According to a new article out of the company, “CollabRx, Inc. today announced the release of a new version of its Therapy Finder™ application (‘app’) for lung cancer. The lung cancer Therapy Finder™app is a web-based decision support tool that enables oncologists to take into account the genetics of a patient’s tumor when determining a treatment plan. The newest lung cancer Therapy Finder™ is currently freely available at the company’s website and via distribution partners such as MedPage Today, Everyday Health’s physician portal (http://www.medpagetoday.com/resource-center/lung-cancer-therapy/therapy-finder).” Read more

According to a new article, “Expert System, the semantic software company, today announced the full integration of its Cogito semantic platform with the Apache Solr™ open source enterprise search platform. Through the integration with Cogito, organizations using Solr will be able to enhance their technology investment by delivering faster, more precise access to big data and enterprise content. Cogito exceeds the limits of traditional search and provides a deep understanding of words by fully understanding their meaning in context. Backed by a powerful semantic network enhanced by vertical knowledge for the most important sectors (finance, security, oil and gas, etc.), Cogito ensures higher precision and recall than traditional systems.” Read more

Dan Rowinski of ReadWrite reports, “The integration of old media and new media can often be like trying to mix oil and water. Even when smart media entities have been proactive in approaching the new digital paradigm – the world of smartphones and tablets, social and serendipity – they have failed either through poor decision making or not putting in a full effort. But CNN is different. Where many newspapers and cable companies have faltered, CNN has thrived. A lot of the credit goes to  the cable news company’s acquisition of Zite, the makers of a popular iPad news app.” Read more

A fascinating project has been undertaken by the Partners of the Pan-Canadian Documentary Heritage Network (PCDHN): It’s a proof-of-concept showcase of using Linked Open Data visualizations for “Out of the Trenches.” This is a look at the First World War from the Canadian perspective: war songs, postcards, newspapers, photos, films, and these resources’ intersection with Canadian soldiers who fought in the war.

These digital resources from organizations such as McGill University, the Universities of Alberta, Calgary and Saskatchewan, and the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec have been linked through existing metadata provided in formats ranging from spreadsheets to MODS XML to RDF. Rather than reduce the metadata to a common subset, the approach was to maximize its use by moving to the “web of data” concept, so that the resources can be combined in different and unexpected ways, according to the proof-of-concept final report that was issued on the project.

The premise was to expose the metadata for these resources using RDF XML and existing published ontologies such as the Event Ontology, the Dublin Core Ontology and the Biographical Ontology, elements sets, vocabularies and resources like the Geonames geographical database to maximize discovery by the user community and contribute to the Semantic Web.

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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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Josette Rigsby reports that open source enterprise CMS provider Nuxeo has teamed with TEMIS “to enrich content stored in Nuxeo with domain-specific metadata.” Rigsby explains, “Nuxeo had support for semantic enhancement even before the TEMIS partnership via its Semantic Entities module. Semantic Entities is an integration of the Apache Stanbol project. Stabbol is an effort initiated by the European Interactive Knowledge Stack for extending content management systems with semantic capabilities. The Nuxeo module extracts and analyzes the content of documents in its repository using an external Stanbol server and DBpedia and then enhances the documents with linked information.” Read more

If you missed the excellent live webcast introduction to SKOS by Bob DuCharme (of TopQuadrant and the recently released Learning SPARQL), the recorded webcast is now available.

You will probably find this webcast useful if: Read more

Tom Sawyer Software, a provider of software for building data visualizations has announced the release of Tom Sawyer Perspectives, Version 3.0. According to the article, “This release introduces game-changing technology involving the integration of visualization and analytics to enable organizations to gain faster insights into their large and complex data sets. In response to growing demand in the market for building more advanced visual data analysis applications, Tom Sawyer Perspectives, Version 3.0, introduces the foundational architecture for agile expansion in future releases.” Read more

A couple of weeks ago The Semantic Web Blog asked our audience whether we thought Larry Page picking up as Google’s CEO might result in semantic search efforts gaining more traction at Google.  The results of that poll, which you can find here, are that 60 percent of respondents think that will be the case (as of this writing).

Maybe so. Last week the search engine giant closed on its acquisition of travel technology provider ITA Software for $700 million. In completing the deal, Google senior VP Jeff Huber posted the comment that a main reason for the buy of the purveyor of airline-data organizing software was that it would make booking travel arrangements more semantic. OK, he didn’t exactly say that but he came close – his actual comment was: “How cool would it be if you could type ‘flights to somewhere sunny for under $500 in May’ into Google and get not just a set of links but also flight times, fares and a link to sites where you can actually buy tickets quickly and easily?”

But the acquisition might unlock more than the doors to travel. Over at the ITA Lab you’ll find projects that include Needlebase and the Needle data aggregation tool for acquiring, integrating, cleansing, analyzing and publishing data on the web. It’s too soon for ITA’s Glenn McDonald, project manager for Needle and designer, Semantic-Web data exploration, to give any details on where what he’s been working on might lead now that Google’s bought the company, but he can say that that work has been about way more than flight data – or search for that matter.

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Your guide to building working solutions for the Semantic Web.

We wrote Semantic Web Programming to offer a useful guide to get the Semantic Web to do stuff – such as data integration and rich data analysis. We are active developers in this space and directly see its potential.  We outline the key concepts, tools, and methods you need to program the Semantic Web to achieve these goals.  Our book is filled with practical, easy-to-follow, examples using working code to illustrate how to take advantage of the many data sources and services available today, especially non-semantic ones like instant messaging, relational databases, and web services such as those offered by Facebook. 

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