Expanding its growing adoption in the U.S. among enterprise companies and staffing firms, Monster, the worldwide leader in successfully connecting people to job opportunities and flagship brand of Monster Worldwide, Inc. (NYSE: MWW) today announced the launch of SeeMore(TM) in France, the first semantic search and workforce analytics recruitment platform available in the French market. Powered by Monster’s 6Sense(TM) semantic search technology, SeeMore offers employers a powerful solution to reduce recruitment costs and improve hiring efficiency and effectiveness.

“SeeMore provides the focus for recruitment teams to build relationships and manage talent, which in turn empowers them with actionable information and predictive workforce analytics to grow their business,” said Mark Conway, Chief Information Officer, Monster Worldwide. “Companies who can crack the code of managing their data in recruitment will improve efficiency and cost per hire, gain knowledge to make strategic business and hiring decisions, and ultimately achieve the competitive edge they’re after.” Read more

Cynthia Haven of Stanford News reports, “The first winners of the Stanford Prize for Innovation in Research Libraries are the Bibliothèque nationale de France (National Library of France) and the Miguel de Cervantes Digital Library in Spain. The Stanford Libraries’ new annual award celebrates groundbreaking programs, projects and services for research libraries anywhere in the world. Commendations of merit went to Australia’s Griffith University and the New York Public Library. About two dozen proposals competed for the modest cash prize of $5,000, underwritten by Logitech, that went to each of the winning institutions.” Read more

Jacob Albert of Quartz reports, “First, they suggested taxing Google’s personalized ads to boost French advertisers. Then, they tried to tax Google News to finance the French press. Now, the French government is thinking about taxing the collection of personal data by Internet companies, according to a report put out Jan. 18. The main target would be American companies like Google, Facebook, or Amazon, whose data mining efforts generate enormous advertising profits but precious little tax revenue for countries like France.” Read more

The OKFN reports, “Following the first ever Open Knowledge Festival in Helsinki earlier this year, we, a group of Open Knowledge enthusiasts in France, have decided to start a national chapter of the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN). France already has a vibrant community of Open Knowledge advocates and associations such as La FING, Libertic and Regards Citoyens, actively promoting the use and reuse of Open Data among other Open Knowledge principles. By establishing the OKFN in France, we aim to reinforce and broaden the current national Open Knowledge community by acting as a focal point for OKFN activities in France, as well as to help promote French initiatives in the international OKFN community. We are therefore delighted to announce the creation of the incubating National Group OKFN France with an initial meeting (12/12/12) at the collaborative innovative tech environment of La Cantine in Paris.” Read more

A million data sets. That’s the number of government data sets out there on the web that we have closed in on.

“The question is, when you have that many, how do you search for them, find them, coordinate activity between governments, bring in NGOs,” says James A. Hendler, Tetherless World Senior Constellation Professor, Department of Computer Science and Cognitive Science Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and a principal investigator of its Linking Open Government Data project lives, as well as Internet web expert for data.gov, He also is connected with many other governments’ open data projects. “Semantic web tools organize and link the metadata about these things, making them searchable, explorable and extensible.”

To be more specific, Hendler at SemTech a couple of weeks ago said there are 851,000 open government data sets across 153 catalogues from 30-something countries, with the three biggest representatives, in terms of numbers, at the moment being the U.S., the U.K, and France. Last week, the one million threshold was crossed.

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France-based startup Kwaga has raised $1.55 million in Series A funding: “The company, which received seed funding from Seedcamp and Kima Ventures after its founding in 2008, raised the money from unnamed private investors, advised by investment consultancy firm Financière Fonds Privés. Kwaga aims to build semantic software that will make us love email again and turn it into a productivity enhancer rather than killer by analyzing the data contained in messages.” Read more

An app to discover 44,000 French monuments. Completed in four days. By one person. Without coding.

Head over to this demo from Antidot, publisher of Information Factory and Antidot Finder Suite software, and you can see the search mash-up it says was created by simply assembling existing components using its technology. Information Factory handled the data processing work flow that resulted in a data mesh outputting an RDF graph containing more than 4.5 million tripesl, with about 450,000 inferred from open data sources.

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Datalift, the new research project we recently reported on out of France, is looking for, as they put it, a data geek. The actual job title is Scientific Developer: “The position, offered in the context of the Datalift project, is opened to a candidate having knowledge of the French language and owning a Master’s degree in computer science. The position is for three years. The job will consist of various data manipulation and programming tasks around the topic of linked-data publication, vocabulary and ontology design, data interlinking, and linked-data infrastructures. Newbies to the linked-data world are welcome as soon as they have significant experience in Web engineering, data cleansing, databases.” Read more

A new research project out of France known as Datalift seeks to bring “raw structured data coming from various formats (relational databases, CSV, XML, … ) to semantic data interlinked on the Web of Data.” The project will be fully funded by the French national research agency for the next three years.

According to Datalift’s website, “Datalift will both publish datasets coming from a network of partners and data providers and propose a set of tools for easing the datasets publication process.” The tools mentioned directly include, “selecting ontologies for publishing data, converting data to the appropriate format (RDF using the selected ontology), publishing the linked data, [and] interlinking data with other data sources.” Read more