Photo Courtesy: Flickr/Lars Plougmann

In recent blogs we’ve discussed where semantic technologies have gone in 2012, and a bit about where they will go this year (see here, here and here).

Here are some final thoughts from our panel of semantic web experts on what to expect to see as the New Year rings in:

John Breslin,lecturer at NUI Galway, researcher and unit leader at DERI, creator of SIOC, and co-founder of Technology Voice and StreamGlider

Broader deployment of the schema.org terms is likely. In the study by Muehlisen and Bizer in July this year, we saw Open Graph Protocol, DC, FOAF, RSS, SIOC and Creative Commons still topping the ranks of top semantic vocabularies being used. In 2013 and beyond, I expect to see schema.org jump to the top of that list.

Christine Connors, Chief Ontologist, Knowledgent:

I think we will see an uptick in the job market for semantic technologists in the enterprise; primarily in the Fortune 2000. I expect to see some M&A activity as well from systems providers and integrators who recognize the desire to have a semantic component in their product suite. (No, I have no direct knowledge; it is my hunch!)

We will see increased competition from data analytics vendors who try to add RDF, OWL or graphstores to their existing platforms. I anticipate saying, at the end of 2013, that many of these immature deployments will leave some project teams disappointed. The mature vendors will need to put resources into sales and business development, with the right partners for consulting and systems integration, to be ready to respond to calls for proposals and assistance.

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Courtesy: Flickr/zoetnet

As we close out 2012, we’ve asked some semantic tech experts to give us their take on the year that was. Was Big Data a boon for the semantic web, or is the opportunity to capitalize on the connection still pending? Is structured data on the web not just the future but the present? What sector is taking a strong lead in the semantic web space?

We begin with Part 1, with our experts listed in alphabetical order:

John Breslin, lecturer at NUI Galway, researcher and unit leader at DERI, creator of SIOC, and co-founder of Technology Voice and StreamGlider:
I think the schema.org initiative really gaining community support and a broader range of terms has been fantastic. It’s been great to see an easily understandable set of terms for describing the objects in web pages, but also leveraging the experience of work like GoodRelations rather than ignoring what has gone before. It’s also been encouraging to see the growth of Drupal 7 (which produces RDFa data) in the government sector: Estimates are that 24 percent of .gov CMS sites are now powered by Drupal.

Martin Böhringer, CEO & Co-Founder Hojoki:

For us it was very important to see Jena, our Semantic Web framework, becoming an Apache top-level project in April 2012. We see a lot of development pace in this project recently and see a chance to build an open source Semantic Web foundation which can handle cutting-edge requirements.

Still disappointing is the missing link between Semantic Web and the “cool” technologies and buzzwords. From what we see Semantic Web gives answers to some of the industry’s most challenging problems, but it still doesn’t seem to really find its place in relation to the cloud or big data (Hadoop).

Christine Connors, Chief Ontologist, Knowledgent:

One trend that I have seen is increased interest in the broader spectrum of semantic technologies in the enterprise. Graph stores, NoSQL, schema-less and more flexible systems, ontologies (& ontologists!) and integration with legacy systems. I believe the Big Data movement has had a positive impact on this field. We are hearing more and more about “Big Data Analytics” from our clients, partners and friends. The analytical power brought to bear by the semantic technology stack is sparking curiosity – what is it really? How can these models help me mitigate risk, more accurately predict outcomes, identify hidden intellectual assets, and streamline business processes? Real questions, tough questions: fun challenges!

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Every day New York City is getting closer to being the Digital City of the Future. It’s a long journey, though, and one that the semantic web community can lend a hand with.

At this week’s Semantic Technology & Business Conference in NYC, Andrew Nicklin of the Office of Strategic Technology and Development, NYC Department of Information Technology & Telecommunications (DoITT) provided a look at what has been accomplished so far, and what’s on the to-do roadmap. Recent months have seen accomplishments including the passage of Local Law 11 of 2012 – the “most progressive legislation in the U.S. as far as cities being mandated to open data,” Nicklin said in an interview with The Semantic Web Blog before his keynote address at SemTech. “It ensures permanency for our program past any administrative changes….The whole notion of open data doesn’t go way because it is written into law.”

