Ed Hayward of Boston College reports, “Say au revoir to the concierge. The proliferation of technology focused on finding the best tickets, the hottest restaurants or the next flight out of town may mean it’s time to bid adieu to the concierge and other traditional service information gatekeepers, according to new research. Face-to-face interactions with front desk clerks and concierges are not essential for personalized service, and increasingly these encounters are being substituted with Smartphone apps and other automated service systems, according to a study in the current edition of the Journal of Service Research. Business travelers who frequent the same hotels time and again may develop personal relationships with certain concierges over time, but a ‘smart digital assistant’ app can provide consistent personalized recommendations for every customer, every time, no matter where they are, the researchers report.” Read more

SEMIC, the Semantic Interoperability Community recently published 10 Rules for Persistent URIs. The article states, “The attached report documents a survey performed by ISA Action 1.1 on Semantic Interoperability in order to explore good practices on the publication of Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI), both in terms of format and of their design rules and management. Read more

Paul Groth of the W3C has shared a new report out of the Provenance Working Group: “After an intense and fun week at the International Semantic Web Conference, I wanted to bring you up to date with the fourth face-to-face meeting of the Provenance Working Group. The meeting was held the two days before the start of ISWC and hosted by the W3C in their offices. We had 12 in-person participants and several who attended remotely on the phone.” Read more

Nathan Eddy of eWeek reports that, according to Gartner analysts, open data is “far more consequential for increasing revenue and business value” than Big Data. He writes, “Open data, according to the research firm, refers to the idea that certain data should be freely available to everyone to use and republish as they wish, without restrictions from copyright, patents or other forms of control.” Read more

Oracle has released a new report entitled From Overload to Impact: An Industry Scorecard on Big Data Business Challenges. The report shows that the data deluge is here, and companies are currently failing to fully capitalize on it as a result of too few and too weak tools — a hole that Semantic Web technologies are starting to fill.

Oracle states, “Executives say they are not prepared to handle the increasing amount of data they face. Twenty-nine percent of executives give their organization a ‘D’ or ‘F’ in preparedness to manage the data deluge, and 93 percent believe their organization is losing revenue opportunities – representing on average, 14 percent of revenue – by not being able to fully leverage the information they collect. Read more

Dan Bowman reports, “Although information technology certainly has the ability to change patient behaviors, a lot of untapped potential remains, according to researchers published last week in the Journal of Medical Internet Research. Such capabilities and risks, they concluded, ‘are not being fully explored.’ What’s more, they said, interactions between different technology components have not been analyzed sufficiently. The researchers combed through 41 relevant studies, examining the extent to which various technologies–such as wearable sensors and mobile phone apps–helped patients to stay fit and track calories.” Read more

A recent report asked the question, is the future of sharing the Semantic Web? The abstract states, “Current information sharing is based mostly on using so-called Web 1.0 search tools and Web 2.0 tools such as social media to collect and display data and information on the Web and make it easier for people to access. The next generation of Web technologies — collectively called the Semantic Web — will move sharing into the era of Web 3.0.”

It goes on, “Semantic Web technologies are already used in government sites such as Data.gov and Recovery.gov, which are part of the Obama administration’s push for open government. Read more

First Retail has been named a “Cool Vendor in Analytics and Business Intelligence by Gartner: “The report, issued on April 27, 2012, highlights five vendors selected by Gartner for their solutions in the analytics and business intelligence market.” The report states, “Selecting Cool Vendors in the analytics market this year was difficult. New providers of analytic solutions abound, especially in the popular areas of mobile, social, cloud and big data. We, as an industry, are building silos of analysis that will eventually have to be integrated, but the benefit of specialized analysis for problems that have not been addressed before outweighs most organizations’ needs for a holistic view, at least for now.” Read more

Tim Davies recently pointed out two new open data publications. The first was a special issue of the Journal of Community Informatics on open government. The second is a report:  ICT for or against development? An introduction to the ongoing case of Web 3 (PDF). The paper was written by Mike Powell, Tim Davies, and Keisha Candice Taylor. The full paper is available for download here. Read more

Mike Bergman, who has compiled an excellent list of Semantic tools over the years, has been busy again. This time he’s announcing AI3’s first annual State of Tooling for Semantic Technologies. Bergman begins, “We have been maintaining Sweet Tools, AI3‘s listing of semantic Web and -related tools, for a bit over five years now. Though we had switched to a structWSF-based framework that allows us to update it on a more regular, incremental schedule [1], like all databases, the listing needs to be reviewed and cleaned up on a periodic basis. We have just completed the most recent cleaning and update. We are also now committing to do so on an annual basis. Thus, this is the inaugural ‘State of Tooling for Semantic Technologies‘ report, and, boy, is it a humdinger.” Read more