rNews - semanticweb.com

Good-Bye to 2012: A Look Back At The Year In Semantic Tech, Part 1

Jennifer Zaino — Wed, 26 Dec 2012 10:08:15 +0000

Courtesy: Flickr/zoetnet

As we close out 2012, we’ve asked some semantic tech experts to give us their take on the year that was. Was Big Data a boon for the semantic web, or is the opportunity to capitalize on the connection still pending? Is structured data on the web not just the future but the present? What sector is taking a strong lead in the semantic web space?

We begin with Part 1, with our experts listed in alphabetical order:

John Breslin, lecturer at NUI Galway, researcher and unit leader at DERI, creator of SIOC, and co-founder of Technology Voice and StreamGlider:
I think the schema.org initiative really gaining community support and a broader range of terms has been fantastic. It’s been great to see an easily understandable set of terms for describing the objects in web pages, but also leveraging the experience of work like GoodRelations rather than ignoring what has gone before. It’s also been encouraging to see the growth of Drupal 7 (which produces RDFa data) in the government sector: Estimates are that 24 percent of .gov CMS sites are now powered by Drupal.

Martin Böhringer, CEO & Co-Founder Hojoki:

For us it was very important to see Jena, our Semantic Web framework, becoming an Apache top-level project in April 2012. We see a lot of development pace in this project recently and see a chance to build an open source Semantic Web foundation which can handle cutting-edge requirements.

Still disappointing is the missing link between Semantic Web and the “cool” technologies and buzzwords. From what we see Semantic Web gives answers to some of the industry’s most challenging problems, but it still doesn’t seem to really find its place in relation to the cloud or big data (Hadoop).

Christine Connors, Chief Ontologist, Knowledgent:

One trend that I have seen is increased interest in the broader spectrum of semantic technologies in the enterprise. Graph stores, NoSQL, schema-less and more flexible systems, ontologies (& ontologists!) and integration with legacy systems. I believe the Big Data movement has had a positive impact on this field. We are hearing more and more about “Big Data Analytics” from our clients, partners and friends. The analytical power brought to bear by the semantic technology stack is sparking curiosity – what is it really? How can these models help me mitigate risk, more accurately predict outcomes, identify hidden intellectual assets, and streamline business processes? Real questions, tough questions: fun challenges!

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A Tale of Agile Development… of a Standard

Eric Franzon — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 13:00:51 +0000

Some in the Semantic Technology community have pointed out that from a development perspective, Semantic Technologies are well suited for an agile approach to programming, and we will be discussing that idea more in future here at SemanticWeb.com. Today, however, we’re taking a look at some novel thoughts on agile development of a standard, thanks to guest contributor, Andreas Gebhard. He is Director, Editorial at Getty Images, and Board member of the IPTC.

We caught up with Gebhard at the recent Semantic Technology & Business Conference in New York, where he initially shared this idea with us.

He has expanded on these ideas in a post on the Getty Images blog. As Gebhard says, “I want to tell you the story of how we got there in just about a year — tremendously fast, in the world of standards.”

We re-print the post in its entirety below with thanks to the author and Getty Images.

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Catching Up With rNews At NYC SemTech

Jennifer Zaino — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 16:42:07 +0000

What’s the latest news about rNews ? Attendees at the SemTech event in NYC Tuesday had a chance to find out.

“The future of rNews 1.0 is rNews .1.1,” said Stuart Myles, deputy director of schema standards at the Associated Press who also heads up the International Press Telecommunications’ Council’s Semantic Web work. At next week’s IPTC meeting a vote will be taken on V. 1.1, with its adoption the hopeful outcome.

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Schema.org, Wikidata, Google Knowledge Graph – Two Great Causes and a Symptom

Richard Wallis — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 13:00:32 +0000

I was toying with another title for this post – Yet Another Perfect Storm, but I think that particular metaphor (although appropriate here) has been somewhat over done. So what sparked this one then?

I am on the long flight back from the Semantic Tech & Business Conference in San Francisco to the good ol’ UK, to see how they got on with the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee festivities. I am reflecting on what my week at the conference has told me. It has told me that things are a changing – I got that impression last year too, but more so this year. Obviously, from the title of this post, it has something to do with Schema.org, Wikidata, and the Google Knowledge Graph….

