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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Announcing Semantic Tech & Business Conference - San Francisco 2012

Semantic Tech & Business Conference is returning to San Francisco in June! Join us from June 3-7 for complete coverage of Big Data, Linked Data, Extreme Information Management, and Semantic Web. From breakthrough approaches to solving business problems to the big data implications of fast–evolving technologies, SemTechBiz provides you with an unparalleled interactive experience and delivers tangible business value. We're offering a special early rate when you register by February 17. Sign up now!

IBM’s Smarter Cities Technology Centre (SCTC) is looking for a Researcher of Social Semantic Web in Mulhuddart, Ireland. The Centre “is accepting applications for full-time researchers from entry-level through principal investigators. We are researching novel ways to enable citizens, services, and service providers to interact coherently in a smarter city. We are creating and leveraging Social Media and Web 2.0 software tools that help to capture, organize and benefit from the wealth of city data being generated by urban and environmental sensors, including citizen-contributed data.” Read more

What do big companies have that most emerging businesses don’t have to help them get value from Big Data? Well, to start with, there’s lots of money and a ton of technology resources.

Never fear. At the upcoming Semantic Tech & Business conference in Berlin, Christopher Testa, CTO of startup WhiteBox Inc., plans to give companies with considerably fewer resources than giants like Google and IBM insight into how to use Big Data as a small, lean startup. His guidance will draw from his own past experiences at Google training AdSense; lessons learned studying the development of IBM’s Watson; and his current efforts to apply Big Data principles to create an expert system for amateur radio operator license exams at his own startup, with limited engineering resources. Most recently Testa was head of engineering at Ad.ly, and that will factor into advice about how to run a data center with free and open source solutions, too.

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Google has purchased over two hundred IBM patents including one patent for a semantic social network. Peter Pachal reports, “While the patents cover a variety of topics, one in particular could give the search giant a new tool for its social network, Google+. The patents cover many different technologies, but they mainly deal with data services like email management, online calendars and transferring web apps between devices. The patent grab, first reported by SEO by the Sea, potentially serves two purposes: providing avenues to develop new products, and providing ammunition in litigation.” Read more

To accompany our recent podcast looking back on 2011, we’ve accumulated some additional perspectives from thought leaders in the next-wave Web space on the year that’s quickly passing us by.

Some highlights follow. You’ll see respondents hit on some common themes throughout, such as Big Data, sentiment analytics, specific vertical industry adoption, and the standards space:

 

• SKOS has become an increasingly popular entry point for organizations that want to use semantic technology in practical applications without worrying about the more complicated aspects of semantic web technology. – Bob  DuCharme, solutions architect, TopQuadrant

 

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IBM recently published a technical paper entitled Toward a Basic Profile for Linked Data. In the introduction, the writers begin, “There is interest in using Linked Data technologies for more than one purpose. We have seen interest in it to expose information — public records, for example — on the Internet in a machine-readable format. We have also seen interest in using it for inferring new information from existing information, for example in pharmaceutical applications or IBM Watson™ (see the Resources section for links to more information). The IBM® Rational® team has been using Linked Data as an architectural model and implementation technology for application integration.” Read more

When it comes to Semantic Web technologies, there are some business-technology leaders that see value in moving rapidly forward. For some, it’s critical if they’re to live up to their image as technologically advanced enterprises. For others, it’s a matter of hearing that competitors are doing it, so they need to get on board too. There’s also the case to be made that there the amount of data to deal with already is overwhelming, and it’s only going to get worse, creating a world that mere humans and current information technology tools simply can’t keep up with.

At the (quickly) upcoming Semantic Tech & Business Conference in Washington D.C., Janet Millenson, principal of advisory firm Two Crows Consulting, will hit those high notes. But expect also to hear about what remains to grapple with in order to get executive support for what is still a new idea in many organizations.

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IBM is looking for a Research Staff Member – Semantic Analysis and Integration in Hawthorne, NY. According to the post, “The Semantic Analysis and Integration Department at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center is seeking Research Staff Members on to work on research and applications of intelligent human language technologies. The project focuses on developing general and reusable Question Answering(QA) systems to achieve reproducible high-performing results for open-domain and specialized-domain question answering.” Read more

IBM’s new Smarter Cities Technology Centre (SCTC) at the Dublin Research Laboratory in Ireland has several job openings in the semantic web space. One opening is for a Researcher: “We are researching novel ways to enable citizens, services, and service providers to interact coherently in a smarter city. We are creating and leveraging Social Media and Web 2.0 software tools that help to capture, organize and benefit from the wealth of city data being generated by urban and environmental sensors, including citizen-contributed data.” Read more

A new article reports that “Hewlett-Packard is looking to dump — er, spin out its PC business, and confirms that it has bought database and analytics vendor Autonomy for $10.3 billion. Plus, it is discontinuing its WebOS-based tablets and smartphones. Prepare for a major shift in the tech business and an acceleration of the ‘consumerized IT’ trend in which business users increasingly drive technology adoption and usage — and traditional IT moves further and further into the back office.” Read more