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On Friday, October 12, a group of Semantic thought leaders from around the globe met with their host and colleague, Paul Miller, for the latest installment of the Semantic Link, a monthly podcast covering the world of Semantic Technologies. This episode includes a discussion about various approaches to building semantic systems, and “the Linkers” were joined by two special guests: Hadley Beeman, expert in Government Linked Data and Open Data; and Joel Natividad, CEO & Co-Founder, Ontodia.
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Six months ago, Ontodia’s NYCFacets walked away with the win at New York City’s BigApps 3.0 conference. In the months since, the Smart Open Data Exchange that catalogs all the NYC-related data sources (which we first covered here) has been busy expanding its team, moving into the NYU-Poly hosted incubator, and getting ready to launch its Smart City platform for general use next year.

A preview of that platform will take place at the upcoming Semantic Technology & Business Conference in NYC. “We are going to our original mission of really creating that data exchange using semantic technology,” says Ontodia co-founder Joel Natividad. It’s putting the focus not on raw data or learning new technologies, but on being a linked answers marketplace – converting raw data to answers rather than just linking raw data.

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Helen Walters reports that Beth Noveck recently gave a TED talk regarding open-source government. Walters writes, “As the US’s first Deputy CTO, Beth Noveck founded the White House Open Government Initiative, which developed administration policy on transparency, participation and collaboration. She starts her talk by reminding us that in the old days, the White House was literally an open house. At the beginning of the 19th century, John Quincy Adams met a local dentist who happened in to shake his hand. Adams promptly dismissed the Secretary of State, with whom he was meeting, and asked the dentist to remove an aching tooth. ‘When I got to the White House in 2009, the White house was anything but open,’ she says. Bomb blast curtains covered the windows; they were running Windows 2000. Social media was verboten. Noveck’s mandate: to change this system.” Read more

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.

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Editor’s Update Jan. 19: DBpedia, Wikipedia and company are all back online, while some lawmakers have taken their support for SOPA and PIPA offline. Republican Senators Roy Blunt and Marco Rubio have withdrawn their support for the Protect IP Act, and Representative Lee Terry (R-Neb.), an original co-sponsor of SOPA, also has asked to have his name removed from the bill.

It’s Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) day. At 8 a.m. EST  OpenLink Software began a 12-hour blackout of the following sites it controls in support of Wikipedia, Reddit and others spearheading the online protest against the legislation:

• http://dbpedia.org
• http://dbpedia-live.openlinksw.com
• http://lod.openlinksw.com
• http://uriburner.com

Founder and CEO of OpenLink Software Kingsley Idehen yesterday directed interested parties to a Linked Data-driven poll for the opportunity to vote on taking this step, and the ayes, so to speak, had it.

Turn to any of the above sites and you’ll see:

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What’s the path from an XML based e-government metadata application to a linked data version? At the upcoming Semantic Tech & Business Conference in Berlin, the road taken by the Dutch government will be described by Paul Hermans, lead architect of Belgian project Erfgoedplus.be, which uses RDF/XML, OWL and SKOS to describe relationships to heritage types, concepts, objects, people, place and time.

Some 1,000 individual organizations compose the Dutch government, each with their own websites. An effort to employ a search engine a few years ago to spider those different and separate web sites to have one single point of access didn’t work as anticipated. The next step to bring some order was to assign all the documents published on those sites a common kernel of metadata fields, which led to building an XML application to enable a structured approach. Linked Data entered the picture about a year and a half ago.

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Due out next month from Springer Publishing is Linking Government Data, a book that highlights some of the leading-edge applications of Linked Data to problems of government operations and transparency. David Wood, CTO of 3RoundStones and co-chair of the W3C RDF Working Group, writes and edits the volume, which includes contributions from others exploring the intersection of government and the Semantic Web.

“If you look at the LOD cloud, you see that a very large percentage of data comes from government sources,” Wood says. Historically, it’s made up about one-quarter to one-third of it, and it’s a very international set of data. The new book, with contributions from authors in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Finland, the U.S. and the U.K., among others, aims at providing visibility into what’s going on around all that data, such as work underway between academia and governments that could lead to more mainstream deployments in the sector in coming years.

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