Digital Reasoning, developers of the Synthesys platform for discovering the meaning in unstructured data at scale, has on the roadmap exposing to and packaging up for its customers a simplified version of its internal technology for teaching the system new grammatical structures so that it can quickly understand custom or otherwise specific data sets.

The company has quickly added support for new languages such as Arabic, traditional and simplified Chinese, Farsi and Urdu (with more languages on the way) to Synthesys using the tool. The tool gets the software up to speed on each one in just a few weeks by teaching it the grammatical structure and then letting it go off and figure out what the words mean for its work of transforming unstructured (and structured) data into the underlying facts, entities, relationships, and associated terms.

“In the same way we teach it languages you may have a data set that is highly scientific, for example, and this tool essentially makes it easier for our customers to make Synthesys even more accurate for that specific set of data,” says Dave Danielson, VP of marketing.

Read more

Today, Experian, the global information services company, announced that it has acquired Garlik Limited, a provider of web monitoring services based in the United Kingdom. Garlik uses Semantic Web Technologies to help consumers protect themselves from the risks of identity theft and financial fraud.  At the last SemTechBiz UK Conference, Steve Harris, CTO of Garlik, presented “Combatting Online Crime with RDF.” Mr. Harris presented a compelling case of Garlik’s use of Semantic Technology throughout its offerings to support business-critical, highly sensitive production systems to financial institutions worldwide. Read more

PolarLake was recently awarded the Technology Innovation Award at the annual Irish Software Association Awards. According to the article, “The award acknowledges PolarLake’s achievement in producing the world’s first Semantics Based Data Management Platform for Financial Services Firms. The category was the most competitive of the evening with 12 other companies nominated for the award but PolarLake was selected because of its ability to innovatively apply Semantic Web and Big Data Technologies to solve Data Management problems in Financial Services Firms.” Read more

Former Paypal and Intuit CEO Bill Harris these days is heading up financial advisory service Personal Capital, which now is adding an independent media property to its portfolio to aggregate and deliver financial news to individuals. That new property, Daily Capital, launches today and is powered by Eqentia’s semantic technology. Eqentia offers a content discovery and knowledge management portal for consumers, and also has other enterprises using its technology for their backbone portal infrastructures. But Eqentia CEO William Mougayar thinks this deal is likely the biggest one so far in terms of how much visibility it’s going to get and its potential to grow.

As Harris explains to The Semantic Web Blog in an email interview, Personal Capital provides clients with a holistic view of their complex financial lives, “and the mission of Daily Capital is the same: to cut through the clutter and highlight the best financial content from around the Web.”

Read more

At JPMorgan Chase, application security and semantic web technology are teaming up. David C. Laurance, who works in the former area at the financial services giant, is pursuing an initiative with semantic technology vendor Clark & Parsia, and its CTO Evren Sirin, that’s focused on authorization policy management. The primary goal is to ensure that a given access control policy – enabled by the XACML (eXtensible Access Control Markup Language) Oasis standard that provides a high-level XML-based language to describe access control policies for distributed resources – covers the actual business requirements for the application it protects.

It’s critical in the financial sector, with its trove of customer records and accounts and its requirements to separate duties around actions such as placing and settling trades, to have robust access control capabilities in place. Other verticals – think of health care and its rules and regulations around patient privacy – also take advantage of the XACML standard to describe control policies, to say in a declarative way which kinds of subjects can perform what kinds of actions on which resources.

Photo: Flickr/ Alexandre Dulaunoy

But XACML on its own doesn’t catch those things that might be wrong in a policy – the door may be left open to contradictory permissions because of the combination of different user characteristics embedded in a policy, for example.

Photo: Flickr/nathangibbs

“This is a matter of what kind of analysis do I have to do for critical policies to make sure that they’re right,” Laurance explains. “When you have two different permissions, that’s where you can get into mischief.” That mischief might be the purposeful actions of a rogue trader out to defraud a bank, or it might be the accidental result of not ensuring that the right oversight and authorizations are maintained. Either way, it’s a potential problem.

Read more

On Friday, August 12, a group of Semantic thought leaders from around the globe met with their host and colleague, Paul Miller, for the ninth installment of the Semantic Link, a monthly podcast covering the world of Semantic Technologies.

In this episode, they were joined by special guest Steve Harris, CTO of Garlik, a UK-based company focused on prevention of identity theft and financial fraud.*

Steve Harris CTO Garlik

* On Sept. 26, Steve will present, “Combating Online Crime with RDF” at SemTechBiz UK
Read more

The Cogito blog has been reporting some of the highlights at the Semantic Technology Conference this week. Recently the writers at Cogito shone the spotlight on several presentations from the financial track. The blogger writes, “The speech that was the most interesting to me was that of Wells Fargo’s David Newman. Newman argues that traditional information management systems are no longer sufficient to effectively manage the continuously growing flow of data. The reasons are varied, and include the fact that the increasing amount of information, without an intelligent filtering system, can lead to higher, unsustainable infrastructure costs.” Read more

What do the Open Travel Association, the Filoli historic site of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and the Ontology Platform Special Interest Group (PSIG) at the Object Management Group all have in common? Ontologies, of course!

Starting at the most obvious point, the Ontology PSIG developed the Ontology Definition Metamodel (ODM), and at the upcoming SemTech conference, Elisa Kendall, CEO of Sandpiper Software, co -editor of ODM and co-chair of the Ontology PSIG, will discuss some of the latest work underway there. Of which, she tells The Semantic Web Blog, there is “a ton.”

Among the efforts underway are making ODM current with W3C specs including support for OWL 2 (which should be available towards year’s end), and others that depend to some degree on the standard and building on that baseline.

These include vertical industry efforts such as Common Terminology Services (CTS) 2 from the health care sector’s HL7 standardization body. Kendall says this builds on the first version of ODM, with the focus on using ontologies and depending on semantics for providing the terminology, translation and cross-correlation of the maze of hospital and insurance codes to enable interchange of this data among parties.

The CTS2 effort has been generalized so that it can support terminology services for other verticals as well, which the OMG Ontology PSIG group hopes will make it more broadly useful. “We’ll have to see how that plays out in practice, since it’s only just being published this summer,” Kendall says.

Read more

SemanticWeb.com, in association with Recognos Financial and Expert System, is pleased to provide this white paper (PDF, opens in new window) as a free resource.  The white paper serves as an introduction to the use of Semantic Technology in the financial services industry, but the techniques and technologies referred to here can also be applied to other enterprises.

Topics covered include:

• Why Semantic Technology Matters
• Knowledge Management: More than just search
• Customer Care: Using semantics for valuable insight
• Sentiment Analysis: Hearing the voice of the customer
• Key Benefits of Semantic Technologies (working with unstructured data, data integration, and data mining)

Be sure to also check out the recent webcast:
“Why Semantics Matter: Demonstrating the Power of Semantic Technology in Financial Services,” also created in partnership with Expert System and Recognos Financial.

Please let us know what you think and if you would like to see more resources like this by commenting below.

If you missed the live webcast with Drew Warren of Recognos Financial and Bryan Bell of Expert System, the recording is now available and posted below. 

Description

The software that runs computers is getting smarter every day. Semantic technology allows computers to understand the meaning of words —content and context— helping put users in touch with the right information at the right time.

Read more