MODENA, ITALY–(Marketwired – June 11, 2013) - Expert System, the semantic technology company, and GMDE, a systems integrator and solution provider for the publishing market, today announced their collaboration for the successful implementation of an innovative semantic solution for Wolters Kluwer Italy.

Wolters Kluwer Italy, part of the Wolters Kluwer group that makes publishing products, solutions and software, integrated Expert System’s Cogito®, the semantic platform to improve access to information on its online portal for legal and public sector professionals. Read more

Zemanta, a semantic service that extracts entities within the text of a publisher’s content and suggests related media, links and tags to add to a work as it’s being written, has launched a content discovery network to complement its suggested recommendations for which authors create original content.

The focus here is on providing editorial control. Publishers can feature content recommendations from their site, other web sites (Zemanta has 300,000 publishers in its network), and advertisers, taking advantage of the option to let Zemanta’s semantic algorithms automatically make those selections for them or to take the manual content selection route. Another option is to blacklist sites that they don’t consider appropriate content sources.

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The Software & Information Industry Association this year debuted a category for Best Semantic Technology Solution in its 2013 SIIA CODiE Awards. Two products were finalists in the category (see our story here), and yesterday the winner was announced. It was the Luxid Content Enrichment Platform from TEMIS Inc, which is used by publishers to automate the extraction of entities, relationships, concepts and topics from their digital assets, and augment content enrichment and linking.

It won out over finalist Elsevier with its ClinicalKey solution for helping doctors and clinicians search Elsevier’s medical and surgical content smarter and faster. ClinicalKey maps content to Elsevier’s proprietary medical taxonomy, and builds relationships using a semantic framework to faster and more clinically relevant answers. Elsevier, by the way, just ended the voting for its own ClinicalKey Key Innovator Awards, with the prize being a $10,000 grant to a U.S.-based hospital, medical school or institution that has demonstrated the most innovative use of information and technology to save lives and improve patient care.

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Advertising platform C.A.S.T. wants to attract premium publishers interested in the concept of native advertising, and also interested in leveraging its possibilities through contextual and categorical targeting, among other means.

The company, which has been offering its advertising technology to its strategic partners for the last couple of years, now is bringing the platform to the broader medium- and large-size publisher market. “We see native advertising as advertising that integrates seamlessly as a very natural part of site-user behavior,” says Omer Kaplan, CEO and co-founder.

Today, native advertising is about helping publishers to have not only new but better-quality and more engaging inventory to sell to their advertisers, he says. With a native approach, ad units can be customized in terms of the placement and look of sponsored content that is related to what users are reading and what they are looking for – that is, designed with the semantics of the content in mind for a more natural flow between content and ads.

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The Semantic Technology and Business Conference (#SemTechBiz) will take place October 15-17 in New York City. In addition to presentations regarding Big Data, open government, and business, the highly anticipated conference will feature a number of presentations discussing the use of Semantic Technologies in the financial and publishing industries.

Two presentations to look forward to include:

Smart Financial Data: How Semantic Technology Can Help Big Data Become Smart Data
David Saul, Chief Scientist, State Street Bank and Alok Prasad, President, Cambridge Semantics will explain how the use of industry standards set by organizations such as the Enterprise Data Management Council (EDM), the Object Management Group (OMG) and their Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO) to describe data semantically has the ability to create an intelligent information fabric that overlays key data assets and links across the organization and the financial industry. Not only are semantic technologies a benefit to financial institutions, but they are also critically important to the end user – the business. We see the next step for semantic technologies as the development of end-user-oriented semantic tools that bring data from the information fabric into the hands of the business people thereby irrevocably linking the business to IT.
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Even as semantic web concepts and tools are underpinning revolutionary changes in the way we discover and consume information, people with even a casual interest in the semantic web have difficulty understanding how and why this is happening.  One of the most exciting application areas for semantic technologies is online publishing, although for thousands of small-to-medium sized publishers, unfamiliar semantic concepts are too intimidating to grasp the relevance of these technologies. This three-part series is part of my own journey to better understand how semantic technologies are changing the landscape for publishers of news and information.  Read Part 2.

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So far we’ve looked at the “cutting edge” of dynamic semantic publishing (BBC Olympics) and we’ve seen what tools large publishers such as the New York Times, Associated Press, and Agence France Press are using to semantically annotate their content.

