Last week, we published Under the Hood: A Closer Look at Information WorkBench, an interview with Peter Haase conducted by Kristen Milhollin as part of her series on Dynamic Semantic Publishing.

We are pleased to announce that FluidOps has created a viewer for the SemTechBiz conference program in Information Workbench.  The viewer is a good example of a faceted, semantic viewer for the conference program data, including map, timeline, and graph views, and tying in data from disparate sources such as Facebook, Twitter, and the conference program itself.

You can view this event browser here:
http://conference-explorer.fluidops.net/resource/semtech:semtech-SF-2012

Of course, we have the conference agenda-at-a-glance here, and will make the program available to conference attendees via the Guidebook app for mobile devices, but this is an interesting example of Semantic Technology at work in a human-friendly user interface.

Thanks to Peter Haase and the FluidOps team for this work!

fluid Operations’ Information Workbench is part of the semantic infrastructure supporting the BBC’s revolutionary coverage of the 2012 Olympic Games.  Below is a conversation with fluid Operations Senior Architect for Research & Development Michael Schmidt in advance of his 2012 Semantic Technology and Business Conference presentation. This conversation is a supplement to the series “Dynamic Semantic Publishing for Beginners.”

Q. Is the Information Workbench a response to the need for more robust applications to help process “Big Data”? How is it different than other popular tools?

A. Dealing with Big Data involves a number of different challenges, including increasing volume (amount of data), complexity (of schemas and structures), and variety (range of data types, sources).

However, most Big Data solutions available on the market today focus on volume only, in particular supporting vertical scalability (greater operating capacity, efficiency, and speed.)   This means that such solutions mainly address the analysis of large volumes of similarly structured data sets. Yet the Big Data problem is not fully solved only by technologies that help you process similarly structured data more quickly and efficiently.

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Semantic technology is scoring more goals in the sports world. The BBC, for example, which created the FIFA World Cup 2010 website that leveraged semantic technology, is at it again as London prepares for the 2012 Summer Olympics. Brazil has gotten into the action, too, with an Internet portal there taking soccer to the semantic web set. At the upcoming SemTech conference in San Francisco, attendees will have an opportunity to hear the latest details about both efforts.

Over at the BBC, for example, the 2012 Olympics site accompanies a completely redesigned BBC Sports site, both based on technology including Fluid Operations’ Information Workbench to support the editorial process for the BBC’s Dynamic Semantic Publishing strategy, from authoring and curation to publishing of ontology and instance data following an editorial workflow. The BBC environment since the World Cup also has been updated to use the MarkLogic document store for managing rapidly changing statistics, navigation and ultimately all content objects, as lead architect Jem Rayfield described it in this blog posting. Today, the triple store that’s been behind the BBC’s past work is extended to cover every team, athlete, venue, discipline, country and so on, Rayfield told The Semantic Web Blog.

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Want to have a peek into the semantic applications that can result when the cloud and Linked -Data-as-a-service join up? Start with a trip here, where you’ll find the SemTech Berlin 2012 Conference Explorer (among other event explorers). It lets attendees browse through conference metadata – and more – to help them plan for next week’s event.

The application was built with fluid Operations’ Information Workbench, which is a platform for building self-service Linked Data cloud apps; the company also provides the eCloudManager Product Suite, for public and private cloud management. With Information Workbench, users can get over some of the challenges of making Linked Data useable, such as automatically discovering and integrating data sources, dealing with heterogeneity in data sets and access, and planning end-user oriented interfaces and interaction paradigms, says Peter Haase,  a senior architect at fluid Operations, who will be speaking about Linked Data-as-a-service at SemTech Berlin.

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 Photo Courtesy: Flickr/ knitsteel

Earlier this week The Semantic Web Blog took a look at a new service, Publish My Data, that’s aimed at helping U.K. governmental and quasi-governmental agencies climb aboard the Linked Data train.

Continuing that line of thought, there are some other opportunities emerging for public and private institutions to get some help in getting in on the fun. The more opportunities to grow buy-in for Linked Data, the better.

“Data is of course at the basis of our open and modern scientific community,” Professor Nigel Shadbolt,  Professor of Artificial Intelligence in the School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, and Transparency and Open Data Adviser to UK Government, noted in his November presentation to the Royal Society, London. The more accessible and connected it is the better the opportunity to understand it, which has implications for everything from tackling climate change to the effectiveness of new drugs for diseases.

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