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Semantic Tech Outlook: 2013

Jennifer Zaino — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 09:41:56 +0000

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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Good-Bye to 2012: A Look Back At The Year In Semantic Tech, Part 1

Jennifer Zaino — Wed, 26 Dec 2012 10:08:15 +0000

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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New York City: Taking Smart — And Semantic — Steps To Its Digital Future

Jennifer Zaino — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 10:00:58 +0000

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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The Semantic Link – October, 2012

Eric Franzon — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 09:00:08 +0000

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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Ontodia Preps Smart City Data Marketplace; Platform Previews At SemTech NYC

Jennifer Zaino — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 09:39:08 +0000

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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Beth Noveck on a More Open-Source Government

Angela Guess — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 18:00:44 +0000

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.” continued…

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Digital Reasoning To Give Users New Tool For “Learning” Custom Data Sets

Jennifer Zaino — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 08:35:57 +0000

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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Stop SOPA Protest Gets Underway With DBpedia.org On Board

Jennifer Zaino — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 09:23:18 +0000

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:

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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Lessons Learned On the Road To Linked Data

Jennifer Zaino — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 08:55:00 +0000

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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A Look Into Linking Government Data

Jennifer Zaino — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 08:22:06 +0000

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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Latent Semantic Analysis Helps Assess Health Concerns of Military Personnel

Jennifer Zaino — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 09:18:14 +0000

Photo courtesy: Flickr/ The National Guard

Military personnel are likely familiar with The Millennium Cohort study, which began in the late 1990s to evaluate the effect of service on long-term health. In addition to the service that thousands of men and women in uniform already have given their country, many of those who participated in the 2001-2003 and 2004-2006 survey cycles also may contribute to advancing the understanding of qualitative survey results that may further epidemiological research.

Researchers have released the results of their application of latent semantic analysis to an open-ended question found on The Millennium Cohort study. The question asked respondents to discuss their additional health concerns, in as much detail as they like about any health subject that was not otherwise covered. In October the researchers published the report, Application of Latent Semantic Analysis for Open-Ended Responses in a Large, Epidemiologic Study, which found significantly lower self-reported general health among the group of almost 28,000 Millennium Cohort respondents who answered the open-ended question, compared to the nearly 80,000 participants who did not.

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We Come Not To Bury Steve, But To Celebrate Him

Jennifer Zaino — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 11:59:51 +0000

You’ve probably read a couple of hundred remembrances and memorials to Steve Jobs in the last day. Don’t worry – this little blog isn’t going to rehash each of his amazing achievements.

Rather, perhaps the sad news of his passing might provide an opportunity to reflect on what it means to innovate, and what it means to be an innovator. Apple’s well-known mantra – Jobs’ coaxing of his fans to “think different” – isn’t just something we’ve seen played out in the design of that company’s products, or in the sheer genius Jobs had for tapping into the zeitgeist, turning it around, and building a business model out of it.

Certainly those are the most obvious fruits to most people. But the work the Semantic Web community is doing exemplifies the “think different” attitude every day. That’s true of products like Apple’s Siri that bring some (now) in-house semantic smarts to Jobs’ creations, as well as a host of others whose creators hope to harness new opportunities from Jobs’ tablet revolution.

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Let Freedom Ring — Or Maybe Not So Much?

Jennifer Zaino — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 11:10:21 +0000

Photo Courtesy: Flickr/Vironevaeh

As we get ready to celebrate the July 4 holiday here in the States, there’s a lot to cheer for about how the Semantic Web can be a force for good when it comes to creating an informed and empowered populace upon which democracy depends. Examples of this include the work being done by the Tetherless World Constellation at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to translate open government datasets into RDF and create applications using linked government data (read more here); and work by the Sunlight Foundation, which does things such as make semantic information in its OpenCongress wiki available via an API with the help of the Semantic MediaWiki extension.

The departure of Vivek Kundra as federal CIO that takes effect in August – together with the planned funding cuts to e-government initiatives, such as the Data.gov open data effort – may take its toll on the data that’s available to Semantic Web initiatives at the federal level. On the other hand, states themselves are plowing ahead, most recently with the launch of the State of Illinois Open Data site that’s built on Socrata’s platform. Socrata supports a number of different formats for developers, RDF among them, with its Open API. Cities won’t be left out of the mix, either, with New York, San Francisco, and Chicago, to name a few, pursuing this agenda.

But let’s take a moment to look beyond government data.

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Liberating Data, One Bridge at a Time

Sam Chance — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 14:00:14 +0000

Approximately 1200 people attended the 2011 Semantic Technology Conference hosted in San Francisco, CA. At least a large portion – if not the majority – were first-time attendees. Products, technologies and methodologies advancing the Semantic Web (aka Web 3.0) crystallized the vision of the “web of meaning” more than ever. The focus of the community seemed rather sharp: Linked Data. As an individual who has been involved the Semantic Web since about 2001, it was rewarding and encouraging observing the steady progress in the space.

From a competency and expertise perspective, it validated my own company’s focus on developing Linked Data using (W3C) RDF. I liken Linked Data to building a foundation. Concentrating here is appropriate, and an increasing number of tools augment our collective ability and efficiency to create Linked Data. Within the Linked Data construct, the conference provided a large number of examples that highlighted approaches and architectures to design, build and deploy Linked Data.

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Why Governments Should Invest in the Semantic Web

Angela Guess — Fri, 13 May 2011 12:00:15 +0000

Andrew Updegrove recently shared his thoughts on why governments should invest in the semantic web: “Some 40 years ago, the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency made what may be the most successful R&D investment in history. The result was the Internet, and the return on ARPA’s funding was incalculably large. After all, how can you value the transformation of everything the world does, sells and says? You can’t. That’s why the U.S. government and governments around the world should fund the next vital step in the advancement of the Internet — the transition to a ‘Semantic Web.’” continued…

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