The opening keynotes at this week’s Semantic Technology and Business Conference saw two industry giants pump up the volume about how, and why, to apply semantic technology in the enterprise.

At Viacom, the largest pure-play media company in the world, the sheer number of perspectives across an exhaustive portfolio that includes more than 160 networks and 500 digital media properties globally, as well as entertainment behemoth Paramount Pictures Corp., was a factor in giving semantic tech a start. Its pain point, chief architect Matthew Degel told attendees, involved dealing with issues like the creative variations that come with the territory – U.S. vs. international versions of digital assets, or the MPEG-2 take on a clip for broadcast in this country vs. H.264/MPEG-4 formats for streaming the same clip online. “How do you track all this and say that I have 23 files, they are all sort of different but they’re talking about the same thing,” Degel said. “We thought semantics could help address that.”

Multi-platform being the rule of the day, the company faced the challenge of making its material reuseable, findable, searchable and purposeable, Degel said. As it takes steps to its goal of providing a corporate-focused, general purpose application of the technology, Degel explained that the view he takes on semantic technology is to think of it as “helping you deal with a certain amount of uncertainty and chaos.”

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NEW YORK, NEW YORK–(Marketwired – May 15, 2013) - ADmantX, the next-generation contextual analysis and semantic data provider, today announced that it has been included in Gartner “Cool Vendors for E-Commerce, 2013″ report, published on April 9, 2013, and authored by Chris Fletcher, Gene Alvarez, Praveen Sengar, Penny Gillespie, Regina Casonato, Andrew Frank.

The report reviews five vendors that provide innovative offerings in the digital marketing, social products, and digital and social e-commerce space. The main issue limiting the online advertising market is the disconnect between advertisement placement and the relevance of the copy. This is due to the reliance on keyword frequency without considering the meaning. Ads may appear on pages that have little significance to the assigned page or may produce counterproductive effects. Semantic technology automatically extracts the meaning in text to increase the relevance of ads, and maximize the website visitor’s receptiveness to advertising content. Read more

David Meyer of GigaOM writes, “In the development of natural language processing, the semantic web and so on, e-commerce provides a rich breeding ground. Companies such as Amazon and Google always want to find better ways to learn what it is potential customers are looking for, so the technology follows the commercial imperative. A Berlin startup called Versus IO is trying to apply natural language algorithms in its product comparison service, and it’s just closed a $2.8 million Series A round to do so. The round was led by Earlybird Venture Capital and also includes Dave McClure, who previously invested $100,000, and angels Lars Dittrich and Dario Suter.” Read more

How will webpage data be interpreted in the next few years?  The Semantic Web community has high hopes for ever evolving semantic standards to help systems identify and extract rich data found on the web, ultimately making it more useful.  With the announcement of Schema.org support for GoodRelations  in November, it seems clear semantic progress is now being made on the e-commerce front, and at an accelerated rate.  Martin Hepp, founder of GoodRelations, estimates the rate of adoption of rich, structured e-commerce data to significantly increase this year.

However, Mike Tung, founder and CEO of a data parsing service called DiffBot, has less faith that the standards necessary for a true Semantic Web will ever be completely and effectively implemented.  In an interview on Xconomy he states that for semantic standards to work correctly content owners must markup the content once for the web and a second time for the semantic standards.  This requires extra work, and affords them the opportunity to perform content stuffing (SEO spam).

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Courtesy: Flickr/takacsi75

Valentine’s Day is all about celebrating the coming together of two parties who are made for each other. That’s as true when it comes to semantic technology as it is for two people – sort of.

Yes, semantic tech aligns with the concept of matchmaking in its own ways. They aren’t always as romantic as a quiet dinner with a bottle of wine and a bouquet of roses, but hey, love comes in many forms. Here’s a quick look at semantic tech and its role in matchmaking, of various kinds:

• In the journal Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience you’ll find the work Semantic Web Service Matchmakers: State of the Art and Challenges. The semantic matchmakers it’s talking about get involved in helping developers partner up with the right web services: The mission of Web service discovery, its abstract explains, is to seek an appropriate Web service for a service requester on the basis of the service descriptions in Web service advertisements and the service requester’s requirements. But a problem in that discovery process is ambiguity, because the standard language used for encoding service descriptions does not have the capacity to specify the capabilities of a Web service.  According to the abstract of the article, “This brings up the vision of Semantic Web Services and Semantic Web Service discovery, which make use of the Semantic Web technologies to enrich the semantics of service descriptions for service discovery. Semantic Web Service matchmakers are the programs or frameworks designed to implement the task of Semantic Web Service discovery.” The paper surveys and analyzes typical, contemporary Semantic Web Service matchmakers across six technical dimensions.  Read more

Schema.org has announced that GoodRelations is now fully integrated into the markup vocabulary backed by Google, Yahoo!, Bing/Microsoft, and Yandex (read our past schema.org coverage). GoodRelations is the e-commerce vocabulary that has been developed and maintained by Martin Hepp since 2002 (previous coverage).

In the official announcement, R.V. Guha (Google) says, “Effective immediately, the GoodRelations vocabulary (http://purl.org/goodrelations/) is directly available from within the schema.org site for use with both HTML5 Microdata and RDFa. Webmasters of e-commerce sites can use all GoodRelations types and properties directly from the schema.org namespace to expose more granular information for search engines and other clients, including delivery charges, quantity discounts, and product features.”

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Yesterday The Semantic Web Blog discussed how personalized mobile assistance came up on the lists of a bright future in the eyes of semantic web experts (see here). Sharing that vision is the team at Vital.AI, the NYC-startup founded by Marc Hadfield.  Its Thrive.AI app, also a contender at SemTech’s Startup Competition, is a personalized semantic shopping agent for the iPad, but the underlying Vital.AI platform on which it is built provides an integrated suite of components for a variety of knowledge-centric, intelligence-rich, Big Data-driven applications.

The e-commerce agent, Hadfield told attendees at SemTech in San Francisco last week, was the company’s own foray into figuring out what it needed to add to the platform to make it easier to build apps that bring semantic technologies and Big Data together.

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Jay Myers, lead web development engineer at Best Buy, acknowledged that he had to make some last-minute alterations to the presentation he gave yesterday at SemTech on the practical business uses of RDFa for search engines and beyond. They were required in light of the schema.org announcement that came at the end of last week. Myers worked the new standard for creating and supporting a common vocabulary for structured data markup on web pages in microdata into a slide that showed how the Semantic Web can bring equilibrium to the pendulum that tends to swing between the shiny-ball stuff of the web that’s tailored for human consumption and the back-end keyword- and metadata-stuffing that’s done for the benefits of machine-reading.

But RDFa still takes top billing.

schema.org, Myers told the audience, is “search-centric and what I believe what the Semantic Web really entails is knowledge and insight,” he said.

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A new article takes a look at Buyosphere, a semantic start-up in the e-commerce realm: “Buyosphere, a fresh start-up, is trying to democratize the information about your shopping practices and patterns. The best part is that you control and use your data. Semantic commerce is good for everyone. The customers who will own their own data can have control and insight of their buying pattern. Brands/vendors (who will have insight to such data, when granted, can ensure better product recommendations and customer satisfaction apart from better planning, preparation and expansion opportunities.” Read more