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Dynamic Semantic Publishing for News Organizations

Kristen Milhollin — Thu, 31 May 2012 09:58:09 +0000

Paul Wilton was Technical and development lead for semantic publishing at BBC News and Sport Online during the 2010 World Cup. Currently he is the Technical architect at Ontoba. In this interview, a supplement to “Dynamic Semantic Publishing for Beginners”, Paul describes the current landscape for DSP as it applies to news organizations.

Q. Are you seeing a wide disparity in the way that news organizations have approached the creation and use of semantically-linked (or annotated) content?

A. Actually the pattern and often the (general) technical architecture is surprisingly similar. Where things differ are the applications, models used and instance data. This is undoubtedly bleeding edge technology, and typically the impetus to begin investigating the use of linked data, RDF and semantics in the technology stack has come from within the Information Architecture and R&D teams, not from the offices of the CTO/CIO. Maybe this is starting to change now.

Q. Do many news organizations have the resources (staff and/or Content Management Systems) that are able to publish and use semantic data?

A. Not in our experience, but this shouldn’t be a barrier to integrating semantic technologies and publishing linked data.

The key components to adopting semantic publishing – a semantic repository (triple store); appropriate linked data sets; and the ability to semantically annotate your content – can be built alongside an existing Content Management System. continued…

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Brands Take An Interest In Semantic-Enabled Content Syndication

Jennifer Zaino — Tue, 01 May 2012 09:29:18 +0000

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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Smart Ad Sophistication Lacking in News Industry, To Its Peril

Jennifer Zaino — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 10:42:17 +0000

The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism State of the News Media 2012 report was just published, and among the findings is that efforts by most top news sites to monetize the web in their own right are still limited. Few news companies, it reports, “have made much progress in some key new digital areas. Among the top news websites, there is little use of the digital advertising that is expected to grow most rapidly, so-called “smart,” or targeted, advertising.”

Failing to make a lot more hay from digital ads is problematic for traditional news companies given the decline in print circulation and in its ad revenue, too. The report says that in 2011, losses in print advertising dollars outpaced gains in digital revenue by a factor of roughly 10 to 1, which it calls an even worse ratio than in 2010.

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The Semantic Web Has Gone Mainstream! Wanna Bet?

Juan Sequeda — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 09:00:18 +0000

In 2005, I started learning about the so-called Semantic Web. It wasn’t till 2008, the same year I started my PhD, that I finally understood what the Semantic Web was really about. At the time, I made a $1000 bet with 3 college buddies that the Semantic Web would be mainstream by the time I finished my PhD. I know I’m going to win! In this post, I will argue why.

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Enterprise Information Efficiency Isn’t Up To Snuff

Jennifer Zaino — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 09:00:40 +0000

How efficient is the enterprise at using information? An independent report being released today from MindMetre Research, sponsored by semantic content intelligence vendor Smartlogic, offers up an Industry Information Index that benchmarked organizations in 20 industry sectors – and finds that information efficiency is fundamentally unsatisfactory.

The benchmarks considered as markers of information efficiency enterprise search effectiveness; information categorization effectiveness; and categorization and search progress and investment. They also explored the fragmentation of information systems at responding companies. Fewer than half the 2,000 firms surveyed worldwide rated their sector as capable across the four categories, indicating issues around tasks such as systematizing documents to make them findable across the enterprise, or enabling internal users and clients to receive precisely filtered information feeds.

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All the rNews That’s Fit to Print

Angela Guess — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 13:00:46 +0000

Evan Sandhaus reports for the New York Times that rNews has finally arrived. He explains, “On January 23rd, 2012, The Times made a subtle change to articles published on nytimes.com. We rolled out phase one of our implementation of rNews – a new standard for embedding machine-readable publishing metadata into HTML documents. Many of our users will never see the change but the change will likely impact how they experience the news. Far beneath the surface of nytimes.com lurk the databases — databases of articles, metadata and images, databases that took tremendous effort to develop, databases that the world only glimpses through the dark lens of HTML.” continued…

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Parse.ly Brings A Dash of Semantics To Online Publishers

Jennifer Zaino — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 10:25:49 +0000

Online publishers and other content providers have a new analytics tool to help them understand what their readers care about and use that information to better connect them to their sites’ relevant and compelling content. Launching today is Dash, based on the predictive content analytics platform Parse.ly. The technology crawls every article page for Parse.ly’s publisher-partners, and analyzes, in real time and at scale, the text to identify relevant topics to group related content together. Behind this lies natural language processing technology, which uses language queues hidden inside the text to determine its affiliated topics. To date Dash has extracted over 350,000 unique topics through all the URLs is has crawled during private beta for a healthy taxonomy of topics across the web being consumed by users.

