Michael Dunn, CTO of Hearst Media has been quoted saying, “Video, in its native form, is a blob of content… and it’s hard to extract data from it.” Thankfully, semantic technologies are starting to take video “beyond the blob,” and that is precisely what panelists at the upcoming Semantic Technology and Business Conference in San Francisco will discuss.

The panel discussion Beyond the Blob: Semantic Video’s Coming of Age is set to begin at 2:25 on Monday, June 3 at SemTechBiz and will feature a panel of semantic web professionals with a broad range of experience regarding semantic video. The panel will be moderated by Kristen Milhollin, Project Lead & Founder of GoodSpeaks.org, an organization aimed at creating a nonprofit media and data distribution network that increases public awareness and support of the work done by nonprofit and other charitable organizations.  continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Factiva was used to map media mentions of women executives in search of the top 20 over the past ten years. The featured individuals are ranked in the infographic according to the number of mentions received in publications ranging from The Wall Street Journal to Barron’s to China’s People’s Daily.

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One of the recipients is the Bibliothèque nationale de France (National Library of France), for both its Gallica and Data Digital Libraries. The discovery service, Data (data.bnf.fr), has integrated numerous BnF catalogues and finding-aids using a Semantic Web approach, so that the BnF’s collection holdings, including those of Gallica (which promotes French cultural heritage in digital form), “are visible through a single, high-tech lens,” according to the announcement of the awards.

“Together, both efforts drive a wider audience to the digital library from search engines,” the SPIRL announcement reports.

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A new article reports, “Concept Searching, a global leader in semantic metadata generation, auto-classification, and taxonomy management software, and developer of the Smart Content Framework™, recently completed a survey of its clients as well as the broader marketplace. The survey focused on the use of intelligent metadata enabled solutions within enterprises from diverse industries and sizes. Concept Searching’s Smart Content Framework™, which is supported by automatic semantic metadata tagging, auto-classification, and taxonomy management technologies, can be readily extended to improve not only search, but also records management, data privacy, migration, and text analytics. The results of the survey indicated the number one priority is improving enterprise search.” continued…

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“We see some really compelling and exciting applications of this type of technology in the life sciences space,” says Bouton. But TripleMap can be applied to any scenario where Big Data dots must be connected so that users can collaborate around the understanding of the associations between entities – health care, legal, retail and finance all come to mind.

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“There are a ton of companies making a lot of money now providing raw storage as things like e-commerce, mobile, and cloud technologies generate big volumes of consumer and behavioral data,” says Henry Olson, director of product management at Embarcadero Technologies.  “But many organizations can’t make effective use out of it. There’s an obscurity problem that people can’t find stuff or know what to make of what they do find.”

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Karen Coyle recently analyzed a new release of OCLC metadata records. She writes, “OCLC recently released a file of 1.2 million metadata records for the most widely held items in its catalog. These are all items with 250 library holdings or more. I created a list on WorldCat of the top 50, mostly out of curiosity. I was quite surprised at the results, however. Here’s how it breaks down: 16 periodicals, with Time and Newsweek being numbers 1 and 2, respectively; 29 kid and YA books, four of which (and very high even in this small list) from the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series; 5 adult books.”

Coyle goes on, “The five adult books are: (1) McCullough, D. G. (1992). Truman. New York: Simon & Schuster. (2) Brown, D. (2003). The Da Vinci code: A novel. New York: Doubleday. (3) Johnson, S. (1998). Who moved my cheese?: An a-mazing way to deal with change in your work and in your life. New York: Putnam.  (4) Haley, A. (1976). Roots. Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday.  (5) Peters, T. J., & Waterman, R. H. (1982). In search of excellence: Lessons from America’s best-run companies. New York: Harper & Row. This small set gives me many ideas of things to investigate in the full set.”

Read more here.

Image: Courtesy OCLC

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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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That’s the position that Keith DeWeese finds himself in. DeWeese recently moved from The Tribune Company, where he led efforts in applying semantic technology to the publisher’s content (see story here), to Ascend Learning, a company that provides technology-based education products with a focus on the healthcare sector.

There, as principal content architect he is again championing the power of semantic technology for online content. “What’s cool is that Ascend is in a state of redefining what it does, how it works, its whole platform,” DeWeese says. Ascend wants to be able to take people from the beginning stages of their career, when they’re learning the basics, and work with them throughout their life, so that as they progress in their careers and become more knowledgeable about their profession or specialization and work toward different exams, it’s got the tools to engage with them at that part of their lifecycle.

“It’s really great because there’s an openness and willingness to try different approaches to making content available to end users.”

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Common Crawl

“The blekko data donation is a huge benefit to Common Crawl,” Common Crawl director Lisa Green told The Semantic Web Blog. “Knowing what the blekko team is crawling and how they rate those pages allows us to improve our crawler and enrich our corpus for high-value webpages.”

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Jeff Bertolucci of Information Week recently discussed how the evolution of Big Data may be just what the Semantic Web needs to reach its full potential. He writes, “In a phone interview with InformationWeek, Cambridge Semantics CTO Sean Martin summed up the Semantic Web in a nutshell: ‘In essence, all you’re doing is tagging data and giving it a description of what it is… If you can put more information in — more metadata with the data — then the software can interrogate the data to find out what the data is, and what it’s capable of,’ added Martin, who believes the rise of big data could help spur the adoption of Semantic Web technologies.” 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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James Grundvig of the Huffington Post

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Yet, challenges remain to leveraging all the possibilities of Hadoop, an Apache Software Foundation open source project, especially as it relates to empowering the data scientist. Hadoop is composed of two sub-projects: HDFS, a distributed file system built on a cluster of commodity hardware so that data stored in any node can be shared across all the servers, and the MapReduce framework for processing the data stored in those files.

Semantic technology can help solve many of the  challenges, Michael A. Lang Jr., VP, Director of Ontology Engineering Services at Revelytix, Inc., told an audience gathered at the Semantic Technology & Business Conference in New York City yesterday.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.