Centurion, South Africa (PRWEB) April 26, 2013 — Gatfol serves base technology to provide digital devices with the ability to process human natural language efficiently.

The goal of truly semantic search has not yet fully been realized. The main problem is the enormity of ambiguous word permutations of semantic equivalence in even the simplest of phrases, which up to now has processing-wise required huge structured lexicons and ontologies as guides. Read more

Courtesy: Flickr/ Sean MacEntee

Earlier this month word came of a revision to schema.org: Version 1.0a additions, according to this posting from Dan Brickley, include the Datasets vocabulary, and some supporting utility terms for describing schema.org types, properties and their inter-relationships. One of the gems in the update are additions related to the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI), an effort led by the Association of Educational Publishers and Creative Commons, which has as its goals making it easier to publish, discover and delivery quality educational resources on the web. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation helped fund the work.

With schema.org serving as a catalyst for its work, the LRMI developed a common metadata framework for tagging online learning resources, with the idea of having that metadata schema incorporated into Schema.org. With that now the case, it’s possible for publishers or curators of educational content to use LRMI markup and have that metadata recognized by the major search engines.

“One of the reasons why education was one of the first extensions of schema.org is that the education industry is going through some very interesting times,” says Madi Weland Solomon, head of Data Architecture Standards at education company Pearson plc, one of the LRMI project launch partners.

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Claire Cain Miller of The New York Times recently wrote, “Say you need a latté. You might pull out your phone, open the Yelp app and search for a nearby cafe. If instead you want to buy an espresso machine, you will most likely tap Amazon.com. Either way, Google lost a customer. Google remains the undisputed king of search, with about two-thirds of the market. But the nature of search is changing, especially as more people search for what they want to buy, eat or learn on their mobile devices. This has put the $22 billion search industry, perhaps the most lucrative and influential of online businesses, at its most significant crossroad since its invention.” Read more

Structured data makes the Web go around. Search engines love it when webmasters mark up page content. Google’s rich snippets, for instance, leverages sites’ use of microdata (preferred format), or RDFa or microformats: It makes it possible to highlight in a few lines specific types of content in search results, to give users some insight about what’s on the page and its relationship to their queries – prep time for a recipe, for instance.

Plenty of web sites generated from structured data haven’t added HTML markup to their pages, though, so they aren’t getting the benefits that come with search engines understanding the information on those web pages.

Maybe that will change, now that Google has introduced Data Highlighter, an easy way to tell its search engine about the structured data behind their web pages. A video posted by Google product management director Jack Menzel gives the snapshot: “Data Highlighter is a point- and-click tool that allows any webmaster to show Google the patterns of structured data on their pages without modifying the pages themselves,” he says.

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Search engine Yandex, which like Google, Bing and Yahoo takes advantage of sites using schema.org markup to improve the display of search results, today released a search app for the iPad. The other major search providers have already accounted for the iPad in their search portfolios.

According to the release announcing the news, the Yandex Search App offers a tablet-optimized, intuitive interface marked by the ability for users to open pages as tabs in a browser – as many as they wish – so they can switch between tabs and search results within one screen.

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Panelists: Ivan Herman (Moderator), Dan Brickley, R.V. Guha, Peter Mika, Steve Macbeth, Jeffrey Preston, Alexandre Shubin, Evan Sandhaus

A packed room at the Semantic Tech & Business Conference in San Francisco played host to the much-anticipated Schema.org panel on Wednesday morning. As W3C semantic activity lead and moderator Ivan Herman had hoped (see this article), the discussion didn’t get bogged down in a duel between RDFa and microdata, but rather emphasized some important accomplishments of the last year and looked forward to future work.

As Herman put it, the only discussion he wanted to have around RDFa was to announce that the proposed RDFa 1.1 recommendations are expected to be published as official W3C standards Thursday, and that there had been a lot of interaction with the schema.org folks to make this useable for them as well.

Wednesday’s panel was composed of: Dan Brickley, of Schema.org at Google;  R.V. Guha of Google;  Steve Macbeth of Microsoft; Peter Mika ofYahoo!; Jeffrey W. Preston of Disney Interactive Media Group; Evan Sandhaus of The New York Times Company; and Alexander Shubin of Yandex.

Here are highlights of what took place:

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The Semantic Technology & Business Conference has been underway since Sunday, with tutorials and lightning sessions catching audience interest. The conference presentations get underway today, most of them following on the heels of the opening keynotes given by Bart van Leeuwen, firefighter and architect at netage.nl; Jay Myers, web architect at Best Buy; and Steve Harris, CTO of Garlik, a part of Experian.

Best Buy, as readers of this blog know, has been diving deep into the semantic web waters under Myers’ direction for a few years now, and he shared that journey with the audience at SemTech.

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Perhaps one of the most anticipated panels at next week’s Semantic Technology & Business Conference in San Francisco is the Wednesday morning session on Schema.org. Since the announcement of Schema.org just prior to last year’s SemTech Business Conference on the west coast, using the Schema.org shared vocabularies along with the microdata format to mark up web pages has been much debated, and created questions in the minds of webmasters and web search marketers along the lines of, “Which way should we go? Microdata or RDFa?”

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Facebook IPO not panning out for you? Well, there are other opportunities out there where you can get in on the ground floor for a lot less.

Take a Kickstarter project dubbed Gooey Search – it’s trying to get funding of at least $125,000 by June 8 for its consumer-facing technology, based on latent semantic analysis (LSA). It has as its goal delivering the best and most accurate Google search results in what it calls a Gooey Graph real-time diagram of discovered network concepts, while keeping user privacy intact.

With the recent announcement of Google’s Knowledge Graph, do we need another way to probe the leading search engine? Ed Heinbockel, founder, president and CEO of Visual Purple, is betting we do. “To me [what Google’s done] validates the approach we’ve gone down in terms of visualizing and letting you navigate search. It’s the same direction. The question is can we provide value to that equation,” he says.

Where he sees the opportunity: “What drives us a lot is that we’re very concerned about the direction that privacy and the Internet are going,” he says. “And we think the quality of the results they give back to users isn’t in the order it should be.”

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Ask.com is striving to stand apart from other search engines by utilizing semantic search technology. According to the article, “Today, Google captures nearly 65% of all U.S. search queries, according to ComScore. But Ask.com, the granddaddy of question and answer based search sites, isn’t bowing out just yet. Established in 1996, Ask.com (it was then known as Ask Jeeves and is owned by IAC) has survived stiff competition from old-timers like Yahoo! and Google, but also newcomers, from Facebook to Quora. The company’s latest effort to hold and gain a new piece of the overall search market entails a brand-new Q&A community and mobile apps for iPhone and Android operating systems. How is this going to work?” Read more