Janice Lawrence of Semantic Arts has published an interesting read on semantic technology and enterprise architecture, specifically how a semantic layer improves IT productivity. Lawrence writes, “Short term IT decision making results in underutilized IT infrastructures. Technology adoption is strikingly consistent – each new wave of technology is first implemented in a distributed form and then consolidated resulting in poor utilization of computing resources, rising costs, and increased complexity.” Read more

A recent article reports on the success of Smartlogic’s Semaphore with EPiServer 6 websites. Rufus Leonard, a London/Dubai-based digital agency, “completed a successful integration project where the semantic capabilities of Smartlogic‘s Semaphore software were used in conjunction with the popular EPiServer 6 web content management system. The result is a semantic website that appropriately models the client’s business while allowing users to locate unstructured content, efficiently integrated into a content management system.” Read more

Google recently announced a few changes to its news search feature. According to the article, “Android and iPhone smartphone users now have the option to see news stories relevant to their current location via the Google News mobile News Near You feature. When visiting Google News from one of these devices, you are prompted via popup whether you want to see news near you. If you choose yes, then this section will be added to your standard Google News layout on that device. (Note: This feature does not appear to be compatible with the FireFox browser for Android.)” Read more

This article takes a look at one of the new features in TopBraid Composer 3.5 – the Web Data Basket view: “This can be used to incrementally download Linked Data (either RDFa or RDF) while browsing the web. The best way to experience this is by getting a small TBC Firefox extension. This will add a tiny TopBraid button to the lower right corner of your browser. Click on this button while TopBraid Composer is executing, and all RDF data encoded on the currently visited page will be added to TBC’s Web Data Basket.” Read more

A recent article comments on Google’s recent launch of +1: “Google announced on March 30, that it was releasing this new “Like” button for their search results that they’re calling +1. This opens up a whole new approach towards the industry of search marketing and could potentially have some interesting impact on how you can find relevant content from your friends. In the short term, does this constitute a social strategy? Not necessarily, but in the long term there could be some good consequences or some backlash, depending on how Google treats the feedback.” Read more

An announcement was recently made that “Expert System, the leading provider of semantic software that searches, discovers, classifies and interprets text information, announced that it has been awarded a patent by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for its Cogito® semantic platform. The patent, ‘Method and systems for automatically extracting relationships between concepts included in a text,’ safeguards Cogito, which relies on deep linguistic analysis and semantic disambiguation of text to ensure a complete understanding of a text without the use of statistics or keyword based technologies.” Read more

According to a recent article, “Wal-Mart Stores paid just over $300 million in cash for Kosmix. The six-year-old Mountain View, Calif.-based company–which has built a social media platform that organizes content by topic–has raised $55 million from a large group of Silicon Valley venture firms… Kosmix will join the newly formed @WalmartLabs.” Read more