The winner of the Semantic Web Challenge at November’s International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) was EventMedia Live, a web-based environment that exploits real-time connections to event and media sources to deliver rich content describing events that are associated with media, and interlinked with the Linked Data cloud.

This week, it will begin a one-year effort under a European Commission-funded project to align its work with the Nokia Maps database of places, so that mobile users of the app can quickly get pictures of these venues that were taken by users with EventMedia’s help.

A project of EURECOM, a consortium combining seven European universities and nine international industrial partners, EventMedia Live has its origins in the “mismatch between those sites specializing in announcing upcoming events and those other sites where users share photos, videos and document those events,” explains Raphaël Troncy, assistant professor at the EURECOM: School of Engineering & Research Center, Multimedia Communications, and one of the project’s leaders.

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Last week The Semantic Web Blog covered the launch of the SindiceTech Assisted SPARQL Editor as an open source project, noting that SparQLed also is part of SindiceTech’s commercial suite for large enterprises building private linked data clouds. This week, we’ll dive a little deeper into SindiceTech and its progress since the founders of the Sindice web of data search engine turned their attention to focusing on the commercial application of its technology as a real-time semantic warehousing infrastructure, which leverages cloud computing for integrating and normalizing the massive amounts of data the enterprise must deal with.

As SindiceTech founder and CEO Giovanni Tummarello explains, companies actually approached his team to help them make a reality of their visions to use RDF and SPARQL, as the best knowledge representation and querying technologies available, by providing the missing scalability and stability. Sindice.com was evidence that the technology the team had developed could answer these enterprises’ needs; currently there are about 700 million semantically marked-up web pages indexed in the Sindice.com search engine, with a live updated index of some 80 billion triples daily. Its database is over 5 terabytes.

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Linked Open Vocabularies (LOV), a great public resource that has been around for about six months now, has been updated and now includes 229 vocabulary spaces. The website states, “Welcome to LOV, your entry point to the growing ecosystem of linked open vocabularies (RDFS or OWL ontologies) used in the Linked Data Cloud. Here you will find vocabularies listed and individually described by metadata, classified by vocabulary spaces, interlinked using the dedicated vocabulary VOAF. You will enjoy querying the LOV dataset either at vocabulary level or at element level, exploring the vocabulary content using full-text faceted search, and finding metrics about the use of vocabularies in the Semantic Web.” Read more

Image by Howard Brier, shared under a Creative Commons Attribution License

Referring to claims made in the funding proposals lying heaped before us, a European Commission official recently made an important point. Never mind the claimed size of the whole problem, population or industry, he said. Concentrate instead upon the much smaller numbers which describe the part that any proposed project will be able to affect. Unfortunately, whilst the majority of proposals gushed enthusiastically about the big numbers, almost none of them said anything remotely quantifiable about the subset they thought they might reach, impact, benefit, or even just influence a little bit. It’s a worryingly common problem. Read more