Turns out that supply chains need the Semantic Web, too. The iCargo project, co-funded by the 7^th Framework Programme of the European Commission, was formally launched last year to help make global logistics across multiple modes of transport more sustainable, both in terms of lowered costs and greater energy efficiency.

The project is composed of multiple components, including technical tasks where semantic interoperability plays a key role in the goal of developing an open information architecture that lets real-world objects, existing systems and new apps to better cooperate with each other. Things have progressed to the point where the semantic capabilities it’s developed are to be included in prototypes debuting in May.

“Enabling interoperable supply chains could provide us better intermodal door-to-door services, and semantic technologies will provide the interoperability between services,” says Germán Herrero Cárcel, head of sector, Full Electric Vehicle & Supply Chain Sector, MRS Market, Research & Innovation at international IT services company Atos, which is coordinating the iCargo consortium of 29 organizations with experience in the field of logistics, supply chain management and ICT.

Read more

Ellyssa Kroski of American Libraries Magazine recently shared a list of ten technology initiatives that can improve libraries. She writes, “Today’s hottest web and mobile technologies are offering libraries a new world of opportunities to engage patrons. Ultra-popular social media websites and apps combined with the availability of affordable cloud-based services and the evolution and adoption of mobile devices are enabling librarians to share and build communities, store and analyze large collections of data, create digital collections, and access information and services in ways never thought about before.” Read more

Courtesy: Flickr/takacsi75

Valentine’s Day is all about celebrating the coming together of two parties who are made for each other. That’s as true when it comes to semantic technology as it is for two people – sort of.

Yes, semantic tech aligns with the concept of matchmaking in its own ways. They aren’t always as romantic as a quiet dinner with a bottle of wine and a bouquet of roses, but hey, love comes in many forms. Here’s a quick look at semantic tech and its role in matchmaking, of various kinds:

• In the journal Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience you’ll find the work Semantic Web Service Matchmakers: State of the Art and Challenges. The semantic matchmakers it’s talking about get involved in helping developers partner up with the right web services: The mission of Web service discovery, its abstract explains, is to seek an appropriate Web service for a service requester on the basis of the service descriptions in Web service advertisements and the service requester’s requirements. But a problem in that discovery process is ambiguity, because the standard language used for encoding service descriptions does not have the capacity to specify the capabilities of a Web service.  According to the abstract of the article, “This brings up the vision of Semantic Web Services and Semantic Web Service discovery, which make use of the Semantic Web technologies to enrich the semantics of service descriptions for service discovery. Semantic Web Service matchmakers are the programs or frameworks designed to implement the task of Semantic Web Service discovery.” The paper surveys and analyzes typical, contemporary Semantic Web Service matchmakers across six technical dimensions.  Read more

Dennis Wisnosky is on-board to lead the standards implementation process for FIBO, the Financial Industry Business Ontology that is a joint effort of The Enterprise Data Management Council in conjunction with the Object Management Group.

The data management standards can be used by financial institutions and industry regulators to support conformance to federal regulatory reporting requirements and for internal business processes and risk analysis. Wisnosky, who previously was Chief Technical Officer and Chief Architect, Business Mission Area, U.S. Department of Defense, has spearheaded the U.S. DoD’s use of semantic technology across systems to meet the goal of having an “executable, integrated, consumable, solution architecture.” (See story here).

Read more

Image courtesy: Flickr/ Ian W Scott

Teaching may seem the most obvious career choice for philosophy students. But it’s not the only one. Epistematica, which provides tools and services for Linked Data and semantic web applications, sees opportunities for philosophers at any organization that will be publishing Linked Data.

“Any organization that will want to be in the semantic web will need a philosopher,” says Dr. Marco Romano, Epistematica’s chief knowledge officer – a graduate in Philosophy at RomaTre University, who also has a Phd in Logic from Paris 13 University.

Why? “In order to produce a good ontology or even also a good vocabulary that can be really useful in the semantic web, that is to connect to Linked Data on the web of data, you need a philosopher, someone who can look at things on the web, to understand what they actually are and how to describe them in the most suitable way. That is, such that it is well-useable and understandable to machines, to services that will use that data, but also to the people [who will want] to find it.”

Read more

The Internet of Things is coming, but it needs a semantic backbone to flourish. With some 25 billion devices expected to be connected to the Internet by 2015 and 50 billion by 2020, providing interoperability among the things on the IoT “is one of the most fundamental requirements to support object addressing, tracking, and discovery as well as information representation, storage, and exchange.” So write the authors of Semantics for the Internet of Things: Early Progress and Back to the Future, Payam Barnaghi and Wei Wang, Centre for Communication Systems Research, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK and Cory Henson, Kno.e.sis – Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge-enabled Computing.

Applying semantic technologies to IoT, however, has several research challenges, the authors note, pointing out that IoT and using semantics in IoT is still in its early days. Being in on the ground floor of this movement is undeniably exciting to the research community, including people such as Konstantinos Kotis, Senior Research Scientist at University of the Aegean, and IT Manager in the regional division of the Samos and Ikaria islands at North Aegean Regional Administration Authority.

Read more

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.

Read more

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.

Read more

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!

Read more

Edamam, which has built a food ontology for its food knowledge site (which The Semantic Web Blog initially covered here), is adding an iPad version of its app to its existing iPhone and Android versions. The company also did a full relaunch of its web site to optimize the experience for desktop users, as well, with improved browsing and search.

Originally, the web site app mirrored the mobile versions. But, says co-founder and CEO Victor Penev, “We realized that people wanted to be able to access recipes and search on the desktop, and they should have a holistic experience from anywhere.” While the company had been more focused on the mobile arena, Penev says building traffic for the website is going to be a priority too. Among the capabilities users should see in the near future are functions like one that will let people save recipes on their iPhone or Android mobile devices and then access them on their iPads or desktops, or vice verse.

Read more