“There’s our SPARQL endpoint.” Or “Just view the page in Tabulator.” I have lost count of the number of times that either of these have been the only response to an innocent request to see what some new piece of semantic wizardry can do. For a developer seeking to integrate one semantics-rich data set with another, SPARQL may very well be the tool for the job. And for someone (probably a developer, again) who wants to track the way that data is pulled together to build a page, Tabulator has a lot going for it. But as a shop window for the power of semantics? As a demonstration of what’s possible? Seriously, is it possible to pick worse ways to show off to the world?

In January’s episode of the Semantic Link, we were joined by serial entrepreneur Nova Spivack (perhaps best known to readers as the Founder and CEO of Twine) for a discussion about the importance of delivering a good user experience. In the time available, we only scratched the surface, and I’m sure it’s a topic to which we’ll return. Read more

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!

What’s the path from an XML based e-government metadata application to a linked data version? At the upcoming Semantic Tech & Business Conference in Berlin, the road taken by the Dutch government will be described by Paul Hermans, lead architect of Belgian project Erfgoedplus.be, which uses RDF/XML, OWL and SKOS to describe relationships to heritage types, concepts, objects, people, place and time.

Some 1,000 individual organizations compose the Dutch government, each with their own websites. An effort to employ a search engine a few years ago to spider those different and separate web sites to have one single point of access didn’t work as anticipated. The next step to bring some order was to assign all the documents published on those sites a common kernel of metadata fields, which led to building an XML application to enable a structured approach. Linked Data entered the picture about a year and a half ago.

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The small city of Cluj in Romania, of some half-million inhabitants, is responsible for a 2.5 million triple store, as part of a Recognos-led project to develop a “Linked City” community portal. The project was submitted for this year’s ICT Call – SME initiative on Digital Content and Languages, FP7-ICT-2011-SME-DCL. While it didn’t receive funding from that competition, Recognos semantic web researcher Dia Miron, is hopeful of securing help from alternate sources in the coming year to expand the project, including potentially bringing the concept of linked cities to other communities in Romania or elsewhere in Europe.

The idea was to publish information from sources such as local businesses about their services and products, as well as data related to the local government and city events, points of interest and projects, using the Linked Data paradigm, says Miron. Data would also be geolocated. “So we take all the information we can get about a city so that people can exploit it in a uniform manner,” she says.

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We recently rounded up some thought leaders’ perspectives on the big semantic trends of 2011 – most (if not all) of them positive. Here’s some further perspective about where hopes and expectations fell a little short of reality:

• The biggest lost possibility was not rethinking the whole RDF stack. Instead of actually reducing complexity, it seems the direction is hiding complexity. This makes its proposition unattractive for web developers. – Andraž Tori, Founder and Director, Zemanta

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ReallaeR is still looking for a Semantic Search Algorithm Developer in Washington, DC. The company is looking for someone to fill the position “at our client site at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington, DC. The successful candidate will design and implement algorithms to extract enhanced semantic information from variety of entity sources of varying quality. This position will allow the employee to engage with leaders across multiple government agencies, industry, and academia and to bring research algorithms to practical applications.” Read more

Ivan Herman announced on the W3C blog: “The W3C Media Annotations Working Group has published a Proposed Recommendation of Ontology for Media Resources 1.0. This document defines the Ontology for Media Resources 1.0. The term ‘Ontology’ is used in its broadest possible definition: a core vocabulary. The intent of this vocabulary is to bridge the different descriptions of media resources, and provide a core set of descriptive properties.” Read more

The latest U.S. jobless rate report that came out late last week gave some reason for hope, with the numbers dipping to their lowest level in two years. The percentage came in at 8.6 percent, down from the 9 percent mark it’s been stalled at this year.

Semantics matter here as everywhere else, though, since analysis pointed to the rate dropping as a result of some 315,000 people stopped looking for work. Just 64 percent of Americans are participating in the workforce, down from 64.2 percent. On the other hand, companies have added more jobs and small businesses hiring intentions are up.

If you happen to be an information technology professional, job site Indeed.com adds to the good news, showing a 13 percent change on the positive side in year-over-year comparisons of the industry’s employment trends as of October. What of technology professionals with expertise in semantic web?

Well, there’s some creep-up in the postings in most cases (not all), though things are not near peak (so to speak) levels of a couple of years ago, according to the site’s analysis. See the graphs below for the percentage of some job postings that list semantic web standards and technologies:

 Here’s one interesting new term on the comparative upswing, though:

Also, among the top job trends related to technology, interesting to see HTML 5 at the top of the list, given that richer semantic markup of documents is part of the close-to-finalized spec. And we’ve been hearing more about MongoDB and experimentation with it as a semantic triple store:

 

 Of course, you can find out more about semantic-related job openings every day right here on our web site (just search on “jobs”).

Steve Hamby recently attested that semantic technology is one of the three main solutions that has shown success at taming Big Data, the other two being cloud computing and natural language processing. Hamby writes, “The May 2001 Scientific American article ‘The Semantic Web’ by Tim Berners-Lee, Jim Hendler, and Ora Lassila described the Semantic Web as agents that query ontologies representing human knowledge to find information requested by a human. OWL ontology is based on Description Logics, which are both expressive and decidable, and provide a foundation for developing precise models about various domains of knowledge.” Read more

What do you get when you join up machine-readable representations of federal government agencies’ strategic plans and spending on IT resources? Expressing these as Linked Data adds value in that it becomes easier to correlate and mash up information, and even to determine how or whether technology implementations are helping to achieve agencies’ big-picture goals.

At next week’s Semantic Tech & Business Conference in Washington D.C., George Thomas, Change Agent at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, will discuss connecting these dots in a session entitled, Realizing the GPRMA using Government Linked Data. The Government Performance and Results Modernization Act of 2010 requires that agencies publish strategic plans, which they’re often doing as Word or PDF documents, on their websites. Meanwhile, the IT Dashboard website is the space for federal agencies to provide details of federal information technology investments. “So the idea of using Linked Data to realize GPRMA suggests we can do better in connecting or linking the strategic goals with the IT resource expenditures,” says Thomas.

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If you missed this excellent live webcast with Evren Sirin, CTO, Clark & Parsia, the recorded webcast is now available.  You also can meet Evren in Washington DC, November 29-December 1, 2011 for SemTechBiz DC. The customer mentioned in this case study, JP Morgan Chase, will be co-presenting and discussing how they are implementing Access Control using Semantic Technologies.

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Access control is an essential part of nearly every IT system; Read more