Get ready for some new apps for Elsevier’s Sciverse framework. Last year Elsevier, which has one of the largest vaults of scientific data in the world, launched its Sciverse Applications module. This provided a way for researchers and scientists to develop and share customized solutions that improve search and discovery of its wealth of integrated content and meta-data in the SciVerse hub of ScienceDirect, SciVerse Scopus, Sciverse SciTopics, and targeted web content.

Now it’s announced the winners of its Apps For Science competition, social and semantic ones that plug into the framework among them (see above). Elsevier recognizes that when it comes to meeting researchers’ search and discovery needs, it can’t do it all alone. “We’re not going to come up with all the solutions ourselves, so a key goal is to collaborate with developers and researchers to provide tools,” says Rafael Sidi, Vice President Product Management, Applications Marketplace and Developer Network, Elsevier

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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!

A recent article reports, “Many newspapers and other traditional media entities still think of themselves as delivering their content in a specific package… But few are thinking about their businesses in radically different ways — as content-generating engines with multiple delivery methods, or as platforms for data, around which other things can be built. USA Today appears to be moving in this direction, by opening up its data for others to use and even commercialize, following in the footsteps of The Guardian and its ground-breaking open platform.” Read more

The New York Times Company is looking for a Web Developer in New York, NY. The post states, “NYTimes.com is looking for an experienced and self-motivated Web Developer to drive implementiation of our SEO initiatives. This position will deal with all aspects affecting SEO including server configuration, site performance, and monitoring tools. Other responsibilities include ongoing site maintenance and technical documentation. Strong communication skills are a must as this position interacts heavily with many departments within NYTimes.com.” Read more

[UPDATE - November 9, 2011: the IPTC rNews version 1.0 documentation is now available.]

Today (Oct. 7, 2011), at a gathering of the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC), rNews took the step from being a proposal to being a formal standard. rNews was created by the IPTC and made its public debut earlier this year as a proposal for using RDFa to annotate news-specific metadata in HTML documents.

Congratulations to the IPTC and the leaders of the rNews standardization effort: Andreas Gebhard (Getty Images), Evan Sandhaus (New York Times), and Stuart Myles (Associated Press).

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We recently reported on the New York Times new testing and collaboration platform, beta620. A recent article reports that, “An interesting Semantic Web experiment went live this week [on beta620] called Longitude. As the name suggests, it presents a geographical interface for accessing content from The Times. It uses The Time’s large store of metadata, along with Linked Open Data from the Web.” Read more

The New York Times has launched a new platform called beta620 for testing and collaborating on experimental NYT projects. “For years,” the article notes, “the NYT’s systems and technology team has had a blog, Open, where they’ve shared data and coding projects with the public. But Open primarily targeted other developers, particularly those using the NYT’s data APIs to build their own tools. beta620 is aimed at nytimes.com’s broader readership. It’s a chance to test how new prototypes work, generate community input, figure out how they can best add value to the company, and build and iterate on the fly.” Read more

We recently have given coverage to the new rNews standard from the IPTC, but two things today caught our eye:

First, from Beet.tv, a brief video from Mike Dunn, VP and CTO of Hearst Interactive. The video serves as an introduction to the value of rNews in the media industry, and does that well.  That said, I think it could also be used as an elevator pitch for publishing decision-makers who are considering implementing rNews, RDFa, or more generally, Semantic Technologies.  Mike indicates that Hearst is currently evaluating rNews.

The video can be seen here:

NOTE: Mike Dunn will be speaking at SemTech 2011, where there will also be a presentation on the rNews standard. Read more

As a kid, I always wanted to be a reporter. Woodward and Bernstein were my heroes. I wanted to be the person you saw reporting live from some trouble spot in the world.

So when Eric Franzon asked me to report live from the Semantic Web MeetUp on RNEWS that was held in the New York Times building in Manhattan last week, I leaped at the chance. The New York Times is journalism at its best and their building resonates with the history of the 20th century. Outside the room where the SemWeb techies gathered, was a wall display of NYT front pages from the First World War to the present.

This makes you aware how incredibly important reporting the news is to our lives. The events in the Middle East have had me glued to my Twitter List, linking from there to reports from Al Jazeera and Nick Kristof’s wonderfully impassioned reporting for the New York Times. Read more

Last week, our own Jennifer Zaino reported on a new standard being adopted by the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC), called rNews (rNews 0.1, to be exact).

Last night, at the New York Times Building in Manhattan, the Lotico New York City Semantic Web Meetup group was introduced to rNews.  Presenting to the group were Andreas Gebhard (Getty Images), Stuart Myles (Associated Press), and Evan Sandhaus (New York Times).

By all reports, it sounds like rNews was very well received, and there were several takeaways from the evening.  At one point, Stuart Myles offered seven concrete ideas for ways in which rNews could be used. Read more

News publishing outlets stand to benefit from adopting Semantic Web technologies, and now there’s a lightweight way for them to begin moving in that direction, too.

The International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) recently introduced rNews 0.1, a set of specifications and best practices for using RDFa to embed news-specific metadata (headlines, bylines, publication dates and so on) into HTML documents. It hopes rNews will become a standard in the industry for conveying through to browsers and into HTML documents the deep structure and explicitly modeled content that exists in publishers’ back-end data layers. The wider its adoption across news channels, the greater the chance of innovative apps cropping up that can help publishers increase engagement with their audiences, according to rNews’ developers.

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