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Eric Franzon
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SemanticWeb.com

Amazon Web Services have added CloudSearch to their increasingly comprehensive portfolio of everything a developer would ever want.

Amazon CloudSearch is a fully-managed search service in the cloud that allows customers to easily integrate fast and highly scalable search functionality into their applications. With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, developers simply create a search domain, upload the data they want to make searchable to Amazon CloudSearch, and the service then automatically provisions the technology resources required and deploys a highly tuned search index.

In their press release they say CloudSearch is based on technology that has been rattling around on their network for a while – A9.
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Zite CEO Mark Johnson says he’s flattered by the rumors this week of a multi-million dollar CNN acquisition. He won’t comment on them, of course, but he is flattered.

What he will say is that there’s a reason such talk gets started around intelligent, personalized news apps. “Whether a company chooses to partner with a larger company to distribute their technology or go on their own, we are solving a basic consumer need,” Johnson says. The iPad-oriented Zite, which has its semantic groundings in the Worio (the catchier handle for Web of Research Iteration One) contextual discovery engine plug-in that works alongside a user’s search engine, benefits from the six years of work behind that system in personalizing search results, he says.

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I sat down with Dr. Alexandre Passant, of DERI NUI Galway, to discuss his recent research projects entitled “sparqlPuSh” and “SMOB.” SparqlPuSh combines Google’s PubSubHubbub, SPARQL, and SPARQL updates for proactive notifications in RDF stores. The interface was designed to be plugged on top of an RDF store. SMOB is a distributed microblogging system that reuses similar principles to enable privacy in microblogging, and won a Google research award. The full specification of sparqlPuSHcan be found on the Google code website.

Passant began by discussing the real-time web and applications that utilize citizen sensing. Practical applications are being developed that combine sensors and social data to solve real-world problems. Passant said “The web is now being looked at like a large information stream.We can use this stream to build real-time semantic applications.” He quoted a recent paper from WWW2010 entitled “Earthquake Shakes Twitter Users:Real-time Event Detection by Social Sensors.”  In this paper the authors discuss how they semantically analyze a tweet and how each user is regarded as a “sensor” in the application.

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The breaking news is that a new service from Regator has resulted from tweaking its semantic algorithms to find within its human-curated collection of web content emerging stories and to quickly alert bloggers and journalists about them via a desktop app.

Regator actually has been around as a curated blog directory and search engine for a couple of years, and in and of itself is a perfectly good and pretty fast source for the word on the digital street, along with the other usual suspects (Twitter, Facebook, Google blogs, CNN, etc.) – at least in so far as the big stories go. “But unless it’s a really big story and Twitter explodes eventually, you won’t find those second-tier news stories so easily,” says Scott Lockhart, Regator cofounder and CEO.

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