It’s time to get real with Linked Data. The World Wide Web Consortium’s Linked Data Platform Working Group, convened almost a year ago, is on the case, with expectations by June to publish a last call working draft of the specification, and to have a final recommendation, the last stage of the W3C’s standards process, by early next year.

“The Linked Data Platform is expanding on the concept [originally] put forward by Tim Berners-Lee on his web site, to turn it into a specification,” says Arnaud J. Le Hors, co-chair of the working group and IBM’s Linked Data Standards Lead. He will address the work at this session during next month’s SemTechBiz conference in San Francisco.

Why the need to formalize Linked Data?  While there is a fairly significant list of W3C standards around the Semantic Web, the more loosely-defined Linked Data has led to an environment where interoperability suffers. That’s because people are left to solve the same problems, such as those around publishing and retrieving data, over and over again, and they take different paths to get there, Le Hors says. The guides that are out there are just that, guides, with people free to use or ignore them, if they can even find them – which in itself isn’t easy to do for those who aren’t well-informed members of the community, he says.

The Linked Data Platform extends the model to provide the industry with a formal definition for read-write access to Linked Data; it mandates publishing data in a standard format, RDF, and using a standard protocol, HTTP, “which is completely symmetrical with the way the web works today, with HTML and HTTP,” Le Hors says.

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IBM is looking for an IBM Watson User Interface & Tooling Developer in Dublin, OH. According to the post, “The IBM Watson offerings are based on the solution created by IBM Research and is a platform which is very different from most common software/hardware platforms in that it involves an uncommon and complex system of systems. These new product offerings will meet the requirements of an emerging market for Deep Question/Answer Solutions. The capability is based on UIMA AS an Open Source framework for deployment of a highly parallel, probabilistic infrastructure running across dozens of discrete Linux systems. You will specialize in designing, developing, testing, and deploying use cases in targeted industries including, but not limited to: health care, financial services, and contact center domains. Read more

Conversational user interfaces and natural language processing could be put to much more use than they currently are.  At the GigaOM Structure Data event in New York City this week, IBM distinguished engineer Currie Boyle, who leads the vendor’s North American natural language services practice, including for deep question and answer Watson-type natural language and unstructured information processing systems, and Nuance Communications CTO Vlad Sejnoha, discussed the realized promises, but also the waiting opportunities.

At Nuance, Sejnoha noted, the focus is on the notion that we are entering a time when how we interact with systems and access information and content is undergoing a “dramatic transformation.” Contributors to that include high- level artificial intelligence reasoning and natural language understanding. “We are overwhelmed with lots of data including unstructured data and these technologies make a difference in how we take advantage of all that,” he said.

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Joab Jackson of Network World reports, “IBM has started a new practice to help organizations interact more effectively with their customers through the use of social media and other emerging technologies. ‘Today, businesses have a completely different way of engaging customers,’ said Mahmoud Naghshineh, IBM vice president of services research, noting that social media and mobile technologies have provided organizations new forms of feedback from their customers. ‘There are all these new ways of reaching out to people [but] you need to know when the right time is to engage.’ The IBM Customer Experience Lab will provide clients with access to both IBM researchers and IBM business analysis consultants, who will generate new ways for clients to communicate with customers and employees.” Read more

James Hendler recently discussed what the arrival of Watson at RPI will mean  for the growing technology. He writes, “The Watson program is already a breakthrough technology in AI. For many years it had been largely assumed that for a computer to go beyond search and really be able to perform complex human language tasks it needed to do one of two things: either it would “understand” the texts using some kind of deep ‘knowledge representation,’ or it would have a complex statistical model based on millions of texts.” Read more

David Meyer of GigaOM reports, “IBM and Deutsche Telekom, the carrier behind the T-Mobile brand, are to work together on creating smart city systems, the companies have announced. The smart city concept, which is closely related to the internet of things, is reliant on pervasive connectivity, drawing on what has traditionally been known as machine-to-machine (M2M) technology to hook up everything from traffic lights to public transport vehicles to the local broadband network. This usually involves the use of cellular networks.” Read more

Friend of SemanticWeb.com Dr. James Hendler recently shared his perspective on the arrival of Watson at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute: “Every single student in the Department of Computer Science here at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has the potential to revolutionize computing. But with the arrival of Watson at Rensselaer, they’re even better positioned to do so. Watson has caused the researchers in my field of artificial intelligence (AI) to rethink some of our basic assumptions. Watson’s cognitive computing is a breakthrough technology, and it’s really amazing to be here at Rensselaer, where we will be the first university to get our hands on this amazing system.” Read more

IBM will provide Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with a modified version of Watson, making RPI the first university to receive the technology. The article states, “The arrival of the Watson system will enable new leading-edge research at Rensselaer, and afford faculty and students an opportunity to find new uses for Watson and deepen the systems’ cognitive capabilities. The firsthand experience of working on the system will also better position Rensselaer students as future leaders in the areas of Big Data, analytics, and cognitive computing.” Read more

A new report from Hurwitz & Associates seeks to put text analytics vendors in context. In an environment where unstructured text accounts for 80 percent of the data available to companies, the market analyst and research firm has prepared a Victory Index to help companies suss out who can best help them get value from this information.

By providing the ability to analyze unstructured text, extract relevant information, and transform it into structured information, “text analytics has become a key component of a highly competitive company’s analytics arsenal,” write report authors Fern Halper, partner and principal analyst; Marcia Kaufman, COO and principal analyst; and Daniel Kirsh, senior analyst. Often, the research firm notes, companies begin to experiment with text analytics to gain insight into the unstructured text that abounds in social media, and from that move on to other use cases. For instance, they’ll discover value in mining unstructured data and using it with structured data to improve predictive models.

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Brian Jackson recently discussed three of IBM’s latest patents that could, as he puts it, “be used to create a futuristic cyborg.” Jackson explains, “Well, it’s possible. Out of the 6,478 patents that big blue registered in the U.S. last year, a few of them definitely focus on giving computers more human-like capabilities. Combining them and projecting into the future, you could imagine that someone like Star Trek’s Commander Data could be the result of intellectual groundwork like this.” Read more