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The Semantic Link – Episode 11, October 2011

Eric Franzon — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 06:12:53 +0000

On Friday, October 14, a group of Semantic thought leaders from around the globe met with their host and colleague, Paul Miller, for the latest installment of the Semantic Link, a monthly podcast covering the world of Semantic Technologies. This episode includes a discussion about schema.org. The Semantic Link panel was joined by special guest, Ramanathan V. Guha, Google Fellow, and one of the principal people behind schema.org.

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rNews 1.0 is an Official Standard!

Eric Franzon — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 12:51:58 +0000

[UPDATE - November 9, 2011: the IPTC rNews version 1.0 documentation is now available.]

Evan Sandhaus, New York Times (seated) and Andreas Gebhard, Getty Images, present rNews.

Today (Oct. 7, 2011), at a gathering of the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC), rNews took the step from being a proposal to being a formal standard. rNews was created by the IPTC and made its public debut earlier this year as a proposal for using RDFa to annotate news-specific metadata in HTML documents.

Congratulations to the IPTC and the leaders of the rNews standardization effort: Andreas Gebhard (Getty Images), Evan Sandhaus (New York Times), and Stuart Myles (Associated Press).

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Schema.org Workshop – A Path Forward

Eric Franzon — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 16:09:41 +0000

schema.org Leadership Panel; L-to-R: Michael O'Connor (Microsoft), John Giannandrea (Google), Charlie Jiang (Microsoft), Kavi Goel (Google), R.V. Guha (Google), Steve MacBeth (Microsoft), Gaurav Mishra (Yahoo), Peter Mika (Yahoo)

A room full of interested parties gathered in Microsoft’s Silicon Valley Campus yesterday to discuss Schema.org, its implications on existing vocabularies, syntaxes, and projects, and how best to move forward with what has admittedly been a bumpy road.

Schema.org, you may recall, is the vocabulary for structured data markup that was released by Google, Microsoft, and Bing on June 2 of this year. The schema.org website states, “A shared markup vocabulary makes easier for webmasters to decide on a markup schema and get the maximum benefit for their efforts. So, in the spirit of sitemaps.org, Bing, Google and Yahoo! have come together to provide a shared collection of schemas that webmasters can use.” (For more history about the roll-out and initial reactions to it, here’s a summary.)

Yesterday was the first time since the Semantic Technology & Business Conference in San Francisco that community members have gathered face-to-face to discuss Schema.org in an open forum. It was a full agenda with plenty of opportunity for debate and discussion.

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Mending Media’s Tangled Relationship With the Web

Jennifer Zaino — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 11:41:43 +0000

The media industry has had a complicated relationship with the Web, and that’s putting it kindly. While other sectors pretty quickly realized ways to take advantage of that new thing called the Internet – to sell goods, accelerate supply chains, and build deeper customer relationships – established content providers spent years trying to figure it out. And many still are tussling with big issues, such as whether or not to charge for access to content.

Given the Web’s impact on their business model and their revenues, you can forgive publishers if they might prefer if the darn Internet just stood still for a few minutes and let them catch their breaths and catch up. Since that isn’t about to happen, the thing to do is to make peace with those changes, many of them thanks to Semantic Web technologies – and figure out fast how they’re going to profit from them.

They’ll have an opportunity to do just that at the upcoming Semantic Web Media Summit in New York City, whose speakers will include Michael Dunn, VP and CTO at Hearst Interactive Media on the topic of why media companies should be interested in this critical part of the Web 3.0 world.

Dunn sees a number of reasons for using Semantic Web technologies as the means for structuring the wealth of content that publishers produce. There’s improving its discoverability by the world via search and social, of course, but it matters for internal operations, too. And add to that the relationship with online advertising so that content can be better monetized.

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