Out with the old, in with the new. We’ve covered (here and here) the year past for the semantic web. So now let’s see what might be in store for the year ahead.

Also, don’t forget to listen to our podcast here for more insights into what 2012 may hold.

• Interest in sentiment analysis exploded with the growth of the social Web, although its reputation suffered due to the prevalence of low-grade Twitter-sentiment toys, simplistic, wildly inaccurate systems that misled many into criticism of the concept where it was the cheap implementations they’d tried that were faulty.  In 2012, sentiment analysis will come into its own: Automated (and crowd-sourced!) mining of attitudes, opinions, emotions, and intent from social and enterprise sources, at the “feature” level, linked to real-world profiles and transactional data. — Seth Grimes, founder, Alta Plana Corp

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Semantic Tech & Business Conference Returns to San Francisco

Semantic Tech & Business Conference returns to San Francisco in June! Join us from June 3-7 for complete coverage of Big Data, Linked Data, Extreme Information Management, and Semantic Web. From breakthrough approaches to solving business problems to the big data implications of fast–evolving technologies, SemTechBiz provides you with an unparalleled interactive experience and delivers tangible business value. We're offering a special early rate when you register by February 17. Sign up now!

Bioinformatics software provider IO Informatics recently released its free Knowledge Explorer Personal Edition. Version 3.6 of the Personal Edition can handle most of what Knowledge Explorer Professional 3.6, launched in October, can, but it does all its work in memory without direct connectivity to a back-end database.

“In particular, a lot of the strengths of Knowledge Explorer have to do with modeling data as RDF and then testing queries, visualizing and browsing the data to see that you have the ontologies and data mappings you need for your integration and application requirements.” says Robert Stanley, IO Informatics president and CEO. The Personal version is aimed at academic experts focused on data integration and semantic data modeling, as well as personal power users in life sciences and other data-intensive industries, or anyone who wants to learn the tool in anticipation of leveraging their enterprise data sets for collaboration and integration projects.

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How’s your Thanksgiving meal planning and prep going? Hopefully well, but some day, semantic web technologies might help it go even better.

A couple years back, K. Krasnow Waterman – visiting fellow at MIT who co-chaired its Linked Data Product Development Lab that has evolved into a course – organized a lecture on the topic of the business value of the semantic web. For her presentation, she focused on catering to a consumer application — that is, how the technology could add up to improving prepping a holiday dinner.

It was fun to do it then, Waterman says, and new developments like the integration of Siri into the iPhone could push the envelope even further, adding a voice-activated intelligent personal assistant to the mix.

She describes the vision of streamlining T-Day operations via the semantic web with the initial finding of recipes online. From there, apps could take the recipes a user has selected and extract as structured data various entities – i.e., the ingredients for a shopping list. After the app pulls the ingredient list, the cook-to-be could indicate what’s already in the house (e.g., flour, salt, pepper), so it’s only searching for what’s needed. 

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MIT has created a computer chip that they claim thinks like a single synapse of the human brain. The article explains, “It may be a bit on the Uncanny Valley side of things to have a computer chip that can mimic the human brain’s activity, but it’s still undeniably cool. Over at MIT, researchers have unveiled a chip that mimics how the brain’s neurons adapt to new information (a process known as plasticity) which could help in understanding assorted brain functions, including learning and memory. The silicon chip contains about 400 transistors and can simulate the activity of a single brain synapse — the space between two neurons that allows information to flow from one to the other.” Read more

[Editor's Note: This week, Juan Sequeda is reporting in from the International Semantic Web Conference in Bonn, Germany. See his other reports here:
Day 1 |  Day 2 |  Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5 ]

Day 3 was the first full conference day. The past two days were dedicated only to tutorials and workshops on more specific topics. This year, ISWC turns 10 years old and they showed a tag cloud of the abstracts submitted in 2001 versus the tag cloud of the abstracts submitted this year. Not surprising, the word “data” appears much larger, the word “ontology” has maintained its size, the word “web” has almost disappeared while the word “query” appears now and barely appeared 10 years ago.

(tag cloud image after the jump)

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Computer Economics has just released its 2011/2012 IT Spending and Staffing Benchmarks survey. And guess what? Some of its findings make a case for business’ IT leaders to put semantic technologies high up the priorities list.

Not that the report spells that out, exactly. But here are some things it does say that help us form that conclusion. Take, for instance, the finding that IT spending has not yet strongly recovered. The study reports that both IT operational and capital spending is rising, but not at a strong increase. On top of that, it says that many IT executives lack confidence in their spending plans, even though confidence, at least, is higher today than during the previous two years.

Why not look beyond that mix of “eh” and “ok” news to this option: Leverage semantic web technologies to stretch IT budgets further in key areas.

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Data scientists are looking to Big Data to see if they can, essentially, predict the future. A recent article on the subject states, “More than 60 years ago, in his ‘Foundation’ series, the science fiction novelist Isaac Asimov invented a new science — psychohistory — that combined mathematics and psychology to predict the future. Now social scientists are trying to mine the vast resources of the Internet — Web searches and Twitter messages, Facebook and blog posts, the digital location trails generated by billions of cellphones — to do the same thing.” Read more

This is Part I of a two-part series. Part II will be published later this month.

Individuals, communities and organizations increasingly require the ability to combine fragmented data sources into easily searched and navigated wholes.  From combining family playlists to merging scientific databases and spreadsheets, the need for integrating data and metadata from multiple sources into a single, Web-based publishing framework is increasing.  Allowing users to publish, explore and visualize data in useful ways is a powerful mechanism for identifying, organizing and sharing patterns inherent in this data.  Web data publishing demands easier data integration and customizable ways to interact with the data such as faceted browsing, spatial or temporal-based visualizations, tag clouds, and full-text search.

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The U.S. government on Tuesday unsealed an indictment of Aaron Swartz, who helped to develop standards and tutorials for Linked Open Data, on charges including computer intrusion, fraud, and data theft in computer hacking incidents that targeted the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and JSTOR, a not-for-profit archive of scientific journals and academic work.

If convicted, the 24-year old Swartz, a Harvard researcher who worked on the Linked Data standards while serving on the W3C’s RDF Core Working Group, could serve up to 35 years in prison and face a fine of as much as $1 million. Swartz, among other things, also co-founded Reddit and was Metadata Advisor to the nonprofit Creative Commons and coauthor of the RSS 1.0 spec.

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Here’s what Bluefin Labs is trying to capture for mass media content providers, be they media companies or brands: The word-of-mouth about TV shows and commercials that has migrated to the social media space. It wants to make visible the feedback loop that is very evident in live human communications – be they one-on-one at the water cooler or speaker-to-audience on the lecture circuit – but which has been essentially invisible in the world of mass media for decades.

“The value proposition of broadcast and mass media is that you can magnify your audience and reach,” says Bluefin founder and CEO Deb Roy. “The primary cost is you lose the feedback channel.” Instead of talking with each other or with a speaker, listeners are talked at. And the speakers lose the immediate connection with the listeners that helps them understand if they are communicating effectively.

Providers such as The Nielsen Company have long offered services that track how many people were seated to watch a particular show and something about their age or gender, for instance, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. “Most people still see mass media as a one-way shotgun into the dark, and they hope to hit as many people as they can and that approach is and not where the future lies,” says Roy.

Where it does lie, he believes, is with using semantic technology to do something with public social media as a new and real-time data stream to build a richer feedback loop for mass media content creators.

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