SmartLogic recently released a new version of its Semaphore software, which took home the 2011 European Frost & Sullivan Technology Innovation Award. Version 3.3 adds new semantically-rich features, but the company itself has been shifting its strategy to talk about its solution less as the enterprise semantic platform and more as a content intelligence platform for identifying, classifying, extracting, analyzing and utilizing hard-to-find information from among unstructured assets in existing information management systems like Microsoft SharePoint.

Why? According to marketing VP Maya Natarajan, it’s an in to better customer access. “Whenever you think of the word semantic, there’s such a small percentage of the population that understands what it is,” she says. “But amazingly the uptake for content intelligence is so great. People immediately understand that so much quicker and it’s exactly the same thing.”

Another way to make the virtues of content intelligence even more obvious: SmartLogic is planning to introduce prebuilt starter taxonomies to kickstart the process in some vertical sectors. Meanwhile, Version 3.3 has brought to its customers features that still proclaim its semantic heritage, including a semantic visualization tool.

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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!

How do you define a forest? How about deforestation? It sounds like it would be fairly easy to get agreement on those terms. But beyond the basics – that a definition for the first would reflect that a forest is a place with lots of trees and the second would reflect that it’s a place where there used to be lots of trees – it’s not so simple.

And that has consequences for everything from academic and scientific research to government programs. As explained by Krzysztof Janowicz,  perfectly valid definitions for these and other geographic terms exist by the hundreds, in legal texts and government documents and elsewhere, and most of them don’t agree with each other. So, how can one draw good conclusions or make important decisions when the data informing those is all over the map, so to speak.

“You cannot ask to show me a map of the forests in North America because the definition of forest differs between not just the U.S. and Canada but also between U.S. member states,” says Janowicz, Assistant Professor for geographic information science at UC Santa Barbara who’s one of the organizers of this week’s GeoVoCamp focusing on geo-ontology design patterns and bottom-up, data-driven semantics.

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What makes a business ripe to adopt semantic web technologies? Those engaged in cross-enterprise business processes, in particular where models based on web technologies drive greater collaboration and increased dynamism, are on the list, says Professor Adrian Paschke,  Corporate Semantic Web chair at the institute of computer science at the Freie Universität Berlin and head of the InnoProfile project Corporate Semantic Web.

“That is motivation to apply semantic web technologies because you no longer are working in closed walls where you build your own schema and database model, but you need a flexible semantic model that easily integrates with others,” says Paschke.

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Want web sites to run as smooth as silk? So do the developers behind Silk, who’ve been working the last couple of years to make it easy to apply semantics to create more powerful web sites, with information that can be used more effectively.

Silk, which The Semantic Web Blog previously has covered here and here, now is in the process of testing its WYSIWYG Silk Editor with a select user set, and is slowly inviting more interested parties to get involved. It expects to release it publicly soon. The simplicity of the Silk Editor, says Sander Koppelaar, head of business development, is that it looks very much like familiar environments – think a graphical Wiki – while supporting tagging information on a page, such as the population or capital of Amsterdam, if that were the subject.

“That way you first create pages that are very handy for users because they are built for humans, containing text and images you’d see on a normal web site,” he says. “But more or less without noticing it you build on your data model and can start to use that to create the great overviews and answer actual questions about the data.”

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Occupy Wall Street, as a real-world presence, has been pushed off the front pages since the Zuccotti Park protestors were rousted out of their 24/7 encampment, with bands in many other cities also being given the heave-ho. But its spirit may virtually reconvene with the Tribeforth Foundation’s Project 99.

To be clear, what Brett McDowell and D’Arcy Cunningham of the Foundation are working on is more about building social democracy 2.0 than being affiliated with a specific movement and enforcing its viewpoint, though the two did meet face-to-face for the first time at the Vancouver, Canada version of Occupy Wall Street. And their plan is to realize that dream using semantic and open source technology.

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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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More vendors are making waves among the ranks of those that figure semantic technology has a role to play in the travel sector, from helping hospitality providers assess the quality of user experiences to serving as a B2B backbone for companies that want to help users book travel plans, whether they’re aiming to spend Thanksgiving with the family in Nebraska or Christmas shopping in Paris, and more.

* At the PhoCusWrite 2011 Travel Innovation Summit last week, ReviewPro won the QuickMobile Award for Travel Innovation: Emerging Category.

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Antidot, which makes the semantically-powered Information Factory and Antidot Finder Suite software, this month released its db2triples as open source component software, available here, which implements the W3C RDB2RDF Working Group’s proposed R2RML language and Direct Mapping, covered here.

Antidot, in fact, shared with the W3C its experience leveraging Direct Mapping and R2RML to, in just half a day, fetch information from hundreds of tables in a client’s Magento ecommerce database to transform it to a graph model. That’s normally a complex task, says Antidot founder and CEO Fabrice Lacroix, which would involve data transformation and database content indexing of an unknown database model. “No one [here at Antidot] knows the complex, dynamic data model from Magento, and it’s very difficult to reverse-engineer these sort of models,” he says.

“So with Direct Mapping and R2RML it is very easy to go directly from the database to the graph you need…and then extract just the business objects we need. We did it in just half a day. Imagine that. For such complex stuff that’s a very short timeframe.” Lacroix says that the company thought it only fair, after that success, to send something back to the community.

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[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 4 of ISWC 2011 was the second full day of the conference and started out with a keynote from Frank van Harmelen, titled “10 Years of Semantic Web: does it work in theory?“  There were several sessions on RDF Querying of Multiple Sources, RDF Data Analysis, Formal Ontology & Patterns, Knowledge Representation Semantics, Web of Data, MANCHustifications and Provenance, the In Use track on Environmental data, the Semantic Web Challenge and a very exciting Deathmatch panel.

The main question addressed in the keynote was if a decade of Semantic Web work has helped to discover any Computer Science laws? Frank stated that what has been built in the past 10 years can be characterized in 3 parts:
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How can you not be intrigued by a project whose tag line is, “an elevator for your data.” DataLift, funded by France’s Agence Nationale de la Recherchenatl, is that project, and it’s developing a platform for publishing structured data as Linked Data. That platform is the elevator going up, and it’s due to have its first formal release by year’s end, says Francois Scharffe, scientific director at DataLift and also Associate professor at the Université de Montpellier 2 and researcher at LIRMM.

To bring your data – perhaps it’s information in a relational database or CSV files, for instance – up to the top floor, so to speak, requires making four stops, he explains. The first one is to select the ontologies for publishing the data.  “We aim to provide every solution to either give you the right ontology or set of ontologies and terms, or to tell you that you need to extend an ontology for that particular data,” he says.

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