Silk is launching in open beta today (May 10). The service for applying semantics to create more powerful web sites, which we last discussed here, moves out of a private beta stage that the company says saw more than 10,000 users.

“A lot of the sites during the private beta were, well… private, so we can’t go into details about those,” says Sander Koppelaar, head of operations. Countries of the World, with all United Nations member state information, is one public Silk-powered demo web site for those who’d like to explore one. Generally speaking, he says there’s been a wide variety of use cases, ranging from professional publishers and data journalists to businesses and even personal use. “Publishers have used Silk to interpret data sets such as deadly traffic accidents, house sales and MBA rankings.

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SemTechBiz is Less Than 2 Weeks Away

The Semantic Tech & Business Conference (SemTechBiz) is coming to San Francisco on June 3-7! Join us for case studies, innovative panels, tutorials, and keynotes that will provide you with practical advice, hands-on guidance, and breakthrough approaches to solving business problems with semantic technology. Passes go up $200 at the door. Sign up now and save !

Ward Cunningham, inventor of the wiki, is percolating another project: The Smallest Federated Wiki. This week he gave a presentation entitled, Missing From the Beginning: The Federation of Wikis Abstract, at the University of Advancing Technology (UAT) theatre, which is viewable here, and he’s been hosting Google+ hangouts about the work, too.

So, what is the Smallest Federated Wiki? The idea behind the work-in-progress, launched at IndieWebCamp this past summer and as explained here, is to innovate in three ways: The new Wiki shares through federation, composes by refactoring and wraps data with visualization. As Cunningham said in the March 7 presentation, “We’re making an ecosystem here for sharing data about ideas. I’m taking the conversation about how we’re going to live going forward, to be based on ideas backed up by data that we can understand because it has sensible visualizations.”

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Last week the New York City Council gave its nod of approval to legislation that would require city agencies to publish public data sets in a common format on an online portal for the public’s use. Mayor Bloomberg just signed off on it, with the Open Data Bill legislation to be phased in over six years.

But semantic tech startup Ontodia hopes to help speed up the development of the Big Apple as the Digital City of the Future with NYCFacets, a Smart Open Data Exchange for the developer community just released that catalogs all the NYC-related data sources already present in the New York City Open Data Catalogue.

“There are about 900 data sets in the New York City Open Data Catalogue,” says Ontodia co-founder Joel Natividad. Last year, while at TCG Software Services, he was part of a team that won the Large Organization Recognition Award at BigApps 2.0 – the city-sponsored contest for developers to use NYC Open Data – for participating in creating NYC Data Web, which integrates the NYC.gov data sets into a single web of data for developers. The team also included Revelytix and Spry. “Now that the Open Data Bill just passed, there will be a tsunami of data,” he says.

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Wikimeta, the semantic tagging and annotation architecture for incorporating semantic knowledge within documents, websites, content management systems, blogs and applications, this month is incorporating itself as a company called Wikimeta Technologies.  Wikimeta, which has a heritage linked with the NLGbAse project, last year was provided as its own web service.

Dr. Eric Charton, Ph.D, MSc at École Polytechnique de Montréal, is project leader and author of the Wikimeta code. The NLGbAse project was conducted by Charton at the University of Avignon as part of his Ph.D. Thesis.  The Semantic Web Blog recently hosted an email discussion with him to learn more about the Wikimeta architecture and its evolution.

 

The Semantic Web Blog: Tell us about the NLGBase project and Wikimeta’s relationship to it.

Charton: NLGbAse is an ontology extracted from Wikipedia. It is used in Wikimeta as a resource for semantic disambiguation. For each Wikipedia document (aka Semantic Concept), NLGbAse provides various ways of word-writing (for example, “General Motors” can be written “GM Company”, “GM”, “General Motors Corp” and so on), used for detection.

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MongoDB has been gaining traction: 10gen, which began the MongoDB project and offers commercial MongoDB support services, said that for 2011 there was a 300 percent increase in Fortune 500 enterprise customers. The list included Disney, Viacom, HP and McKesson. The company also noted strong adoption in Europe including Telefonica and The National Archives. In all, 10gen reported that it ended 2011 with more than 400 commercial customers, with numerous large deployments scaling to 1,000 or more servers.

What makes MongoDB appealing to JavaScript programmers working with JSON objects at these and other organizations is its simplicity. If all that’s desired is to have an easy-to-use database where you can add or retrieve JSON objects – the main data type for Javascript developers – it remains an attractive option.

But Franz Inc. proposes an alternative for those who want more sophisticated functionality: Use the semantic power of its AllegroGraph Web 3.0 database to deal with complicated queries, via MongoGraph, a MongoDB API to AllegroGraph technology.

