Are you starting to feel like there’s no real winning investment strategies these days, at least for the average investor? Make some gains one month, only to lose them all the next.

Well, maybe it’s time to invest a little something in efforts that might not pay you back in dollars, but in online badges, acknowledgement of your contributions or donations, maybe even in a chance to provide input into a solution that can advance semantic web, Linked Data, or discovery technologies? Or maybe the ROI is just about feeling that you did something good.

Recently we wrote about Sebastian Trüg’s fundraiser to keep the Nepomuk semantic desktop alive, for example, which this month reached its 9000€ initial goal (though he’s still in search of long-term funding). Turns out there are – or recently have been – other opportunities to put some of your pocket change to work for a smarter and more meaningful web of data. Projects on Kickstarter.com, for instance, run the gamut from fashion ($1 to fund chic 3D glasses), to theatre (you can help launch the LA production of Spring Awakening for $10 or more), to technology.

Kickstarter builds itself as the world’s largest funding platform for great projects, and whiling away the late-night hours wandering through the crowd-funding forum, it surprised me to learn that among its successfully funded projects were efforts including hypothes.is, the brainchild of online travel industry pioneer Dan Whaley. This is described as “a distributed, open-source platform for the collaborative evaluation of information. It will enable sentence-level critique of written words combined with a sophisticated yet easy-to-use model of community peer-review. It will work as an overlay on top of any stable content, including news, blogs, scientific articles, books, terms of service, ballot initiatives, legislation and regulations, software code and more-without requiring participation of the underlying site.”

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Semantic Tech & Business Conference Returns to San Francisco

Semantic Tech & Business Conference returns 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!

[Editor's Note: With the San Francisco-based Semantic Technology Conference just two weeks away, we are going to feature a few of the the new and important products to be discussed at the conference. We will focus on a few of the products and tools that will be featured at the event. The full conference program is available here.]

At SemTech, representatives from Oracle will demonstrate the semantic aspects of Oracle database in two sessions:

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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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