following headline, “RDFa is an extension to HTML5 that helps you markup things like People, Places, Events, Recipes and Reviews. Search Engines and Web Services use this markup to generate better search listings and give you better visibility on the Web, so that people can find your website more easily.” SemanticWeb.com has covered RDFa’s development and use in the past and we’ve often heard from developers that they were looking for such a starting place.

Manu Sporny

Led by members of the RDFa Community, RDFa.info provides information and resources aimed at dispelling the myth that RDFa is difficult to implement. SemanticWeb.com caught up with Manu Sporny, one of the creators of the site, to learn more about its goals and resources: “One of the misconceptions that RDFa has, is being seen as a very programmer-centric extension to HTML. This misconception is unfortunate because it was built for Web developers, and with the right introduction to it, anyone can author RDFa.”

He continued, “We wanted a site that captured and taught the essence of RDFa to Web Developers. We wanted the site to gather a set of documentation and tools that would help web developers not only learn about authoring RDFa, but help them write markup, show them the result of their markup, and point out any issues with their RDFa-enabled web pages.”

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