Cait O’Riordan recently explained the many changes to the BBC Sport Website. O’Riordan writes, “This redesign is the first major launch of many this year as we get ready to cover the Olympic Games this summer. We are working on some really exciting developments, which will be showcased on the new BBC Sport website. This redesign has concentrated on doing four main things: (1) Creating a fresh website that better showcases the range of content we offer. (2) Prominent promotion of our fantastic live coverage from across the BBC. (3) Making it easier for our users to talk about our sport coverage. (4) Making it faster for our users to find our great content. We have tried to do this in a way that makes the site easier to use for the millions of people from across the UK and around the world who use the site every week and are confident it will. But we know that, initially at least, the site will take a bit of getting used to.” Read more

Announcing Semantic Tech & Business Conference - San Francisco 2012

Semantic Tech & Business Conference is returning to San Francisco in June! Join us from June 3-7 for complete coverage of Big Data, Linked Data, Extreme Information Management, and Semantic Web. From breakthrough approaches to solving business problems to the big data implications of fast–evolving technologies, SemTechBiz provides you with an unparalleled interactive experience and delivers tangible business value. We're offering a special early rate when you register by February 17. Sign up now!

PureDiscovery has announced a new version of PureDiscovery Legal Suite which includes ‘Focus,’ a semantic search visualization tool. According to the article, “The release includes significant changes to the products workflow through a more intuitive user interface and the addition of several compelling product features suggested by the rapidly growing PureDiscovery user community. The most frequently suggested and significant upgrade to PDLS is the addition of a visual search capability the company calls ‘Focus’.” Read more

Lexis Nexis has announced a new release of Lexis Advance which includes “content enriched using SRA’s industry-leading NetOwl® text and entity analytics technology, delivering a more sophisticated semantic search capability to enable legal professionals to conduct better, faster and more relevant research. As one key part of the Lexis Advance application, NetOwl’s entity and relationship extraction capabilities semantically enrich the vast amounts of text-based content offered to legal professional customers.” Read more

iXiGO, a travel meta search engine has launched a new flight search tool for Facebook and Twitter that utilizes natural language processing. According to an article by Anupam Saxena, “Users can directly post a query on iXiGO’s Facebook page or make a twitter mention to @iXiGOsearch with the query. iXiGO says that it will reply to the user with a comment on his query with details of the cheapest flight found across multiple travel sites, a link to the relevant iXiGO.com result page where the user can filter the results by time, stops, price and other factors, as well as a direct booking link for booking the cheapest flight on the travel site where it is available.” Read more

The internet is buzzing with talk of Beepl, the new question-and-answer site. Kit Eaton reports, “It launched to the general public [Monday] in the online expertise-sharing/question-and-answer sphere after a short private test run. Branding itself as a ‘social Q&A site’ that ‘lets users seek answers and opinion from subject specialists, enthusiasts and their social graph,’ Beepl also ‘understands the topics that questions relate to and users’ interests and expertise so that questions automatically reach the best people to reach them.’ That bit of lateral thinking differentiates Beepl in a pretty bustling market, but it’s only one of the novel surprises from the company (starting with the lack of a launch press release).” Read more

Vertical Search Works has launched a new semantic search and advertising platform for foodies, VS4Food – a search widget for publishers. The Ardent Epicure is among several food websites that are already using the widget. According to the release, “VS4Food is a vertical search engine that resides on a publisher’s site.  Users can enter a query without leaving the site through a toolbar, and the search engine returns results from both the publisher and from other web sites relevant to the query. VS4Food automatically organizes results into facets, relevant categories associated with the query. For example, searching for ‘sirloin steak’ will classify documents in categories about grilling recipes and wine pairings. Similarly, a search for ‘Emeril dessert’ will return categories such as cooking show, dessert recipe and cookbooks.” Read more

Google has introduced a new feature to their search engine: Search, plus Your World. The official announcement states, “We’re transforming Google into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships. We began this transformation with Social Search, and today we’re taking another big step in this direction by introducing three new features: (1) Personal Results, which enable you to find information just for you, such as Google+ photos and posts—both your own and those shared specifically with you, that only you will be able to see on your results page; (2) Profiles in Search, both in autocomplete and results, which enable you to immediately find people you’re close to or might be interested in following; and, (3) People and Pages, which help you find people profiles and Google+ pages related to a specific topic or area of interest, and enable you to follow them with just a few clicks. Because behind most every query is a community.” Read more

According to a recent article, “Collegeseekr.com is a new college and college degree semantic search engine available for anyone to use. With over 7,000 colleges and 200,000 college program listings available, this location aware search engine aims to be the easiest way to find a college program of interest nearby.” It continues, “This website offers a fast, simple way to quickly find college programs by city or neighborhood. The key to this simplicity is the natural English language searching it supports, for example, the search ‘nursing programs near atlanta’ will locate 16 colleges in the Atlanta, Georgia region offering a variety of Nursing programs. This friendly way of searching is designed to empower and encourage users to quickly find the right college.” Read more

An app to discover 44,000 French monuments. Completed in four days. By one person. Without coding.

 

Head over to this demo from Antidot, publisher of Information Factory and Antidot Finder Suite software, and you can see the search mash-up it says was created by simply assembling existing components using its technology. Information Factory handled the data processing work flow that resulted in a data mesh outputting an RDF graph containing more than 4.5 million tripesl, with about 450,000 inferred from open data sources.

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A new article reports, “CodeBaby, a company whose award-winning digital characters are shaping the growing online self-service marketplace, today announced its partnership with inbenta, a leader in Natural Language Processing and Semantic Search. Recognizing the expanding market demand for self-service solutions, CodeBaby and inbenta have joined forces to deploy intelligent virtual assistants that increase online conversation rates and customer satisfaction.” Read more