Robin Wauters of The Next Web reports, “Seattle startup GraphLab claims it is building the ‘fastest machine-learning analytics engine for graph datasets’, based on the popular open-source distributed graph computation framework with the same name, and it has just raised capital to come through on its promise. Founded by scientists from the University of Washington, Carnegie Mellon and UC Berkeley, GraphLab today announced that it has secured $6.75 million in a financing round led by Madrona and NEA.” Read more

Arnaud Le Hors and Steve Speicher of IBM recently composed a case study: “Open Services Lifecycle Collaboration framework based on Linked Data.” In the introduction they write, “The Rational group in IBM has for several years been employing a read/write usage of Linked Data as an architectural style for integrating a suite of applications, and we have shipped commercial products using this technology. We have found that this read/write usage of Linked Data has helped us solve several perennial problems that we had been unable to successfully solve with other application integration architectural styles that we have explored in the past.” Read more

A New Framework for Querying Semantic Networks, a paper that was presented at Museums and the Web 2012, is now available online. The paper was written by Katerina Tzompanaki, Martin Doerr Institute of Computer Science, F.O.R.T.H. Crete–Greece. The abstract states, “The upcoming large-scale metadata repositories, semantic networks of Resource Description Framework triples integrating large amounts of cultural–historical data, are not easily accessible to global query paradigms, such as ‘query by example’ or keyword search. ISO21127 (CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model) is an adequate global schema for such systems, but querying individually hundreds of different kinds of properties leaves a huge recall gap compared to text retrieval, whereas a global restriction to ‘core metadata,’ such as Dublin Core, deprives the systems of any more advanced integration and reasoning capability.” Read more

Karen Coyle recently commented on the growing number of RDF and linked data projects in the field of library data. Coyle writes, “With the newly developed enthusiasm for RDF as the basis for library bibliographic data we are seeing a number of efforts to transform library data into this modern, web-friendly format. This is a positive development in many ways, but we need to be careful to make this transition cleanly without bringing along baggage from our past. Recent efforts have focused on translating library record formats into RDF with the result that we now have: ISBD in RDF, FRBR in RDF, [and] RDA in RDF, and will soon have MODS in RDF.” Read more

Mike Bergman, who has compiled an excellent list of Semantic tools over the years, has been busy again. This time he’s announcing AI3’s first annual State of Tooling for Semantic Technologies. Bergman begins, “We have been maintaining Sweet Tools, AI3‘s listing of semantic Web and -related tools, for a bit over five years now. Though we had switched to a structWSF-based framework that allows us to update it on a more regular, incremental schedule [1], like all databases, the listing needs to be reviewed and cleaned up on a periodic basis. We have just completed the most recent cleaning and update. We are also now committing to do so on an annual basis. Thus, this is the inaugural ‘State of Tooling for Semantic Technologies‘ report, and, boy, is it a humdinger.” Read more

Ian Davis recently sketched out an “alternate way of thinking about RDF, one that is resource-oriented rather than triple-oriented.” He writes, “The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a framework for representing information in the Web. RDF has a simple data model that is easy for applications to process and manipulate. The data model is independent of any specific serialization syntax. RDF provides information about resources through Resource Descriptions. A Resource Description consists of: (1) A subject resource identified by a URI. (2) Zero or more relationships to other resources. (3) Zero or more properties having literal values.” Read more

This video lecture discusses the development of OpenTox, an open source predictive toxicology framework. The description states, “A new paradigm of 21st century human-oriented safety testing approaches is now emerging based on a combination of in silico and in vitro approaches. The new predictive test systems developed from this growing ‘grand challenge’ effort will need to combine evidences from a great variety of data, protocols, and concepts. The combination of these sources of knowledge within an ontology-based mechanistic knowledge-oriented framework to produce reliable test systems demands the development of a semantic web for toxicology.” Read more

Creative Commons and the Association of Education Publishers (AEP) have announced the Learning Resources Metadata Initiative, “a project aimed at improving education search and discovery via a common framework for tagging and organizing learning resources on the web. The learning resources framework will be designed to work with schema.org, the web metadata framework recently launched by Google, Bing, and Yahoo!, as well as to work with other metadata technologies and to enable other rich applications.” Read more