Google has announced two updates to rich snippets, the enhanced format that they announced in 2009 for displaying content in search results that use semantic markup.

The first update addresses an issue raised on answers.semanticweb.com in July of 2011. Prior to this update, only some places in the world saw rich snippets in their local results. Now product rich snippets is getting global support, meaning that users worldwide will be able to preview product information in the rich snippet. Here is an example from www.google.fr:

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SemTechBiz is Less Than 2 Weeks Away

The Semantic Tech & Business Conference (SemTechBiz) is coming to San Francisco on June 3-7! Join us for case studies, innovative panels, tutorials, and keynotes that will provide you with practical advice, hands-on guidance, and breakthrough approaches to solving business problems with semantic technology. Passes go up $200 at the door. Sign up now and save !

How to help the bench biologist get value out of the wealth of life sciences Linked Data sets? Startup Metaome Science Informatics proposes to offer some help with its DistilBio semantic search and data integration technology, by streamlining the approach to posing user queries. The Distil in DistilBio stands for Data Integration using Semantic Technologies in the Life Sciences.

Metaome, which was founded by CEO Kalpana Krishnaswami and CTO Ramkumar Nandakumar as a bioinformatics services provider before transitioning to a product vendor, contains a few more than a dozen life sciences public data sets so far. Infomaticians in the life sciences space have the expertise to query such data across sets via SPARQL, but the front-line biologist isn’t necessarily an infomatician. So, DistilBio has created a query interface that makes it easier for them to ask large and complex questions in a simplified way across data sets while building a graph in the process.

“How does a user say what are the drugs used for Alzheimer’s disease and do have they have certain protein targets and are those protein targets implicated in other diseases?” says Krishnaswami. “To ask that in one shot right now is hard without working through a SPARQL endpoint using all the SPARQL syntax.”

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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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What do big companies have that most emerging businesses don’t have to help them get value from Big Data? Well, to start with, there’s lots of money and a ton of technology resources.

Never fear. At the upcoming Semantic Tech & Business conference in Berlin, Christopher Testa, CTO of startup WhiteBox Inc., plans to give companies with considerably fewer resources than giants like Google and IBM insight into how to use Big Data as a small, lean startup. His guidance will draw from his own past experiences at Google training AdSense; lessons learned studying the development of IBM’s Watson; and his current efforts to apply Big Data principles to create an expert system for amateur radio operator license exams at his own startup, with limited engineering resources. Most recently Testa was head of engineering at Ad.ly, and that will factor into advice about how to run a data center with free and open source solutions, too.

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What’s the path from an XML based e-government metadata application to a linked data version? At the upcoming Semantic Tech & Business Conference in Berlin, the road taken by the Dutch government will be described by Paul Hermans, lead architect of Belgian project Erfgoedplus.be, which uses RDF/XML, OWL and SKOS to describe relationships to heritage types, concepts, objects, people, place and time.

Some 1,000 individual organizations compose the Dutch government, each with their own websites. An effort to employ a search engine a few years ago to spider those different and separate web sites to have one single point of access didn’t work as anticipated. The next step to bring some order was to assign all the documents published on those sites a common kernel of metadata fields, which led to building an XML application to enable a structured approach. Linked Data entered the picture about a year and a half ago.

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Attendees at the fast-approaching Semantic Tech & Business Conference in Berlin will find one of the opening conference sessions, The Simple Power of the Link, to provide a good introduction to the value proposition of Linked Data.

Presenter Richard J. Wallis is happy to be on the docket early, so that those in the audience who aren’t coming from a died-in-the-wool semantic web background will get a sense of the big-picture benefits to be realized, and incented enough to explore the possibilities that they won’t be scared off by the more technical discussions later in the program. “Later on, when presenters start talking about graph models and SPARQL endpoint performance, hopefully they can harken back to the simple basic benefits I’ll be discussing,” says Wallis, who will be conducting the session as an independent associate on behalf of Kasabi, the Linked Data marketplace from Talis Systems Ltd. Wallis, currently Kasabi technology evangelist, is launching his own semantic web consultancy this month.

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Google this week posted a video about its evolution of search that’s worth the watch. All six minutes of it.

The highlight for semantic web aficionados will be at the end – or should I say, the future. As Google Fellow Amit Singhal explains, his dream has always been to build the Star Trek computer. That’s where a farmer in India can walk up to it and ask when’s the best time to sow seeds this year because the monsoons came early. “Our users need much more complex answers,” he says. Answering complex questions like that one “are all genuine information needs, genuine questions that if we google can answer our users would become much more knowledge and they will become more satisfied in their quest for knowledge.”

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Antidot, which makes the semantically-powered Information Factory and Antidot Finder Suite software, this month released its db2triples as open source component software, available here, which implements the W3C RDB2RDF Working Group’s proposed R2RML language and Direct Mapping, covered here.

Antidot, in fact, shared with the W3C its experience leveraging Direct Mapping and R2RML to, in just half a day, fetch information from hundreds of tables in a client’s Magento ecommerce database to transform it to a graph model. That’s normally a complex task, says Antidot founder and CEO Fabrice Lacroix, which would involve data transformation and database content indexing of an unknown database model. “No one [here at Antidot] knows the complex, dynamic data model from Magento, and it’s very difficult to reverse-engineer these sort of models,” he says.

“So with Direct Mapping and R2RML it is very easy to go directly from the database to the graph you need…and then extract just the business objects we need. We did it in just half a day. Imagine that. For such complex stuff that’s a very short timeframe.” Lacroix says that the company thought it only fair, after that success, to send something back to the community.

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Military personnel are likely familiar with The Millennium Cohort study, which began in the late 1990s to evaluate the effect of service on long-term health. In addition to the service that thousands of men and women in uniform already have given their country, many of those who participated in the 2001-2003 and 2004-2006 survey cycles also may contribute to advancing the understanding of qualitative survey results that may further epidemiological research.

Researchers have released the results of their application of latent semantic analysis to an open-ended question found on The Millennium Cohort study. The question asked respondents to discuss their additional health concerns, in as much detail as they like about any health subject that was not otherwise covered. In October the researchers published the report, Application of Latent Semantic Analysis for Open-Ended Responses in a Large, Epidemiologic Study, which found significantly lower self-reported general health among the group of almost 28,000 Millennium Cohort respondents who answered the open-ended question, compared to the nearly 80,000 participants who did not.

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About this time last year The Semantic Web Blog introduced readers to a U.K.-based startup called Blueflow Ltd. and its BrandAura software. The social media contextual analytics technology and services were aimed at helping marketing and branding pros understand commentary about them taking place across the web, by determining the words used in context with a product or brand and assessing comparisons with competitive offerings.

Well, the tool found a new use this month – with the unfortunate rioting that took place in the U.K. “Our analysis of social media was able to predict which locations were being targeted by the rioters before they attacked those locations,” reports Dr. Andrew Starkey, co-founder and technology director, via email. The BBC news reported a story this week that said that the police were using Twitter and the Blackberry Messenger Network to monitor streams and comments with the goal of picking up intelligence on locations rioters were possibly targeting – the Olympic site, Oxford Street and Westfield shopping centers among them. But that intelligence, its acting Commissioner Tim Goodwin admitted, could also be misleading.

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