Image Photo Courtesy Flickr/401(K) 2012

Universities play an important role in advancing the technology ecosystem, semantic technology included. Look for starters at work done at The Tetherless World Constellation at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Wright State University’s Kno.e.sis Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge-enabled Computing, MIT, and the Digital Enterprise Research Institute located at the National University of Ireland, Galway.

In addition to driving technology ever forward, institutions like these and others also provide a home for incubating good ideas that could become good businesses. Music discovery service Seevl and the enterprise-focused SindiceTech are two examples of semantic spin-outs from DERI, for instance, while MIT Media Lab gave birth to commercial properties with semantic underpinnings including music intelligence platform The Echo Nest. The Kno.e.sis Center points work it’s doing in the commercial direction, too: Its LinkedIn profile description notes that its “work is predominantly multidisciplinary, and multi-institutional, often involving industry collaborations and significant systems developing, with an eye towards real-world impact, technology licensing, and commercialization.”

Given the projects with commercial prospects underway within their own houses, it would seem there’s opportunity for universities themselves to look for even more ways to contribute to that success. And that’s just what the University of Minnesota is doing: This week it said that it’s launching a $20 million seed fund over a ten-year timeframe to support the innovative ideas to which its campus plays host.

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The Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) is kicking off a project with Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. in Japan to build a large-scale RDF store in the cloud capable of processing hundreds of billions of triples. The idea, says DERI research fellow Dr. Michael Hausenblas, “is to build up a platform that allows you to process and convert any kind of data” — from relational databases to LDAP record-based, directory-like data, but also streaming sources of data, such as sensors and even the Twitter firehose.

The project has defined eight different potential enterprise use cases for such a platform, ranging from knowledge-sharing in health care and life science to dashboards in financial services informed by XBRL data. “Once the platform is there we will implement at least a couple of these use cases on business requirements, and essentially we are going to see which are the most promising for business units,” Hausenblas says.

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A new article reports, “The Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) at NUI Galway has signed a collaborative research agreement with the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI) to progress research in the realm of semantic technologies. The agreement looks set to spawn close collaborations between researchers at both institutes and is expected to lead to a number of funded projects. Researchers at DERI and KISTI are already collaborating on a joint project in the area of semantic data integration and application.” Read more

The Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) at the National University of Ireland in Galway is looking for a Postdoctoral Researcher in Social Software. According to the post, “The successful candidate will co-lead a team of postdoctoral and postgraduate researchers focusing on topics such as the Social Web, the Semantic Web, Semantic Information Systems, Distributed Social Networks, Ontology design for the Social Web, the Internet of Things and the Social Web, Citizen Sensing, Linked Data and the Social Semantic Web. He/she is expected to act as thesis supervisor or co-supervisor for several PhD and Master students and to become the principal scientific investigator on a number of key DERI projects.” Read more

The Health Care and Life Sciences (HCLS) department at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) in Ireland is looking for a Software Developer/Research Assistant to perform research and development tasks in the area of semantic web technologies. The position is a two year temporary position. According to the post, “The DERI HCLS group has embarked on an ambitious European FP7 project which uses semantic web technologies to enable sharing and collaboration between life scientists in cancer chemoprevention. Read more

The Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) in Galway, Ireland, is looking for Semantic Web in Life Sciences Researchers: “DERI is a leading research institute in semantic technologies that offers a stimulating, dynamic and multi-cultural research environment, excellent ties to research-groups worldwide, close collaboration with industrial partners and up-to-date infrastructure and resources. The DERI HCLS group has embarked on an ambitious European FP7 project which uses semantic web technologies to enable sharing and collaboration between life scientists in cancer chemoprevention… The successful candidates will have key roles in this project as DERI’s role and experience in Linked Data is central to the technology to be used in the project.” Read more