Photo courtesy: Flickr/rvaphotodude

Last month at its MarkLogic World 2013 conference, the enterprise NoSQL database platform provider talked semantics as it related to its MarkLogic Server technology that ingests, manages and searches structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data (see our story here). The vendor late last week was scheduled to provide an early access release of MarkLogic 7, formally due by year’s end, to some dozens of initial users.

“People see a convergence of search and semantics,” Stephen Buxton, Director, Product Management, recently told The Semantic Web Blog. To that end, a lot of the vendor’s customers have deployed MarkLogic technology as well as specialized triple stores, but what they really want, he says, is an integrated approach, “a single database that does both individually and both together,” he says. “We see the future of search as semantics and the future of semantics as search, and they are very much converging.” At its recent conference, Buxton says the company demonstrated a MarkLogic app it built to function like Google’s Knowledge Graph to provide an idea of the kinds of things the enterprise might do with both search and semantics together.

Following up on the comments made by MarkLogic CEO Gary Bloom at his keynote address at the conference, Buxton explained that, “the function in MarkLogic we are working on in engineering is a way to store and manage triples in the MarkLogic database natively, right alongside structured and unstructured information – a specialized triples index so queries are very fast, and so you can do SPARQL queries in MarkLogic. So, with MarkLogic 7 we will have a world-class triple store and world-beating information store – no one else does documents, values and triples in combination the way MarkLogic 7 will.”

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Derek du Preez of Computer World reports, “The Financial Times (FT) has appointed John O’Donovan as its new Chief Technology Officer, who will lead the FT’s technology strategy across development and operations teams. O’Donovan joins the publication from the Press Association, where he was director of architecture and development, and has also previously worked as the chief architect for BBC News, Sport and Weather. Whilst at the BBC, O’Donovan played a key role in building some of the company’s flagship products, such as the BBC iPlayer, as well as the widely used sport APIs for the Olympics Data Feed.”

He continues, “The FT said that O’Donovan has ‘delivered influential technical strategies that have become widely adopted, using semantic technologies and architectural patterns for dealing with complex integration in modern technical environments.’ Read more

Today is Global Accessibility Awareness Day (#GAAD), and there are programs taking place all around the world from Bangalore, India to Washington, DC. The purpose of the day is to get people talking, thinking and learning about digital accessibility and users with different disabilities.

GAAD is the brainchild of Joe Devon, a Los Angeles based technologist and entrepreneur. Devon says, “The target audience of GAAD is the design, development, usability, and related communities who build, shape, fund and influence technology and its use. While people may be interested in the topic of making technology accessible and usable by persons with disabilities, the reality is that they often do not know how or where to start. Awareness comes first.”

Last year, I wrote a piece about the inaugural Global Accessibility Awareness Day (#GAAD), and the strong connections between Semantic Web and Assistive Technology. Or rather, I posited that there were connections that were inherent, but not being maximized, or even explored.

One year later, I’m very pleased to report that things are progressing! There are now formal efforts to connect Semantic and Assistive Technologies.

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It’s been a couple of weeks now since the terrorist attack at the Boston Marathon, and since then the media and others have been questioning whether there was an intelligence failure at the FBI. It’s not an easy question to answer, given how many suspicious persons and activities government agencies must have on their radars, and all the data there is to deal with.

It’s undeniably hard work. Semantic technology does come into play to help the government connect the dots on information related to threats and other intelligence issues. For example, Dennis Wisnosky, formerly CTO and Chief Architect, Business Mission Area, U.S. Department of Defense, discussed semantic technology’s role in that institution at SemTech in San Francisco in 2011. (Wisnosky now is spending more time with FIBO in his role providing technical strategy and operational guidance to help the The Enterprise Data Management Council finalize and implement Financial Industry Business Ontology standards – see story here.) It’s also been reported that the FBI and CIA are practicing and developing semantic processing techniques to analyse social media to improve situational awareness and identify emerging threats.

