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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The cloud conversation, with storage as one key discussion point, will continue to be an active one in Big Data circles, whether users are working with massive, connected Linked Data sets or trying to run NLP across the Twitter firehose. CloudSigma, for example, recently publicly disclosed that it is using an all solid-state drive (SSD) solution for its public cloud offering that lets users purchase CPU, RAM, storage and bandwidth independently. The use of SSD, says CEO Robert Jenkins, avoids the problem that spinning disks have with the randomized, multi-tenant access of a public cloud that leads to storage bottlenecks and curbs performance.

That, combined with the company’s approach of letting customers size virtual machine resources as they like, as well as leverage exposed advanced hypervisor settings to optimize for their particular applications, he says, brings the use of the public cloud infrastructure closer to what companies can get out of private cloud environments, and at a price-performance win.

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This week, the DERI and Fujitsu Lab partners have announced a new data storage technology that stores and queries interconnected Linked Open Data, to be available this year, free of charge, on a cloud-based platform. According to a press release about the announcement, the data store technology collects and stores Linked Open Data that is published across the globe, and facilitates search processing through the development of a caching structure that is specifically adapted to LOD.

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Anna Leach of the Wall Street Journal reports, “New scientific research must be published for free online, the vice-president of the European Commission said, in a move designed to increase the knowledge pool open to small business and lead to more innovative products. All scientists receiving European Union funding will have to publish their results in an open-access format, Neelie Kroes, the commissioner responsible for Europe’s digital agenda, said Monday in Stockholm.  Ms. Kroes also  launched the global Research Data Alliance — a group committed to pooling and co-ordinating scientific data so it can be shared better.”

Leach continues, “Opening up scientific research is good for small business, said Victor Henning, CEO of British startup Mendeley, which aims to make academic research more connected. He has noticed the demand for access to academic research from small businesses. continued…

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A website called BigML (for Big Machine Learning) has compiled a great list of freely available public data sources. The article begins: “We love data, big and small and we are always on the lookout for interesting datasets. Over the last two years, the BigML team has compiled a long list of sources of data that anyone can use. It’s a great list for browsing, importing into our platform, creating new models and just exploring what can be done with different sets of data. In this post, we are sharing this list with you. Why? Well, searching for great datasets can be a time consuming task. We hope this list will support you in that search and help you to find some inspiring datasets. ” continued…

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Martin Kaltenbock of the Semantic Web Company reports, “The brand new web based GBPN Knowledge Platform has been launched on 21 February 2013. It helps the building sector effectively reduce its impact on climate change! It has been designed as a participative knowledge hub and data hub harvesting, sharing and curating best practice policies in building energy performance globally. Available in English and soon in Mandarin, this new web-based tool of the Global Buildings Performance Network (GBPN) aims to stimulate collective research and analysis from experts worldwide to promote better decision-making and help the building sector effectively reduce its impact on climate change. continued…

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Photo Courtesy: Flickr/Lars Plougmann

In recent blogs we’ve discussed where semantic technologies have gone in 2012, and a bit about where they will go this year (see here, here and here).

Here are some final thoughts from our panel of semantic web experts on what to expect to see as the New Year rings in:

John Breslin,lecturer at NUI Galway, researcher and unit leader at DERI, creator of SIOC, and co-founder of Technology Voice and StreamGlider

Broader deployment of the schema.org terms is likely. In the study by Muehlisen and Bizer in July this year, we saw Open Graph Protocol, DC, FOAF, RSS, SIOC and Creative Commons still topping the ranks of top semantic vocabularies being used. In 2013 and beyond, I expect to see schema.org jump to the top of that list.

Christine Connors, Chief Ontologist, Knowledgent:

I think we will see an uptick in the job market for semantic technologists in the enterprise; primarily in the Fortune 2000. I expect to see some M&A activity as well from systems providers and integrators who recognize the desire to have a semantic component in their product suite. (No, I have no direct knowledge; it is my hunch!)

We will see increased competition from data analytics vendors who try to add RDF, OWL or graphstores to their existing platforms. I anticipate saying, at the end of 2013, that many of these immature deployments will leave some project teams disappointed. The mature vendors will need to put resources into sales and business development, with the right partners for consulting and systems integration, to be ready to respond to calls for proposals and assistance.

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David Wood, CTO, 3RoundStones:

The short take: Hiring has been on in a big way at semantic tech players as enterprises are moving in greater numbers to buy semantic software, recognizing their traditional vendors won’t solve their interoperability issues. Sem tech vendors should have a happy 2013 as semantics continues going mainstream.

The full take:

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Courtesy: Flickr/LadyDragonflyCC <3

Yesterday we began our look back at the year in semantic technology here. Today we continue with more expert commentary on the year in review:

Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead:

I would mention two things (among many, of course).

•  Schema.org had an important effect on semantic technologies. Of course, it is controversial (role of one major vocabulary and its relations to others, the community discussions on the syntax, etc.), but I would rather concentrate on the positive aspects. A few years ago the topic of discussion was whether having ‘structured data’, as it is referred to (I would simply say having RDF in some syntax or other), as part of a Web page makes sense or not. There were fairly passionate discussions about this and many were convinced that doing that would not make any sense, there is no use case for it, authors would not use it and could not deal with it, etc. Well, this discussion is over. Structured data in Web sites is here to stay, it is important, and has become part of the Web landscape. Schema.org’s contribution in this respect is very important; the discussions and disagreements I referred to are minor and transient compared to the success. And 2012 was the year when this issue was finally closed.
•  On a very different aspect (and motivated by my own personal interest) I see exciting moves in the library and the digital publishing world. Many libraries recognize the power of linked data as adopted by libraries, of the value of standard cataloging techniques well adapted to linked data, of the role of metadata, in the form of linked data, adopted by journals and soon by electronic books… All these will have a profound influence bringing a huge amount of very valuable data onto the Web of Data, linking to sources of accumulated human knowledge. I have witnessed different aspects of this evolution coming to the fore in 2012, and I think this will become very important in the years to come.

