Sean Gallagher of Ars Technica writes, “Most of us are okay with what Google does with its vast supply of ‘big data,’ because we largely benefit from it—though Google does manage to make a good deal of money off of us in the process. But if I were to backspace over Google’s name and replace it with ‘National Security Agency,’ that would leave a bit of a different taste in many people’s mouths. Yet the NSA’s PRISM program and the capture of phone carriers’ call metadata are essentially about the same sort of business: taking massive volumes of data and finding relationships within it without having to manually sort through it, and surfacing ‘exceptions’ that analysts are specifically looking for. The main difference is that with the NSA, finding these exceptions can result in Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants to dig deeper—and FBI agents knocking at your door. So what is it, exactly, that the NSA has in its pile of ‘big data,’ and what can they do with it?” Read more

David Amerland of Imassera recently wrote, “Intelligence, at one significant level, relies on semantics. To occur it needs the ability of data nodes that are separate from each other to connect in ways that unleash fresh meaning in the information each contains. Google’s acquisition of Waze for the now customary $1.3 billion plus change is one more significant step towards building the structure of the semantic web that allows data to be integrated in ways that now make much greater sense to both the end user (in terms of results) and the data provider (in terms of services and products).”

Amerland continues, “Waze’s hyperlocalized approach to collecting data plus its strong social element that helps join the figurative data dots within its platform is a powerful piece of the semantic web that Google is helping to structure. Google has promised to ‘leave Waze alone’ for now. That’s because the platform is performing as it should: it is collating data, it is making connections, it is forming a social layer within its environment. Google, right now, has little to offer in either adding or taking away anything that will help refine the experience.”

Read more here.

Image: Courtesy Waze

Rich snippets – yep, they were a nice start, but Russian search engine Yandex thinks it’s time for something more powerful. Something it’s calling interactive snippets and a feature it’s branding as Islands for its search results pages.

Yandex says the new feature evolves from rich snippets, which CTO Ilya Segalovich refers to in the press release as “mere decoration.” Interactive snippets, in contrast, are actionable, letting users do things like book movie tickets, make reservations or pay bills right from the search page. Webmasters can choose to add this functionality to their web sites if they want to, and while it may get their business customers – especially those using smartphones and tablets – who want to make their transactions as seamless as possible, it does mean those users won’t be making the journey to the business’ own web site.

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Sing along with me to this classic hit from 1980: “Knowledge graphs are everywhere; They’re everywhere; My mind describes them to me.”

Our Daughter’s Wedding’s song Lawn Chairs. But it’s a good description of some of the activity at the Semantic Technology & Business Conference this week, which saw Google, Yahoo and Wikidata chatting up the topic of Knowledge Graphs. On Tuesday, for example, Google’s Jason Douglas provided insight into how the search giant’s Knowledge Graph is critical to meeting a new world of search requirements that’s focused on providing answers and acting in an anticipatory way (see story here), while Wednesday’s closing keynote had Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. project director Denny Vrandecic getting the audience up to date with Wikidata – aka, Wikipedia’s Knowledge Graph For, And By, Everyone.

There are some 280 language versions of Wikipedia for which Wikidata serves as the common source of structured data. Wikidata now has an entity base of more than 12 million items that represent the topics of Wikipedia articles, Vrandecic said during his presentation.

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An audience hungry for more knowledge about what Google is doing with structured data got its fill late in the day Tuesday at the Semantic Technology & Business Conference. Jason Douglas, Group Product Manager, Knowledge Graph, presented to the SRO crowd the link between semantic technology and structured data to the changing world of search.

“Search is changing dramatically because users’ lives are changing dramatically,” Douglas said. “We carry our computers with us. The Internet is with us all the time.” While a decade ago the library analogy worked for search, but increasingly users need more on-the-go, just-in-time information. So, today’s search analogy, he said, is more along the lines of the personal assistant – it’s more about giving users answers, and anticipating their needs.

The only way to meet those requirements is for search engines to have an understanding of the real world, to be the virtual equivalent of a real-world personal assistant who knows what and where things are and how they relate to each other. “On the answer side, if we actually know things about the world, it’s not just answering questions [themselves], but providing all kinds of context that helps in different ways,” Douglas said.

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Ahmed Gabr of Wamda.com reports, “‘In order to achieve true Artificial Intelligence (AI), we have to make machines that are able to acquire knowledge in a scalable way, without human interaction, then use this knowledge to understand, answer questions, think and reason,’ says Egyptian entrepreneur and AI researcher Haytham El Fadeel. In 2008, El Fadeel started to build Kngine, which stands for Knowledge Engine, a semantic search engine that attempts to predict what a searcher really means when typing in a request. Conventional search engines navigate the user towards a particular web page or document, based on keywords, while a semantic search engine aims to understand the searcher’s intent and the contextual meaning of terms, in order to give complete answers.” Read more

At The Semantic Technology and Business conference in San Francisco Monday, OCLC technology evangelist Richard Wallis broke the news that Content-negotiation was implemented for the publication of Linked Data for WorldCat resources. Last June, WorldCat.org began publishing Linked Data for its bibliographic treasure trove, a global catalog of more than 290 million library records and some 2 billion holdings, leveraging schema.org to describe the assets.

“Now you can use standard Linked Data technologies to bring back information in RDF/ XML, JSON, or Turtle,” Wallis said. Or triples. “People can start playing with this today.” As he writes in his blog discussing the news, they can manually specify their preferred serialization format to work with or display, or do it from within a program by specifying to the http protocol for the format to accept from accessing the URI.

“Two hundred ninety million records on the web of Linked Data is a pretty good chunk of stuff when you start talking content negotiation,” Wallis told the Semantic Web Blog.

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Google’s Data Highlighter, its take at making it easier to let the search engine know about the structured data behind web pages, is adding more highlights. Data Highlighter (which The Semantic Web Blog originally covered here) now can teach Google the pattern of structured data about products, local businesses, articles, software applications, movies, restaurants, and TV episodes in addition to events.

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The Semantic Technology & Business Conference begins in a few short days. If you haven’t registered yet, it’s not too late, and if you haven’t looked at the program recently, be sure to check out some of these exciting late-breaking additions…

KEYNOTE:
What Google is Doing with Structured Data
Jason Douglas, Group Product Manager, Knowledge Graph, Google

HOT TOPIC PANEL:
WebSchemas: Schema.org and Vocabulary Collaboration

Dan Brickley, Developer Advocate, Google
R.V. Guha, Google Fellow, Google
Sandro Hawke, W3C Technical Staff, W3C/MIT

(More panelists TBA)

BREAKOUT SESSIONS:

Building Your SmartData Accelerator
Robert Kruse, Managing Partner, SmartDataAccelerator
Gene Mishchenko, Lead Information Architect, Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services

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Casey Newton of The Verge reports, “Google wants to blur the lines between its newly revamped Google+ social network and the rest of its services. To that end, the company announced today it will bring users’ Google+ photos to search results, both in Google’s main search results page and in Google+ itself. It’s part of the enhanced photos experience that launched last week at Google I/O.”

Newton adds, “The new feature rolls out today, and signed-in users can find their photos simply by typing in ‘my photos,’ which returns a grid of recent images on the search results page. Read more