Semantic tech is being applied by military intelligence, too, in services like the Air Force and Marine Corp., which are testing or have live deployments of semantic systems developed by Modus Operandi.  The Air Force is involved with analyzing email traffic on a 24/7 basis, while the Marine Corp. works with it as part of the cyber portion war games exercises. The Office of Naval Research also is utilizing it as part of its lab exercises, says Modus Operandi president Rick McNeight.

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What’s on the menu for semantic technology this week? Two vendors in the foodie field are offering up some new treats.

From Nara, whose neural networking technology is behind a service to help users better personalize and curate their restaurant dining experiences (see how in our story here), comes a new feature that should make picking a restaurant for a group dinner an easier affair. It combines users’ “digital DNA” – the sum of what it learns of what each one likes and doesn’t like regarding dining venues – to serve up restaurant choices that should appeal to the entire group across its range of preferences.

“It’s a really fun way to start getting [the service] into social,” says Nara founder and CEO Tom Copeman.

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Swipp, which in January launched its social intelligence platform and consumer social networking app (see our story here), today follows through on the plans it alluded to then of letting businesses leverage its technology for merging social and knowledge streams. Structured data is at the heart of the Swipp platform, with the Freebase entity graph providing reference knowledge and context for topics; its value propositions are that comments are tied to a specific, exact topic and that it creates a real-time Index for users’ social data sentiment scores for each topic that can be combined and sorted by geography, time, gender, and age.

The new Swipp Plus tool suite, the company says, draws on its social intelligence platform to prepare businesses – from consumer brands to content providers – to better connect with customers on today’s social web. Swipp Plus now enables them to leverage capabilities in its platform to add a Swipp widget to their web sites, blogs, maps, QR codes, and various online arenas around pieces of content, particular products, or concepts, and it also is working to build out mobile capabilities for direct feedback.

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The Research Data Alliance (RDA) was recently formed with the goal of accelerating international data-driven innovation and discovery. It aims to get there by facilitating the sharing and exchange of research data, its use and re-use, standards harmonization, and discoverability.

Funded by The Australian Commonwealth Government through the Australian National Data Service, the European Commission through the iCordi project under the 7th Framework Program, and the U.S. through the RDA/US activity supported by the National Science Foundation, it began its work last August when it established an international steering group with these funds. In March, it held its first plenary meeting and had its official launch.

Dr. Francine Berman, Professor of Computer Science, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, is Chair of the Research Data Alliance/U.S. The Semantic Web Blog recently conducted a  Q&A with her to learn more about RDA plans:

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Pete Swabey of Information Age reports, “The banking industry, it is fair to say, has a legacy IT problem.  Having been some of the earliest adopters of information technology, most major banks have accumulated decades-worth of IT infrastructure, stitched together in unimaginably complex architectures.  For some banks, even keeping this legacy infrastructure running is proving difficult – look no further than RBS’s catastrophic IT outage in the summer of 2012. But it is also stifling innovation. The cost of integrating a new application into legacy systems can be three or four times the cost the application itself. This prevents banks from trying anything new unless it guarantees a phenomenal return on investment. ” Read more

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IT leaders keeping an eye on Gartner’s top tech trends list know that early in March semantic technologies made the cut (see our original story here, and our follow-up with one of the authors of the Gartner report here). The big question for many enterprise IT pros, though, is what should they be doing with that knowledge – how can they start leveraging semantic technology to their own organizations’ benefit?

Help is on the way. Three experts in semantic web technologies and Linked Data weigh in with their advice on heading down that road:

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Dave McComb of Semantic Arts recently commented on Gartner’s nod to Semantic Technology. McComb writes, “Gartner has, finally, nominated Semantic Technology as one of their Top Technology Trends. We’ve seen this movie before. We know how it ends. Indeed it was Gartner themselves who named the plot trajectory: the ‘hype cycle.’ It’s worth a pause to reflect on why the hype cycle exists. The hype cycle suggests that a new technology follows a development growth path as predictable as egg to caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly. In the hype cycle, the stages are [pictured above].” Read more