Our discussion of Big Data at SemTechBiz, begun here, continues:

The Enterprise Linked Data Cloud Needs Semantics, And More

Another exploration of Big Data’s intersection with semantic technology will take place at this session, where Dr. Giovanni Tummarello, senior research fellow at DERI and CTO of SindiceTech, will talk about the former becoming an enabler for the latter to be really useful in enterprises. “A lot of people say it’s via Big Data that semantic technologies like RDF will see a coming of age and clear applications in certain industries,” he says. There’s value to adding data first and understanding it later, and to that end, “semantic technologies give you the most agile tool to deal with data you don’t know, where there’s a lot of diversity, and you don’t know what of it particularly will be useful.”

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Another announcement by Google this week – one that didn’t get quite as much play as the launch at I/O of Google Play Music All Access and improvements to its search, map and Google + services – was this: Support for JSON-LD markup in Gmail.

The W3C in April published a Last Call Working Draft for JSON-LD 1.0 (JavaScript Object Notation for Linking Data), a lightweight Linked Data format to give data context. It has been shepherded along for some time by the JSON for Linked Data Community Group.

Manu Sporny, who has been instrumental in JSON-LD’s development and is one of the authors of the draft, heralds the news here in his blog, noting that it means that Gmail now will be able to recognize people, places, events and a variety of other Linked Data objects, and that actions may be taken on the Linked Data objects embedded in an e-mail. “For example, if someone sends you an invitation to a party, you can do a single-click response on whether or not you’ll attend a party right from your inbox. Doing so will also create a reminder for the party in your calendar,” he writes.

The news was greeted with enthusiasm on a W3C JSON LD message round, as, as Sporny describes it, “pretty big validation of the technology.”

While noting that Google followed the standard closely, Sporny does point out some issues with the implementation – including a major one that Google isn’t using the JSON-LD @context parameter correctly in its markup examples:

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Andrew Nusca of ZDnet recently interviewed MindTouch CEO Aaron Fulkerson about his company’s use of machine learning. Nusca writes, “When I last wrote about MindTouch, the San Diego-based company, I mentioned that there was a lot of money on the line—$83 billion, according to one market estimate—to get customer service right. MindTouch’s latest gambit? Machine learning. Read more

It’s pretty common these days for people to hit the web in search of medication advice to deal with symptoms they’re experiencing.  The trouble is, most people don’t approach the process in a truly safe manner.

Semantic technology can help rectify the situation. In fact, it’s already doing so in France, where Olivier Curé, an associate professor in computer science at the University of Paris-Est in France, created a web application based on the book by pharmacology expert and educator Jean-Paul Giroud Médicaments sans ordonnance: Les bons et les mauvais!, of which he is a co-author with Catherine Cupillard. The app is made available to their consumers via three big insurance companies there, in order to help the companies save costs on reimbursing them for buying drugs that won’t actually help their condition, or direct them to the appropriate drugs at pharmacies with which the insurers may have relationships to supply them at lower costs. An iPhone version of the app was just released to accompany the web version.

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[NOTE: This guest post is by Peter Haase, Lead Architect for Research and Development, fluid Operations.]

Industry engineers waste a significant amount of time searching for data that they require for their core tasks. When informed about potential problems, diagnosis engineers at Siemens Energy Services, an integrated business unit which runs service centers for power plants, need to access several terabytes of time-stamped sensor data and several gigabytes of event data, including both raw and processed data. These engineers have to respond to about 1,000 service requests per center per year, and end up spending 80% of their time on data gathering alone. What makes this problem even worse is that their data grows at a rate of 30 gigabytes per day. Similarly, at Statoil Exploration, geology and geographic experts spend between 30 and 70% of their time looking for and assessing the quality of some 1,000 terabytes of relational data using diverse schemata and spread over 2,000 tables and multiple individual databases [1]. In such scenarios, it may take several days to formulate the queries that satisfy the information needs of the experts, typically involving the assistance of experienced IT experts who have been working with the database schemata for years.

Siemens and Statoil Exploration are hardly the only companies faced with time-wasting Big Data issues, but the root of these issues is not simply the “big” aspect of their data. The real challenge is finding a way to efficiently and effectively mine data for value and insight, regardless of its volume.

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Derek du Preez of Computer World reports, “The Financial Times (FT) has appointed John O’Donovan as its new Chief Technology Officer, who will lead the FT’s technology strategy across development and operations teams. O’Donovan joins the publication from the Press Association, where he was director of architecture and development, and has also previously worked as the chief architect for BBC News, Sport and Weather. Whilst at the BBC, O’Donovan played a key role in building some of the company’s flagship products, such as the BBC iPlayer, as well as the widely used sport APIs for the Olympics Data Feed.”

He continues, “The FT said that O’Donovan has ‘delivered influential technical strategies that have become widely adopted, using semantic technologies and architectural patterns for dealing with complex integration in modern technical environments.’ Read more

Next month’s Semantic Technology and Business Conference in San Francisco will include a number of panels featuring experts from virtually every facet of the evolving world of semantic web technologies. Experts from major companies and successful startups will share their knowledge on such topics as semantic video, search, financial data, and semantic Big Data. Early bird prices end at midnight tonight. Save $500 off on-site prices and register now!

SemTechBiz Panels

Beyond the Blob: Semantic Video’s Coming Of Age – TV and Video Metadata powers video search, discovery, personalization, and is increasingly used as the basis for targeted advertising and product placement. Join this panel as they explore and discuss advances made and challenges faced over the past year in semantic applications for video.

RDF as a Universal Healthcare Exchange Language – RDF offers a practical evolutionary pathway to semantic interoperability. It enables information to be readily linked and exchanged with full semantic fidelity while leveraging existing IT infrastructure investments. Being schema-flexible, RDF allows multiple evolving data models and vocabularies to peacefully co-exist in the same instance data, without loss of semantic fidelity. This panel will discuss the goal of adopting RDF/Linked Data as a universal healthcare exchange language. Read more

BOSTON, May 8, 2013 /PRNewswire-iReach/ — karmadata officially introduced its freemium website (www.karmadata.com) and API (www.karmadata.com/API) to the global data community at the Data 2.0 Summit held April 30th in San Francisco.  karmadata’s website enables users to find, visualize, and share data of interest to them and their social networks.  The karmadata API provides standardized linked data from the world’s data sources, allowing developers to design and build their own applications. Read more

Los Angeles, CA (PRWEB) May 07, 2013 — TheBrain Technologies, the leading provider of dynamic visualization and knowledge management software, announced its newest release to its online secure cloud services for information management and team collaboration.

TheBrain Cloud Services, also known as WebBrain.com, lets users create and synchronize their digital Brains online and across multiple devices. Digital Brains are a collection of users’ ideas, notes, files and link relationships all organized and related the way each user thinks.

TheBrain Cloud Services is host to millions of digital Thoughts from users around the world. Read more

Don Clark of the Wall Street Journal reports, “Computer-based educational systems have long helped impart information to students and assess their understanding of it. The next step, one company in the field says, is using their behavior to make predictions. That’s the aim of technology being announced Tuesday by Desire2Learn, a Canadian company that specializes in cloud-based based learning systems it markets to colleges, schools and companies. Desire2Learn, launched in 1999, competes with companies like Blackboard and Instructure. It claims that 10 million learners at a range of institutions have made use of its technology, including some at big U.S. university systems.” Read more