Heading into the Labor Day weekend, Wolfram|Alpha released a new feature that lets users perform personal analytics with Facebook data, for free. Users can head here and type in “Facebook Report” for an analysis of their Facebook data.

Stephen Wolfram, the creator of the computational knowledge engine, alerted the world to the news in this blog post. “When you type “facebook report,” Wolfram|Alpha generates a pretty seriously long report—almost a small book about you, with more than a dozen major chapters, broken into more than 60 sections, with all sorts of drill-downs, alternate views, etc.,” he writes.

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To begin: Semantics is the study of meaning. It focuses on the relation between words and phrases and due to the relationship what they mean in context. Semantics is a game changer when it comes to the management of large volumes of structured and unstructured data. Having the ability to understand words in context using lexical or linguistic semantics will drive linked data initiatives and ultimately, as many believe, will make Web 3.0 a reality. With this in mind, possessing a “semantic platform” is the new marketing target for many software companies and they are quickly moving to describe themselves as a semantic platform in hopes of aligning themselves with the semantic snowball as it continues to gather speed.

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Big Data is throwing its weight around, and perhaps not entirely the way originally expected. Will your business be able to lift the load?

Getting onboard with semantic search technologies is one way to build muscle to meet the challenge of filtering through the onrush of information. “The concept of Big Data was traditionally associated with databases and such structured information,” says Luca Scagliarini, VP, Strategic and Business Development of Expert System. To this end, organizations put a lot of focus on pulling that information together in data warehouses and creating MDM (Master Data Management) initiatives for defining and managing the entities in them.

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