Antony Savvas reports that the Environment Agency is “deploying an open source knowledge management system to compile and share information on around 500 river restoration projects throughout Europe. The Wiki-style online information source will be used by European government agencies, engineers, ecologists, planners and other parties involved in restoring rivers.” Read more

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!

Former Paypal and Intuit CEO Bill Harris these days is heading up financial advisory service Personal Capital, which now is adding an independent media property to its portfolio to aggregate and deliver financial news to individuals. That new property, Daily Capital, launches today and is powered by Eqentia’s semantic technology. Eqentia offers a content discovery and knowledge management portal for consumers, and also has other enterprises using its technology for their backbone portal infrastructures. But Eqentia CEO William Mougayar thinks this deal is likely the biggest one so far in terms of how much visibility it’s going to get and its potential to grow.

As Harris explains to The Semantic Web Blog in an email interview, Personal Capital provides clients with a holistic view of their complex financial lives, “and the mission of Daily Capital is the same: to cut through the clutter and highlight the best financial content from around the Web.”

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[Editor's Note: This week, we welcome Yefim "Jeff" Zhuk of Sallie Mae as he presents a series on Knowledge-Driven Architecture. This series follows up the author’s presentation at the recent international 2011 Semantic Technology Conference San Francisco and further expands on the subject of integrated software and knowledge engineering, originally described by Mr. Zhuk in the book “Integration-ready Architecture and Design.” Part I | Part II | Part III]

Part IV – Creating a semantically rich service environment locally and across industry

Part III focused on the Conversational Semantic Decision Support (CSDS) and related Use Cases.

This example can be expanded from requirements to design and development phases, including hints on service names and application messages. Standards, recommendations and best practices offered by W3C [6] can serve as the base for conversational scripts, which would help a SME, (in this case, a software developer) to successfully implement them and create a truly semantically rich SOA environment.
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[Editor's Note: This week, we welcome Yefim "Jeff" Zhuk of Sallie Mae as he presents a series on Knowledge-Driven Architecture. This series follows up the author’s presentation at the recent international 2011 Semantic Technology Conference San Francisco and further expands on the subject of integrated software and knowledge engineering, originally described by Mr. Zhuk in the book “Integration-ready Architecture and Design.” Part I | Part II | Part IV]

Part III - Transitioning From “What” to “How” and explaining Conversational Semantic Decision Support (CSDS) with Use Cases

a)      Formalization of Business Rules

One of the current development trends is a shift to rule-based applications. As more flexible and quickly adaptive to business changes, rule-based applications live a longer life and provide higher return on investment.

Conversational semantic decision support can be very helpful in the process of collecting and formalizing the rules [5]. CSDS will make sure that the rules are expressed in the known terms and the rules criteria are directly tied to existing data.
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[Editor's Note: This week, we welcome Yefim "Jeff" Zhuk of Sallie Mae as he presents a series on Knowledge-Driven Architecture. This series follows up the author’s presentation at the recent international 2011 Semantic Technology Conference San Francisco and further expands on the subject of integrated software and knowledge engineering, originally described by Mr. Zhuk in the book “Integration-ready Architecture and Design.” Part I | Part III | Part IV]

Part II

Looking for a black cat in a dark room

In the corporate world, each clerk and department has their own knowledge compartment.

Prepared for consumption by an author or a single group, information is based on “tribal knowledge” assumptions and naturally has multiple gaps, especially for other groups and departments. In increasingly interconnected businesses, informational gaps lead to productivity loss.

Compartmentalized information is usually hidden and locked inside complex tools. No surprise that we spend from 30 to 50% time looking for information. Not because we love searching… It’s just hard to find something that was hidden (not intentionally!) and especially something that has never been captured.

We often find ourselves looking for a black cat in a dark room.
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The W3C recently interviewed Jeanne Holm, Chief Knowledge Architect at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Cal Tech. Holm also leads the Knowledge Management team at NASA. In the interview, Holm stated, “The goal of our project was to make it easy find expertise within an organization, or, as you’ll see, across organizational boundaries. The project is called POPS for ‘People, Organizations, Projects, and Skills.’ The acronym does not include E for Expert for a good reason: we tried three times to create a system with data specifically about expertise, but failed each time for different social reasons. Each attempt relied on self-generated lists of expertise. In the first attempt, people over- or under-inflated their expertise, sometimes to bolster their resumes. The second attempt prompted labor unions to get overly involved because greater expertise could be tied to higher pay. The third approach involved profiles verified by management, and that led to a number of human resources grievances when there was a disagreement. In all cases, the data became suspect.” Read more

Eqentia, a semantic entry point into personalized content discovery and knowledge management, today unveils Version 2.0 of its technology. Some of the features, such as the addition of the Personal Stream that gives users eight ways to collect and curate content, have been in soft launch since February. Others, such as a revamped UI and Self-Service Portal creation, are available for the first time.

An enhanced user experience has to be at the heart of special-purpose curatorial platforms, says Eqentia founder and CEO William Mougayar.  That said, while Eqentia may not talk up its semantic back-end to clients, it’s what’s there that adds to the value they’re looking for: “What’s really valuable when we talk to clients is that they like that we tag everything properly, which happens because we know the semantic structures inside and can use the taxonomies.”  In fact, Mougayar says Eqentia has been building up the back-end by incorporating Semantic Web standards such as OWL for linking its own taxonomies and making it easier to reuse parts of them, so that Eqentia can more readily configure new topics or domains.

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If you missed Part 1, read it here.

The Library of Congress’ National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program works to catalyze and sustain a national network of digital preservation partners. From the beginning of the project one of the key ideas has been that the partnership, now with 185 partner organizations across 45 states, needed to work toward a distributed architecture. To that end, NDIIPP has worked with its’ partners to connect different platforms for storage and verification, data and metadata management, and access and discovery of preserved digital materials.

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A Daunting Task

What if you were given a large new initiative to lead? Your resources are a team of 180 different groups distributed across the country. They work for different organizations, each with their own set of priorities and goals. Each group does things just a little differently to accomplish the task at hand. They use different work processes, different software and produce their work in a variety of data formats.

What if you needed to pull the work of all of these groups together and present it in a cohesive manner? Sound familiar? This is a task that presents itself to organizations on a frequent basis as workforces and partnerships expand globally and the amount of digital information to be managed grows exponentially.

Now add another factor into this picture…imagine that the preservation of our nation’s digital history was riding on your success. This is the situation the Library of Congress faced in 2008.

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Bolstering Knowledge Management Through Semantic Technologies CMSWire The next time those in the academic world suggest any miscommunication is an issue of semantics, they might not … and more »