Photo Courtesy: Flickr/Lars Plougmann

In recent blogs we’ve discussed where semantic technologies have gone in 2012, and a bit about where they will go this year (see here, here and here).

Here are some final thoughts from our panel of semantic web experts on what to expect to see as the New Year rings in:

John Breslin,lecturer at NUI Galway, researcher and unit leader at DERI, creator of SIOC, and co-founder of Technology Voice and StreamGlider

Broader deployment of the schema.org terms is likely. In the study by Muehlisen and Bizer in July this year, we saw Open Graph Protocol, DC, FOAF, RSS, SIOC and Creative Commons still topping the ranks of top semantic vocabularies being used. In 2013 and beyond, I expect to see schema.org jump to the top of that list.

Christine Connors, Chief Ontologist, Knowledgent:

I think we will see an uptick in the job market for semantic technologists in the enterprise; primarily in the Fortune 2000. I expect to see some M&A activity as well from systems providers and integrators who recognize the desire to have a semantic component in their product suite. (No, I have no direct knowledge; it is my hunch!)

We will see increased competition from data analytics vendors who try to add RDF, OWL or graphstores to their existing platforms. I anticipate saying, at the end of 2013, that many of these immature deployments will leave some project teams disappointed. The mature vendors will need to put resources into sales and business development, with the right partners for consulting and systems integration, to be ready to respond to calls for proposals and assistance.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Quentin Hardy of the New York Times reports

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Resunate, which The Semantic Web Blog first covered here, has had as its target market university career centers, with a client list that includes among others Carnegie Mellon (where the technology has its roots) and the University of Pittsburgh (whose Library System recently signed on as a customer for Plum Analytics’ RDF-modeled Researcher Graph). CareerImp has been updating the Semantic Intelligence technology behind the solution – which  analyses the sentences in a resume and job description based on the way words are clustered and their context, and weights things to statistically determine how relevant a resume is to a job or vice versa – every couple of weeks since its debut in Spring 2011 with a focus on providing content suggestions.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The Common Crawl Foundation is on the verge of adding to its Amazon Web Services (AWS) Public Data Set of openly and freely accessible web crawl data. It was back in January that Common Crawl announced the debut of its corpus on AWS (see our story here). Now, a billion new web sites are in the bucket, according to Common Crawl director Lisa Green, adding to the 5 billion web pages already there.

“When are you going to have new data is one of most frequent questions we get,” she says. The answer is that processing is underway now, and she hopes they’ll be ready to go this week.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

“Fellows will work 15-25 hours/week, mainly at Boston City Hall, and will be paid $20/hour. While at City Hall, fellows will spend much of their time working closely with a team of policy makers and researchers interested in using new types of data to carry out analyses that can improve both public policy and scholarship about key urban issues. ” continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Semantics matter here as everywhere else, though, since analysis pointed to the rate dropping as a result of some 315,000 people stopped looking for work. Just 64 percent of Americans are participating in the workforce, down from 64.2 percent. On the other hand, companies have added more jobs and small businesses hiring intentions are up.

If you happen to be an information technology professional, job site Indeed.com adds to the good news, showing a 13 percent change on the positive side in year-over-year comparisons of the industry’s employment trends as of October. What of technology professionals with expertise in semantic web?

Well, there’s some creep-up in the postings in most cases (not all), though things are not near peak (so to speak) levels of a couple of years ago, according to the site’s analysis. See the graphs below for the percentage of some job postings that list semantic web standards and technologies:

 Here’s one interesting new term on the comparative upswing, though:

Also, among the top job trends related to technology, interesting to see HTML 5 at the top of the list, given that richer semantic markup of documents is part of the close-to-finalized spec. And we’ve been hearing more about MongoDB and experimentation with it as a semantic triple store:

 Of course, you can find out more about semantic-related job openings every day right here on our web site (just search on “jobs”).

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Richard Padley, the Managing Director of Semantico, posted this week that the Semantic Web is dead.

I could not disagree more. Padley states that “we’ve yet to see many convincing practical uses for the technology.” I have seen many convincing, practical cases. We cover these stories daily here, and they have been presented at our conferences. The BBC, Best Buy, Overstock.com, the New York Times, Amdocs, the Library of Congress, the US Department of Defense, The British Museum… consumer facing apps like Siri, Seevl, and Attune… the list of companies using Semantic Web Technologies to make money and save money — to solve very real business problems — is long and growing.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The Prediction API, due around summer’s end, seeks to predict outcomes from text, as Tyrberg describes it. That is, it assesses how a company name or any other word has been described in text and  finds a correlation between that and expected outcomes, such as sales volumes.

It works by having the user submit historic text and historic data points, from which the technology analyzes the relationship between the meaning of the text and the data that the user wants to have predicted (it also will return data of how good it believes it can predict the outcome, Tyrberg says). After that, the user submits new text data to Saplo for a new time period, and based on that text Saplo returns a prediction of the next outcome.

“Think of it like BI,” says Tyrberg. “You might be able to predict new numbers based on previous numbers, but a lot of information that is available is in written text, and we can find the correlations between the meaning of that text and numerical data.”

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

One of the recent efforts hails from start-up Careerimp, which lately unveiled its semantically intelligent resume builder Resunate that has roots in research begun at Carnegie Mellon. The idea is to make it easier for people who’ve identified a position they want to best present themselves to the applicant tracking systems that are the first hurdle to overcome in order to get a live person’s attention.

Right now, it can take hours or even days to tinker a resume to those ends, while the old-school approach of building one solid resume that can suit any job hunt is quickly going by the wayside. We’re a society of specialists, and that means your resume has to help specialize you for each particular job, too.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Image: Courtesy JPMorgan Chase

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.