Tim Herzog recently reported on World Bank’s efforts to make its data more open and accessible. He writes, “One of our goals in the next year is to make World Bank open data easier to find and use. As a start, we recently redesigned the country pages on data.worldbank.org to showcase other open data resources, such as Projects, Finances, Mapping For Results, Microdata, and the Climate Change Knowledge Portal. From any country page, you can now preview the data and navigate to the corresponding country page on any of these other sites. If you’re a developer or data geek and you’re interested in how this works under the hood, then read on.” Read more

Bryan Bell of Cogito reports that financial companies are wise to turn to semantic metadata for better Big Data analytics. Bell writes, “Financial institutions are looking to linguistics and semantics as the best option for managing and taking advantage of their unstructured data, using it to better understand customers and competitors, to identify impactful market trends or simply to automate the process of answering common customer questions. As one Chief Data Officer put it, ‘We are the stewards of one of our firms’ most important assets, data, and we have been charged with bringing meaning to the data. I believe semantics offers a consistent, long-term capability and change in how data will be managed’.” Read more

Bryan Yurcan interviewed David Saul of State Street regarding how semantic technologies can be used to tame big data. He writes, “Financial institutions are accumulating data at a rapid pace. Between massive amounts of internal information and an ever-growing pool of unstructured data to deal with, banks’ data management and storage capabilities are being stretched thin. But relief may come in the form of semantic databases, which could be the next evolution in how banks manage big data, says David Saul, Chief Scientist for Boston-based State Street Corp. The semantic data model associates a meaning to each piece of data to allow for better evaluation and analysis, Saul notes, adding that given their ability to analyze relationships, semantic databases are particularly well-suited for the financial services industry.” Read more

Andy Oram recently commented on Massachusetts’ newest open government venture, Open Checkbook. Oram writes, “On December 5, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick joined with state treasurer Steven Grossman to create an open government initiative with the promising moniker Open Checkbook. The site launched to some acclaim and has received over 220,000 hits. I decided to take a look at what’s offered and what’s missing from this site, and to ask someone in the government here in Massachusetts to describe their thinking in creating the site. The results can give us some insight into the effort it takes at each stage to release government data–and even more significantly, what it takes to increase the data’s value.” Read more

A new article reports that “Pingar, a leading provider of unstructured data management solutions today announced a new tool for enterprises to quickly capture data and business intelligence stored in documents and use that data for business advantage and operational efficiency. Invoice Analyzer extends Pingar’s proven ability to apply text analytics and natural language processing research, to capture, sort and analyze data in unstructured documents to include semi-structured data.” Read more