Today marks International Women’s Day 2013, and Dow Jones & Company is marking the date with a video and infographics that looks at women’s evolution in business. The data informing these elements comes from its Factiva information service, which recently enhanced its metadata and taxonomy credentials with MarkLogic Corp.’s search technology (see our story here).

Factiva was used to map media mentions of women executives in search of the top 20 over the past ten years. The featured individuals are ranked in the infographic according to the number of mentions received in publications ranging from The Wall Street Journal to Barron’s to China’s People’s Daily.

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Dow Jones & Company’s Factiva information service has long been distinguished by the semantic tools it applies to its content to surface relevant search information. Last week the company announced what it says is one of the most significant investments it’s made in the Factiva product suite, licensing new search technology from MarkLogic Corp.

The arrangement is positioned as providing standardized search technology across the Dow Jones digital network, including Factiva, WSJ.com and Dow Jones Financial Services products. To be specific, the investment in one underlying search technology that will be used by the company’s multiple businesses and products means that, “one powerful, unified search platform will service the search needs of our consumer and enterprise customers around the world,” says Georgene Huang, head of Factiva. “Any improvements or customizations we build atop this infrastructure will be scalable and efficiently accessible to all.” That will allow better and easier synergies between the development, products and the content, she says.

The new search technology, Huang says, complements its continuing investment in Factiva’s core metadata and taxonomy strengths in many ways.

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Real-time macroeconomic and geopolitical events and sentiment about them now figure into RavenPack News Analytics 3.0, to help financial firms react more quickly to what’s happening in the world.

The solution is aimed at quant finance shops, such as hedge funds, banks, and some financial research houses, where the machines are doing the trading. It’s a part of the market that’s had some rough times of late because of some trading errors, but in general quant firms represent a growing piece of the financial space, says RavenPack Head of Sales and Business Development Hugh Taggart.

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Courtesy: Flickr/ Vince Viloria

Out with the old, in with the new. We’ve covered (here and here) the year past for the semantic web. So now let’s see what might be in store for the year ahead.

Also, don’t forget to listen to our podcast here for more insights into what 2012 may hold.

• Interest in sentiment analysis exploded with the growth of the social Web, although its reputation suffered due to the prevalence of low-grade Twitter-sentiment toys, simplistic, wildly inaccurate systems that misled many into criticism of the concept where it was the cheap implementations they’d tried that were faulty.  In 2012, sentiment analysis will come into its own: Automated (and crowd-sourced!) mining of attitudes, opinions, emotions, and intent from social and enterprise sources, at the “feature” level, linked to real-world profiles and transactional data. — Seth Grimes, founder, Alta Plana Corp

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Courtesy: Flickr/ myaimistrue

We recently rounded up some thought leaders’ perspectives on the big semantic trends of 2011 – most (if not all) of them positive. Here’s some further perspective about where hopes and expectations fell a little short of reality:

• The biggest lost possibility was not rethinking the whole RDF stack. Instead of actually reducing complexity, it seems the direction is hiding complexity. This makes its proposition unattractive for web developers. – Andraž Tori, Founder and Director, Zemanta

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To accompany our recent podcast looking back on 2011, we’ve accumulated some additional perspectives from thought leaders in the next-wave Web space on the year that’s quickly passing us by.

Some highlights follow. You’ll see respondents hit on some common themes throughout, such as Big Data, sentiment analytics, specific vertical industry adoption, and the standards space:

• SKOS has become an increasingly popular entry point for organizations that want to use semantic technology in practical applications without worrying about the more complicated aspects of semantic web technology. – Bob  DuCharme, solutions architect, TopQuadrant

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You’ve just been semanticized. Or, you might be if you’re a member of an organization that subscribes to Dow Jones Factiva. The information service known for the semantic tools it applies to its content, including its company, industry, region, and subject taxonomies, in order to surface relevant information in searches, sees an opportunity to increase its service’s value by considering the people part of the search picture.

“An important aspect of filtering is the human aspect,” says Greg Merkle, Factiva’s VP of Product Strategy & Design. “There are those who consume information and those who package and curate it. So we’ve developed a series of personas to understand the ecosystem of information inside the enterprise – how users connect, how they do their work, and so on.”

As Factiva aims to be more about awareness and monitoring vs. a pure research and search tool, it’s important for it to have insight into the meaning of individuals’ specific user roles, to know what they do at a deeper and more meaninful level than the general classification of them as information professionals or end users or, more recently, corporate knowledge worker.

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