GeoNames - semanticweb.com

Tagging the Visual Web: Visual Media Doesn’t Have To Be Dumb Anymore

Jennifer Zaino — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 09:38:08 +0000

Instagram. Tumblr. Pinterest. The web in 2012 is a tremendously visual place, and yet, “visual media still as dumb today as it was 20 years ago,” says Todd Carter, founder and CEO of Tagasauris.

It doesn’t have to be that way, and Tagasauris has put its money on changing the state of things.

Why is dumb visual media a problem, especially at the enterprise-level? Visual media, in its highly un-optimized state, hasn’t been thought of in the same way that companies think about how making other forms of data more meaningful and reasonable can impact their business processes. A computer’s ability to assess image color, pattern and texture isn’t highly useful in the marketplace, and as a result visual media has “just been outside the realm of normal publishing processes, normal workflow processes,” Carter says. Therefore, what so many organizations – big media companies, photo agencies, and so on – would rightly acknowledge to be their treasure troves of images don’t yield anywhere near the economic value that they can.

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Dynamic Semantic Publishing for News Organizations

Kristen Milhollin — Thu, 31 May 2012 09:58:09 +0000

Paul Wilton was Technical and development lead for semantic publishing at BBC News and Sport Online during the 2010 World Cup. Currently he is the Technical architect at Ontoba. In this interview, a supplement to “Dynamic Semantic Publishing for Beginners”, Paul describes the current landscape for DSP as it applies to news organizations.

Q. Are you seeing a wide disparity in the way that news organizations have approached the creation and use of semantically-linked (or annotated) content?

A. Actually the pattern and often the (general) technical architecture is surprisingly similar. Where things differ are the applications, models used and instance data. This is undoubtedly bleeding edge technology, and typically the impetus to begin investigating the use of linked data, RDF and semantics in the technology stack has come from within the Information Architecture and R&D teams, not from the offices of the CTO/CIO. Maybe this is starting to change now.

Q. Do many news organizations have the resources (staff and/or Content Management Systems) that are able to publish and use semantic data?

A. Not in our experience, but this shouldn’t be a barrier to integrating semantic technologies and publishing linked data.

The key components to adopting semantic publishing – a semantic repository (triple store); appropriate linked data sets; and the ability to semantically annotate your content – can be built alongside an existing Content Management System. continued…

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New UMBEL Release Supports schema.org, GeoNames

Angela Guess — Tue, 22 May 2012 18:00:17 +0000

Mike Bergman reports that the latest UMBEL release includes schema.org and GeoNames support. He writes, “We are pleased to announce the release of version 1.05 of UMBEL, which now has linkages to schema.org and GeoNames . UMBEL has also been split into ‘core’ and ‘geo’ modules. The resulting smaller size of UMBEL ‘core’ — now some 26,000 reference concepts — has also enabled us to create a full visualization of UMBEL’s content graph.” continued…

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Schema.org Now Supports External Lists

Eric Franzon — Mon, 14 May 2012 19:22:12 +0000

The schema.org official blog has announced support for enumerated lists. Adding this support allows developers using schema.org to use selected externally maintained vocabularies in their schema.org markup. According to the W3C-hosted schema.org WebSchemas wiki, “This is in addition to the existing extension mechanisms we support, and the general ability to include whatever markup you like in your pages. The focus here is on external vocabularies which can be thought of as ‘supported’ (or anticipated) in some sense by schema.org.”

In other words, “Schema.org markup uses links into well-known authority lists to clarify which particular instance of a schema.org type (eg. Country) is being mentioned.”

For example, consider a list of countries of the world. A developer could use this URI from Wikipedia to reference the USA or this one from the UN FAO, or this one from GeoNames.

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Semantic Project Longitude Launches on beta620

Angela Guess — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 17:00:43 +0000

We recently reported on the New York Times new testing and collaboration platform, beta620. A recent article reports that, “An interesting Semantic Web experiment went live this week [on beta620] called Longitude. As the name suggests, it presents a geographical interface for accessing content from The Times. It uses The Time’s large store of metadata, along with Linked Open Data from the Web.” continued…

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SemTech Spotlight: Civet

Angela Guess — Thu, 26 May 2011 18:30:39 +0000

In the days leading up to this year’s Semantic Technology Conference, we’ve been highlighting several products that will be featured at the conference. Today we turn the spotlight on Civet, a new product from Knowledge Hives to be presented by Sebastian Ryszard Kruz and Arkadius Kwosa: “Civet uses NLP techniques to determine the keywords in the provided text. But it does not stop there: it analyzes these words and determines the most appropriate meanings linked to concepts from vocabularies, such as WordNet and Polish version of the OpenThesaurus, both published as RDF/SKOS graphs on Linked Open Data.” continued…

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The Value of Linked Data

Angela Guess — Tue, 24 May 2011 15:00:08 +0000

A recent article by Michael Hausenblas discusses “why we link.” The article begins, “The incentives to put structured data on the Web seem to slowly seep in, but why does it make sense to link your data to other data? Why to invest time and resources to offer 5 star data? Even though the interlinking itself becomes more of a commodity these days – for example, the 24/7 platform we’re deploying in LATC is an interlinking cloud offering – the motivation for dataset publisher to set links to other datasets is, in my experience, not obvious.” continued…

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Introducing the (Work-in-Progress) LOCAH Archives Hub Dataset

Angela Guess — Fri, 13 May 2011 18:30:10 +0000

The Linked Open Copac Archives Hub (LOCAH) Project recently announced “the release of http://data.archiveshub.ac.uk, the first Linked Data set produced by the LOCAH project. The team has been working hard since the beginning of the project on modelling the complex archival data and transforming it into RDF Linked Data. This is now available in a variety of forms via the data.archiveshub.ac.uk home page.” The announcement notes, “We’re working on a visualisation prototype that provides an example of how we link the Hub Data with other Linked Data sources on the Web using our enhanced dataset to provide a useful graphical resource for researchers.” continued…

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GeoNames Improves Handling of Historic and Colloquial Place Names

Angela Guess — Tue, 03 May 2011 15:00:45 +0000

We recently reported on the new release of LinkedGeoData. In other geo data news, a recent blog post on GeoNames reports, “Improving the way GeoNames handles historical names is a popular feature request. GeoNames is now beginning to address this question. There are two new flags in the alternate name edit tool: isHistoric for names of the past that are no longer used. isColloquial for slang and colloquial names.” continued…

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