The Software & Information Industry Association this year debuted a category for Best Semantic Technology Solution in its 2013 SIIA CODiE Awards. Two products were finalists in the category (see our story here), and yesterday the winner was announced. It was the Luxid Content Enrichment Platform from TEMIS Inc, which is used by publishers to automate the extraction of entities, relationships, concepts and topics from their digital assets, and augment content enrichment and linking.

It won out over finalist Elsevier with its ClinicalKey solution for helping doctors and clinicians search Elsevier’s medical and surgical content smarter and faster. ClinicalKey maps content to Elsevier’s proprietary medical taxonomy, and builds relationships using a semantic framework to faster and more clinically relevant answers. Elsevier, by the way, just ended the voting for its own ClinicalKey Key Innovator Awards, with the prize being a $10,000 grant to a U.S.-based hospital, medical school or institution that has demonstrated the most innovative use of information and technology to save lives and improve patient care.

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According to a new article out of the company, “Elsevier, a world-leading provider of scientific, technical, and medical information products and services, has signed an agreement with EPSRC to provide them with access to SciVal Spotlight, SciVal Strata, and Scopus. EPSRC will use these products and tools to support evaluation of the impact of UK research in engineering and the physical sciences. EPSRC is one of the largest UK research councils and a member of Research Councils UK (RCUK). The decision by the organization to use these products and tools is based on the comprehensiveness of the data and the additional insights available through looking at research from the unique perspective of SciVal Spotlight competencies, as well as the traditional journal classification system.” Read more

According to a new release out of the group, “The Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), the principal trade association for the software and digital content industries, today announced the 82 finalists for the 2013 SIIA CODiE Awards in Content categories. These finalists represent the information industry’s best products, technologies, and services created by or for media, publishers, and information services providers. This year there were 25 Content categories, featuring several new and updated ones, to reflect the latest industry trends and business models. New categories include Best Crowd Sourced Solution, Best Press Release Distribution Solution, Best Semantic Technology Solution, and Best Social Media Platform.” Read more

A new article out of Elsevier reports that the company and the University of Surrey “have signed a three-year agreement for access to Elsevier’s research performance benchmarking tool SciVal Strata. The University of Surrey is one of the few universities in the United Kingdom with a dedicated bibliometrician as part of its library staff. As a result, the role of the library is taking on a new, innovative dimension by driving the use of bibliometrics to help improve the institution’s overall research impact.” Read more

Elsevier has announced that the company “is pleased to join with ORCID to today announce the official launch of the ORCID Registry. Elsevier, a founding sponsor and launch partner of ORCID, expects to integrate ORCID with many of its products and services. ORCID, the Open Researcher and Contributor ID, seeks to remedy the systemic name ambiguity problems seen in scholarly research by assigning unique identifiers linkable to an individual’s research output. ORCID will facilitate an open and transparent linking mechanism between ORCID, other ID schemes, and research objects such as publications, grants and patents.” Read more

VIVO, a semantic information representation system that enables collaboration among scientists across all disciplines, has had a busy summer: The open source project to facilitate the advancement of research and discovery by integrating information about scholars, their activities, and outputs, gained a more permanent home in the DuraSpace Incubator, ensuring a way to continue activities after its NIH grant continuation year ran out. It saw the publication of VIVO: A Semantic Approach to Scholarly Networking and Discovery. And Northwestern University brought its researchers together in a single hub called Northwestern Scholars, an implementation of Elsevier’s SciVal Experts research networking tool (see our story here).

The future is looking pretty bright, too. “We are very interested in funding, research resources, scholarly works, scholars and data sets,” says Mike Conlon, primary investigator of the VIVO project. “As the world moves forward, these things are all inter-related, but that’s been very blurry, especially to organizations and institutions.” Funding agencies, for example, want to know what work was produced as a result of its grants to a major center. It no longer is just a question of who wrote a paper, but who funded it, what tools were behind it, and how was the data produced, and how all these things inter-relate in a scholarly data system.

“Connecting these things becomes the work of the future,” says Conlon.

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Mike Butcher of TechCrunch reports that startup Mendeley’s Open API is stirring things up in the world of academic publishing. He writes, “Science and academia have to date been a little slower to react to the vast changes going on in the business world as we move to the cloud, big data and third-party app ecosystems. Most academic online networks remain locked up by academic publishers with expensive licensing agreements for universities. But that’s starting to change. The science publishing division of corporate giant Elsevier has created its own (closed) platform for apps to be built upon looking at the meta data around scientific journals. That data can range from how many times an academic paper is read, who reads it, and even to how influential each paper is considered to be in scientific circles.” Read more

Elsevier reports that Northwestern University “in collaboration with Elsevier, a world-leading provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, today announced its participation in VIVO, a semantic network that enables the discovery of researchers across institutions. By bringing its researchers together in a single hub called Northwestern Scholars, an implementation of Elsevier’s SciVal Experts research networking tool, and connecting to VIVO through SciVal, Northwestern University facilitates collaboration and accelerates knowledge discovery within the organization and with other research institutions throughout the United States and beyond.” Read more

Last week The Semantic Web Blog covered the launch of the SindiceTech Assisted SPARQL Editor as an open source project, noting that SparQLed also is part of SindiceTech’s commercial suite for large enterprises building private linked data clouds. This week, we’ll dive a little deeper into SindiceTech and its progress since the founders of the Sindice web of data search engine turned their attention to focusing on the commercial application of its technology as a real-time semantic warehousing infrastructure, which leverages cloud computing for integrating and normalizing the massive amounts of data the enterprise must deal with.

As SindiceTech founder and CEO Giovanni Tummarello explains, companies actually approached his team to help them make a reality of their visions to use RDF and SPARQL, as the best knowledge representation and querying technologies available, by providing the missing scalability and stability. Sindice.com was evidence that the technology the team had developed could answer these enterprises’ needs; currently there are about 700 million semantically marked-up web pages indexed in the Sindice.com search engine, with a live updated index of some 80 billion triples daily. Its database is over 5 terabytes.

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Elsevier recently announced that the company “has added a new enhancement to SciVal Strata, a web-based performance evaluation tool that allows users to conduct highly customized performance assessments of research teams and individual researchers. The new functionality provides the capacity for objective assessment of a specific selection of a researcher’s work in addition to their complete publication output. This option is critical when selecting the most impactful papers to be submitted for various government or institutional assessments. In addition the enhanced functionality will prove useful to individuals applying for grants and showing funders the impact of the research they supported.” Read more