Rachel Haot of the Open Gov Partnership reports, “From hackathons to social media, open government is transforming the way that Mayor Bloomberg’s administration and New York City government serve the public. And there has been no greater testament to open government’s potential than the strategy and innovation in action during Hurricane Sandy. Learning from our experience during Hurricane Irene, in the days leading up to Hurricane Sandy’s landfall in New York City, government technologists reached out to the data science community to share recently updated hurricane evacuation zone maps based on up-to-the-minute flooding projections.” Read more

It’s been a big week for news, especially on the East Coast, where Hurricane Sandy punched hard. Add to that the U.S. presidential elections, the fighting in Syria, and the World Series win by the San Francisco Giants.

For those fortunate enough to have a charged iPad, or access to a power outlet (easier said than done in some parts of the country in the wake of the hurricane), a semantically-enabled application aims to bring the news videos that matter to those devices.

Link TV, which had a role in the ViewChange.org project that The Semantic Web Blog covered here, already offers up Link News, a site for global news and documentaries, that also relies on semantic technology to offer a portal to news from around the world. This week, it unveiled the LinkTV World News App for iPad that pulls top world news selected by editors from more than 125 video news outlets worldwide.

Announcing the app, Paul Mason, who became the company’s president and CEO last year (see our coverage here), said,  ”The LinkTV World News app does the heavy lifting so users don’t have to. A team of seasoned journalists using the best semantic ‘smart search’ technology sifts through thousands of newscasts and raw videos to bring people the stories that matter most.”

Read more