Sophia Search, the Belfast-based innovation leader in semantic content analysis, Chaired by industry veteran Chris Horn, today announced that it has closed a $3.7 million Series A funding round. The investment was led by Atlantic Bridge, and will be used to increase marketing and sales efforts in North America and the UK and to accelerate product roll-out at its development facility at the Northern Ireland Science Park. This financing round represents one of the largest venture investments in a Northern Ireland company in recent times. Read more

Tech Central reports, “Fujitsu Ireland and local scientists have formed a research alliance to explore the commercial opportunities that can be exploited through the semantic web. The semantic web Big Data project is a collaborative movement led by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that promotes common formats for data on the web. By encouraging the inclusion of semantic content in web pages, the semantic web aims to convert the current web of unstructured documents into a ‘web of data’.” Read more

Seevl is looking for a Frontend Engineer in Galway, Ireland. According to the company, “We are a small and growing start-up, starving to build beautiful products for music junkies. We are looking for people that share our vision, have a passion for music and a nerdiness for all things data-related… We are currently hiring our first full-time engineer to join the team! We are looking for a talented and passionate individual that will work essentially on front-end development (HTML5, CSS, JQuery and friends, mobile frameworks) but who can easily switch to back-end when needed (Python, APIs, JSON).” Read more

The US has launched open data standards that were originally developed in Ireland, John Kennedy reports. He writes, “The open data movement is in full swing and tools and standards created in Ireland are to prove pivotal to open data employed by the US government. It emerged today that agencies in the US Government have adopted a set of web tools and standards developed in Ireland by researchers at NUI Galway’s Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI). DERI’s technologies are being utilised by Data.gov, a portal developed to bring an unprecedented level of transparency to the US government. DERI’s research, which is funded by Science Foundation Ireland, focuses on enabling networked knowledge, using the latest semantic web and linked data technologies.” Read more

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

The Smarter Cities Technology Centre at IBM’s Dublin Research Laboratory is looking for a Researcher of Social Semantic Web. According to the post, “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. We are looking for researchers with strong expertise in the areas of: (1) Social Media and Web 2.0 , preferably with geospatial applications. (2) Capturing, representing, exploiting social media and crowd-sourced information. (3) Enabling users and developers to easily leverage linked open data as an information source. (4) Collaborative, end-user-driven knowledge enrichment.” Read more

The Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) at the National University of Ireland in Galway is looking for a Postdoctoral Researcher in Social Software. According to the post, “The successful candidate will co-lead a team of postdoctoral and postgraduate researchers focusing on topics such as the Social Web, the Semantic Web, Semantic Information Systems, Distributed Social Networks, Ontology design for the Social Web, the Internet of Things and the Social Web, Citizen Sensing, Linked Data and the Social Semantic Web. He/she is expected to act as thesis supervisor or co-supervisor for several PhD and Master students and to become the principal scientific investigator on a number of key DERI projects.” 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

Europeana, a collection of digital resources from Europe’s countless museums, libraries, and archives has launched data.europeana.eu as part of its “ongoing effort of making its metadata available as Linked Open Data on the Web. It allows others to access metadata collected from Europeana providers, via standard Web technologies, enrich this metadata and give this enriched metadata back to the providers. Links between Europeana resources and other resources in the Linked Data Web will enable discovery of semantically related resources, as, say, when two artworks are created by artists who are related to each other.” Read more

A new Dublin-based start-up called B-Sm@rk promises a semantic tagging tool that allows people “to register instantly how they feel about and react to a product, event, web content or brand.” According to the article, “The company claims its first product MySmark is five times more effective than the now-familiar ‘Like’ button on sites such as Facebook because it makes the user’s interaction with the content more personal and accurate. MySmark is a coloured, personalised smart wheel that allows people to leave one-click smarks, or ‘smart marks’, on a website, in an app or on a social network page. People can calibrate their feedback, leaving up to 32 different tags based on their emotions and moods.” Read more