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Courtesy: Flickr/zoetnet

As we close out 2012, we’ve asked some semantic tech experts to give us their take on the year that was. Was Big Data a boon for the semantic web, or is the opportunity to capitalize on the connection still pending? Is structured data on the web not just the future but the present? What sector is taking a strong lead in the semantic web space?

We begin with Part 1, with our experts listed in alphabetical order:

John Breslin, lecturer at NUI Galway, researcher and unit leader at DERI, creator of SIOC, and co-founder of Technology Voice and StreamGlider:
I think the schema.org initiative really gaining community support and a broader range of terms has been fantastic. It’s been great to see an easily understandable set of terms for describing the objects in web pages, but also leveraging the experience of work like GoodRelations rather than ignoring what has gone before. It’s also been encouraging to see the growth of Drupal 7 (which produces RDFa data) in the government sector: Estimates are that 24 percent of .gov CMS sites are now powered by Drupal.

Martin Böhringer, CEO & Co-Founder Hojoki:

For us it was very important to see Jena, our Semantic Web framework, becoming an Apache top-level project in April 2012. We see a lot of development pace in this project recently and see a chance to build an open source Semantic Web foundation which can handle cutting-edge requirements.

Still disappointing is the missing link between Semantic Web and the “cool” technologies and buzzwords. From what we see Semantic Web gives answers to some of the industry’s most challenging problems, but it still doesn’t seem to really find its place in relation to the cloud or big data (Hadoop).

Christine Connors, Chief Ontologist, Knowledgent:

One trend that I have seen is increased interest in the broader spectrum of semantic technologies in the enterprise. Graph stores, NoSQL, schema-less and more flexible systems, ontologies (& ontologists!) and integration with legacy systems. I believe the Big Data movement has had a positive impact on this field. We are hearing more and more about “Big Data Analytics” from our clients, partners and friends. The analytical power brought to bear by the semantic technology stack is sparking curiosity – what is it really? How can these models help me mitigate risk, more accurately predict outcomes, identify hidden intellectual assets, and streamline business processes? Real questions, tough questions: fun challenges!

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Robert Perkins of USC News reports, “The USC Viterbi School of Engineering’s Information Sciences Institute (ISI) is collaborating with the Smithsonian American Art Museum to provide more detailed and more easily accessed information about artworks in the museum’s collection online than has previously been possible. Through this collaboration, online users will soon be able to access records of more than 40,000 artworks, which will be converted to Linked Open Data (LOD), a system that tags and publishes information online in a structured format designed to be easier to interlink – both inside and outside of the museum’s online presence. ‘We are excited about developing and applying our research tools to support the museum community,’ said Pedro Szekely, research assistant professor at the ISI. ‘The resulting tools are generic, will work with any museum’s databases and they will be made available for free to the museum community’.” continued…

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It doesn’t have to be that way, and Tagasauris has put its money on changing the state of things.

Why is dumb visual media a problem, especially at the enterprise-level? Visual media, in its highly un-optimized state, hasn’t been thought of in the same way that companies think about how making other forms of data more meaningful and reasonable can impact their business processes. A computer’s ability to assess image color, pattern and texture isn’t highly useful in the marketplace, and as a result visual media has “just been outside the realm of normal publishing processes, normal workflow processes,” Carter says. Therefore, what so many organizations – big media companies, photo agencies, and so on –  would rightly acknowledge to be their treasure troves of images don’t yield anywhere near the economic value that they can.

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As part of that launch, Manning is offering a one-day 50% discount for readers of SemanticWeb.com. The discount applies to all versions of “Linked Data”: eBook, print books, and Manning’s “MEAP” books (more on MEAP below). To claim the discount, use coupon code “12linksw” when ordering.

This offer expires at 11:59 pm (US EST) on December 6, so if you’re interested, act fast!

About the Book (description by David Wood):

The flexible, unstructured nature of the Web is being extended to act as a global database of structured data. Linked Data is a standards-driven model for representing structured data on the Web that gives developers, publishers, and information architects a consistent, predictable way to publish, merge and consume data. The Linked Data model offers the potential to standardize Web data in the same way that SQL standardized large-scale commercial databases. Linked Data has been adopted by many well-known institutions, including Google, Facebook, IBM, Oracle and government agencies, as well as popular Open Source projects such as Drupal.

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Talk about all that jazz. The effort, led by Cristina Pattuelli, associate professor at the Pratt Institute School of Information and Library Science, includes a visualization tool developed by a graduate student there, Matthew Miller, that provides different and compelling ways to explore connections among the jazz greats and the lesser-knowns, as well. You can view individuals based on the number of connections they have, for instance, or on their shared connections.

“It can be used dynamically to click on an artist and see the pattern of all the connections around him, play a clip from YouTube, have a little bio,” Pattuelli says. It’s innovative, she says, because it runs direct from a browser. continued…

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“We want to provide a common data platform to make links between data that was usually in separate corners. Even if it’s open it still can be hard to find and interlink because it’s not the same format, or the quality is not reliable,” says Dr. Michael Kaschesky, Head of Research Group / FP7 Fusepool Coordinator, Bern University of Applied Sciences. Fusepool will provide that data pool for specific use cases and areas, letting others bring relevant data into the pool and making it easier to integrate the data into other apps, and develop apps on top of the data.

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