Shahid Qadri has written an article for Med City News about how to use WebID to create single sign-on access for health care systems. He writes, “The Simple Sign-on challenge sponsored by the ONC through the Health 2.0 challenge was an exciting opportunity for us to learn about a sophisticated technology protocol and then being able to hack several open source system to implement a single sign on solution based on the protocol. This was a challenge that was truly a ‘challenge’ for me, but an exciting and rewarding one (our solution was the second place winner!).” Read more

Search is a fundamental, a system building block, and something that should be a critical part of enterprise architectures. That’s what Grant Ingersoll, co-founder and CTO at search, discovery and analytics vendor LucidWorks – which leverages the Apache Lucene/Solr open source search project – told an audience at last week’s GigaOM Structure Data event.

The company late last year launched LucidWorks Big Data for developing Big Data applications, which builds on top of its heritage developing the LucidWorks Search solution. “It’s a platform for organizations and developers to build out next-generation data applications,” Ingersoll said in a conversation with the Semantic Web Blog. Its focus is on tight integration of key Apache open source projects and layering with a REST API, to provide developers single-source access to the stack’s richness for creating applications that provide comprehensive search, discovery and analysis of an organization’s vast content and user interactions.

LucidWorks Big Data is made up of Apache Hadoop; the Apache Mahout machine-learning library; Hive, a data warehouse system for Hadoop that facilitates data summarization, ad-hoc queries, and the analysis of large datasets stored in Hadoop-compatible file systems; and Apache OpenNLP, a machine-learning based toolkit for the processing of natural language text that supports common NLP tasks.

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Alex Howard of O’Reilly Radar reports, “GitHub has been gaining new prominence as the use of open source software in government grows. Earlier this month, I included a few thoughts from Chicago’s chief information officer, Brett Goldstein, about the city’s use of GitHub, in a piece exploring GitHub’s role in government. While Goldstein says that Chicago’s open data portal will remain the primary means through which Chicago releases public sector data, publishing open data on GitHub is an experiment that will be interesting to watch, in terms of whether it affects reuse or collaboration around it. In a followup email, Goldstein, who also serves as Chicago’s chief data officer, shared more about why the city is on GitHub and what they’re learning. Our discussion follows.” Read more

Greg Bates of Programmable Web reports, “The Gray Lady is getting her code on. In Andre Behrens’s New York Times blog, Open, billed as ‘All the code that’s fit to print,’ he recounts events on coding and science held in 2012. Two of the notable events were the well-attended one on Big Data and Smarter Scaling and their Open Source Science Fair. Three speakers graced the Big Data event: Andrew Montalenti the CTO of Parse.ly… James Boehmer, Manager of Search Technology at the New York Times; and Allan Beaufour, CTO of Chartbeat.” Read more

The team at Nextgov reports, “The team that manages Data.gov is well on its way to making the government data repository open source using a new back-end called the Open Government Platform, officials said during a Web discussion Wednesday. The governments of India and Ghana have already launched beta versions of their data catalogues on the open source platform, said Jeanne Holm who heads the Data.gov team. Government developers from the U.S. and India built the OGPL jointly. They posted it to the code sharing site GitHub where other nations and developers can adopt it as is or amend it to meet their specific needs.” Read more

Tim Gasper of TechCrunch has created a list of five open source Big Data technologies that are making waves. He writes, “Did you know that there are over 250K viable open source technologies on the market today? Innovation is all around us… We have a lot of…choices, to say the least. What’s on our own radar, and what’s coming down the pipe for Fortune 2000 companies? What new projects are the most viable candidates for production-grade usage? Which deserve your undivided attention? We did all the research and testing so you don’t have to. Let’s look at five new technologies that are shaking things up in Big Data. Here is the newest class of tools that you can’t afford to overlook, coming soon to an enterprise near you.” Read more

What can semantic search do for your enterprise? One example comes from the recently launched Searchbox online semantic search engine by the company of the same name (which formerly was known as salsaDev).

One of the vendor’s biggest customers is the European Commission, according to Nicolas Gamard, CEO of the Switzerland-based company. That early adopter of Searchbox is using the technology for improving search related to its public grants funding, which amounts to tens of billions of dollars since 2007. Before deploying Searchbox, both researchers and its own commissioners struggled with conducting searches across 15 different repositories, as they looked for previously funded projects and partnership possibilities across the continent, for example. Tooling through a research grant PDF document of some 150 to 600 pages was another time-consuming issue, he says.

“It was like a full-time job just to look at all the different data sources. Things were not formatted in the same way – they used different terms and structures,” Gamard says.

Today, Searchbox powers a single web application for the European Commission, where all such content is interlinked together. “So, if a researcher is looking at a grant, we suggest all the related relevant research grants, partnership opportunities across Europe, all previously funded projects, and all the information he or she needs,” says Gamard. “That’s done automatically so that, within a single look, within 5 minutes you can have identified all the research opportunities right for you.”

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Pierre-Yves Vandenbussche recently wrote, “We are delighted to announce that Linked Open Vocabularies is now being hosted on Open Knowledge Foundation servers and is now officially an Open Knowledge Foundation project… The LOV project was born in the framework of the Datalift project which aims at providing a platform to lift data from semi-structured formats (csv, xls, etc.) to linked data. Part of this project under Mondeca‘s company responsibility was focused on vocabulary selection and re-use. The LOV project purpose goes now far beyond this original catalogue. The LOV dataset is maintained by Bernard Vatant and Pierre-Yves Vandenbussche.” Read more

Helen Walters reports that Beth Noveck recently gave a TED talk regarding open-source government. Walters writes, “As the US’s first Deputy CTO, Beth Noveck founded the White House Open Government Initiative, which developed administration policy on transparency, participation and collaboration. She starts her talk by reminding us that in the old days, the White House was literally an open house. At the beginning of the 19th century, John Quincy Adams met a local dentist who happened in to shake his hand. Adams promptly dismissed the Secretary of State, with whom he was meeting, and asked the dentist to remove an aching tooth. ‘When I got to the White House in 2009, the White house was anything but open,’ she says. Bomb blast curtains covered the windows; they were running Windows 2000. Social media was verboten. Noveck’s mandate: to change this system.” Read more

(Editor’s Note, June 29: The SparQLed project URL now is available here.)

SindiceTech today released SparQLed, the SindiceTech Assisted SPARQL Editor, as an open source project. SindiceTech, a spinoff company from the DERI Institute, commercializes large-scale, Big Data infrastructures for enterprises dealing with semantic data. It has roots in the semantic web index Sindice, which lets users collect, search, and query semantically marked-up web data (see our story here).

SparQLed also is one of the components of the commercial Sindice Suite for helping large enterprises build private linked data clouds. It is designed to give users all the help they need to write SPARQL queries to extract information from interconnected datasets.

“SPARQL is exciting but it’s difficult to develop and work with,” says Giovanni Tummarello, who led the efforts around the Sindice search and analysis engine and is founder and CEO of SindiceTech.

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