And we’ve learned how semantic systems help publishers “Do More With Less”- that is, automate a lot of the work organizing content and identifying key concepts, entities, and subjects- and “Do More With More” – combine their content with related linked open data and present it in different contexts.

You may still be asking at this point, “What makes this so novel and cool?  We know that semantic tools save time and resources.  And some people say semantic publishing is about search optimization, especially after the arrival of Google’s Knowledge Graph.  But the implications of semantic publishing are about oh so much more than search.    What semantic systems are really designed for, to use the phrase attributed to Don Turnbull, is “information discovery” and, if semantic standards and tools are widely adopted in the publishing world, this could have huge implications for content and data syndication.

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Dan Misener of The Globe and Mail recently discussed the need for Semantic Web tools that are more accessible for everyday users and noted that Silk (a company we have profiled here) is working toward that goal. He writes, “On its surface, Silk looks like a simple tool for building Web pages. But behind the scenes, something deeper is going on. ‘When you create a site in Silk, you’ll be able to express the meaning of your words,’ explains Sander Koppelaar, Silk’s head of operations. ‘In the background, Silk builds a data model of the information in your site. It still looks very much like text. It looks a bit like Google Docs. But in the background, you’re silently building a data model. And that means that Silk understands the information on a deeper level.’ The tool is specifically designed to be easy for non-technical users.” Read more

Semantic technology is scoring more goals in the sports world. The BBC, for example, which created the FIFA World Cup 2010 website that leveraged semantic technology, is at it again as London prepares for the 2012 Summer Olympics. Brazil has gotten into the action, too, with an Internet portal there taking soccer to the semantic web set. At the upcoming SemTech conference in San Francisco, attendees will have an opportunity to hear the latest details about both efforts.

Over at the BBC, for example, the 2012 Olympics site accompanies a completely redesigned BBC Sports site, both based on technology including Fluid Operations’ Information Workbench to support the editorial process for the BBC’s Dynamic Semantic Publishing strategy, from authoring and curation to publishing of ontology and instance data following an editorial workflow. The BBC environment since the World Cup also has been updated to use the MarkLogic document store for managing rapidly changing statistics, navigation and ultimately all content objects, as lead architect Jem Rayfield described it in this blog posting. Today, the triple store that’s been behind the BBC’s past work is extended to cover every team, athlete, venue, discipline, country and so on, Rayfield told The Semantic Web Blog.

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While much of the publishing industry still is getting up to speed on what semantic technology can do for business, it’s already deep within the DNA of The Tribune Company – to the point where Keith DeWeese, Director, Information and Semantics Management, can comfortably use the word “ontology” in discussions with non-tech employees, and enjoy the fact that they’re equally comfortable using it themselves.

DeWeese has been with the company since 2007, putting in place a sophisticated semantic system for auto-tagging and indexing content using natural language processing and controlled vocabularies, and leveraging its taxonomy for projects such as providing advanced search functionality. Thanks to building a collaborative communication channel with Tribune executives, producers, and editors, “now I actually am in meetings with executives who say how exciting it is that we now can be part of a community of people applying semantic technologies to content,” he says. “The other day I was at a meeting where a top executive used the word ontology all the time. I kept smiling and later I thanked her.”

Closely engaging with his business customers also is helping make it possible to push the semantic vision further at the company.

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These days, it’s not just the traditional publishing community that has reason for leveraging the content syndication model. As more and more companies across vertical sectors themselves become content providers, syndication makes sense for them, too.

NewsCred has a new – and semantic – take on content syndication, with content partners ranging from Reuters to The Guardian to The Economist. Recently-added customers that leverage the service’s fully licensed text, image and video content include traditional publishers such as the New York Daily News (and NewsCred is in talks with it about becoming a content provider, too). But other recent customers point to the importance of quality content to the consumer and corporate brand market:  For example, insurance provider Zurich recently signed on. NewsCred also just closed a deal with Johnson & Johnson to be a subscriber of its syndication services for content related to the health care products and pharmaceuticals space.

Brands, says NewsCred CEO Shafqat Islam, are responding to consumers getting smarter and more demanding. “They have so much access to information that brands are starting to realize they can’t just sell products or services anymore,” he says. “They need more authentic, engaging conversations with their customers and the best way to build these authentic relationships is with highly-engaging, trusted, high-quality content.”

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