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The W3C reports that “The SPARQL Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of SPARQL 1.1 Query Results JSON Format. This was also the First Public Draft of that document. This document describes the representation of SELECT and ASK query results using JSON. Comments are welcome through 26 October.” The project page notes, “Publication as a Last Call Working Draft indicates that the SPARQL Working Group believes it has addressed all substantive issues and that the document is stable. The Working Group expects to advance this specification to Recommendation Status.” Read more

On Friday, September 9, a group of Semantic thought leaders from around the globe met with their host and colleague, Paul Miller, for the latest installment of the Semantic Link, a monthly podcast covering the world of Semantic Technologies. This episode includes a discussion about the latest document around the RDF 1.1 standard (a Working Draft). The Semantic Link panel was joined by special guest, David Wood, Co-Chair of the RDF Working Group at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

David Wood, 3 Roundstones

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Alexandre Passant of DERI Galway recently launched a new web service called seevl, and will speak about it further at June’s SemTech Conference. According to Passant, seevl “reinvents music discovery. We provide new ways to explore the cultural and musical universe of your favorite artists and to discover new ones by understanding how they are connected. In addition, we let you comment every piece of data about them.” Read more

Last week, the Second Linked Data Meetup London was held at the University of London Union. There were several compelling presentations discussed on Twitter  including the BBC’s use of Linked Data for their Wildlife Finder app. One of the many promising topics to emerge from the day was the introduction of a new Linked Data API. While there have been other Linked Data APIs (Pubby and irON), this API has the more narrow goal of lowering the bar for non-SemWeb developers to access these rich data collections. It is intended as a simple RESTful layer that returns JSON representations of RDF collections backed by a SPARQL endpoint. The API was primarily developed by Dave Reynolds, Jeni Tennison and Leigh Dodds. At the "How the Web of Data Will Be Won" talk by Jeni Tennison and John Sheridan, they emphasized that extending their successes on exposing government data in a linked fashion will require a focus on usability to attract new developers.

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Social Tags Use Simple, Everyday Terms to Categorize Stories;
Make it Easy for Editors to Filter News by Human Interest

San Jose, Calif. – The 5th Annual Semantic Technology Conference – June 15, 2009 – Thomson Reuters today announced significant upgrades to its OpenCalais service. The update adds new ‘Social Tags’ – story descriptors in simple, everyday language – and support for Spanish language content to OpenCalais’ core capabilities. It also adds a new ‘Recession Pack’ of facts and events that OpenCalais can extract from news about company actions related to a down economy.

OpenCalais helps publishers compete. Found at OpenCalais.com, the free service makes it easy to automate content operations, enhance the value of content, improve the reader experience and extend distribution to new search engines, news aggregators and social media applications.

“With these updates, we are increasing the relevance, impact and appeal of the OpenCalais Service worldwide, for everything from content operations to SEO,” said Thomas Tague, Calais Initiative lead, Thomson Reuters. “Social Tags and Spanish language support are two of the most in-demand features with our partner publishers and community of Web developers alike. We are very pleased to be able to meet that demand and quickly bring them to light.”

The new features in the OpenCalais service include:

Social Tags: Social Tags go beyond news categories – such as “lifestyle,” “sports” or “entertainment” – to describe what a story, blog post or document is about using common, conversational terms, such as “gourmet cooking,” “auto racing” or “new movie release.” Social Tags make it easier for editors to filter news by human interest, and to create compelling collections of related content such as microsites that improve search engine optimization (SEO) and bolster reader engagement.

Social Tags are based on sophisticated analysis of an entire document that has been mapped to the OpenCalais knowledgebase as well as Wikipedia. In addition to helping streamline content operations, Social Tags can be used as keywords for ad placement and as metatags for SEO.

Entidad extracción en español: As with French, OpenCalais’ initial support for Spanish language content extends to entity extraction in the top categories, including people, cities, countries company names and more. Extraction of facts and events will follow in 2010.

The Recession Pack of Facts & Events: Given today’s environment, OpenCalais has been tuned to extract a new set of facts and events related to company performance and company actions in a down economy, including accounting changes, labor issues, layoffs, earnings restatements, delayed filings and more.

The Complete Set of IPTC Newscodes: In addition to the new Social Tags, the OpenCalais service now categorizes news stories and documents using one of 17 top-level subject codes from the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) NewsCodes taxonomy.

Enhanced Linked Data URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers): The top-level company name URIs that OpenCalais returns along with document metadata have been enhanced to reflect ongoing updates of company information as those changes happen in Thomson Reuters Linked Data repository.

In addition, the company URIs OpenCalais returns will now feature links to related entries in TechCrunch’s CrunchBase, and include specific URIs for company officers and company competitors, making it easier to source and navigate these key elements of competitive business information.

Linked Data URIs in JSON: In addition to HTML and RDF, OpenCalais’ Linked Data URIs for companies, geographies and more are now available in the JSON format. Users can retrieve URIs as JSON by appending .json to the URI or calling the OpenCalais service with an appropriate caller type.

Opt-In Storage of Document-Level Metadata URIs: Whereas OpenCalais used to return all document-level URIs to the user, the service will now store them on the user’s behalf, returning them on an opt-in basis as needed. This is helpful for publishers processing large quantities of content and preserves their prerogative to share their document-level identifiers when they see fit.

Availability:
The updates to the OpenCalais service are being rolled out as a phased auto-upgrade to the existing service. No changes are required on the part of partners or developers.

1. Phase one (OpenCalais version 4.1) – which goes live today – includes Social Tags, the ‘Recession Pack’ of company facts and events, and more. See release notes here.
2. Phase two (OpenCalais version 4.2) – available in mid-July – includes support for Spanish language content, enhanced Linked Data URIs and more.