Ian Jacobs recently interviewed retiring Chevron executive Roger Cutler regarding Chevron’s use of semantic web technologies. Cutler stated, “In one project we sought to exploit the technical strengths of Semantic Web technology such as the expressiveness and reasoning achievable with OWL. While our efforts in that project have been a success as far as the technology goes, we have not yet seen a significant business benefit.”

Cutler continued, “A second effort focused on challenging integration problems that involve information about equipment in major capital projects such as an oil rig or platform. These capital projects involve tens of thousands of objects: flanges, pumps, blowout preventers, sub-assemblies, and so on. All the pieces of equipment come with documents (for safety and regulatory reasons, engineering drawings, etc.) and manufacturer’s specifications (e.g., temperatures at which the components function).” Read more

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 !

A recent article reports, “A new generation of cybertools developed at Cornell will help researchers share and analyze rare Sri Lankan language recordings important for studying language acquisition in children. The Sinhala language, only spoken on the island of Sri Lanka, is ‘very precious’ because of the unique way it is structured, said project leader Barbara Lust, professor of human development in the College of Human Ecology and director of the Cornell Language Acquisition Lab. It provides an invaluable opportunity to research which aspects of language acquisition are universal or biologically programmed and which are culturally determined, she said.” Read more

Lee Feigenbaum recently wrote an article on the value of semantic web technologies, noting in particular the value of making semantic technologies common, coherent, and standard. Feigenbaum writes, “Semantic Web technologies are broadly applicable to many, many different use cases. People use them to publish pricing data online, to uncover market opportunities, to integrate data in the bowels of corporate IT, to open government data, to promote structured scientific discourse, to build open social networks, to reform supply chain inefficiencies, to search employee skill sets, and to accomplish about ten thousand other tasks.” Read more

A recent article reminds businesses that the semantic web is here and asks what they’re going to do about it. The article states, “Web 3.0 has enabled people and machines to connect, evolve, share and use knowledge. Looking even further ahead, with Web 4.0 wherein we have a self-learning intelligence, the distinctive advantage will come from the combination of semantic technologies, like text analytics, along with other analytical models that extend semantic interoperability. In other words, having feedback loops for improving models – utilizing both semantic representations along with those from areas such as data mining, forecasting, optimization, simulations, and alike. Using these technologies, organizations will create that higher-order learning that did not exist using any one of those methods in isolation.” Read more

A new post on the Wolters Kluwer blog discusses how semantic technologies support transitions in business. The author, Christian Dirschl, begins, “I have been in the business for ten years now. I remember that in the beginning I started to develop DTDs in order to represent our content in a more structured (today we’d say ‘semantic’) way. I also remember developing new offline-products with enhanced search capabilities like field search or slightly adjusted relevance ranking algorithms. A lot has changed in the meantime, but transition has not come to an end – actually, quite the contrary can be observed. The challenges that come with this transition are still the same: What kind of information does my customer need? What added-value will he pay for? [And] what information channels do we have to support?” Read more

iSOCO, a Spanish semantic technology company that specializes in helping companies position themselves in the Network Economy, is planning a major international expansion. According to a recent article, iSOCO “has decided to push further afield by opening branches that will enable it to replicate its business strategy in other countries and, above all, extend its experience and knowledge as a creator of technological business solutions for companies and institutions.” Read more

The upcoming Semantic Technology Conference this June in San Francisco will feature a number of case studies that highlight real-world semantic technology applications. Here are just a few (Click session titles to view details):

Dynamic Semantic Publishing at the BBC

Details on how the BBC sport site currently uses embedded Linked Data identifiers, ontologies and associated inference plus RDF semantics to improve navigation, content re-use, re-purposing, and search engine rankings.

Enabling Business Users to Define Rules and Configure the Semantic Enterprise at Amdocs

How a team of developers using semantic technology and an expressive business language made a significant breakthrough to help business users create, extend and alter high level business concepts and create natural language rules. We recently had a webcast with Craig Hanson from Amdocs, the speaker on this session. Read more

The Semantic Web and Complementary Technologies Smart Data Collective But there’s another type of IE and it’s critical from a semantic technology perspective: Information Extraction. In their book Semantic Web Technologies: …

Date: April 30, 2010, 11:00AM (1 hour)
Register: View the Recorded Webcast
Q&A: Q&A Session for “The RDFa initiative in Drupal 7, and how it will impact the Semantic Web”
Attachment: RDFa-in-Drupal-7-Slides.pdf (2.15 MB)

Drupal 7 (alpha), the latest major release of the popular open source CMS, includes a lot of features for web publishers interested in implementing Semantic Web Technologies.

In May of 2009, Google announced the support for RDFa as part of its Rich Snippet program. At the time, the work for integrating Semantic Web technologies into the next release of Drupal’s core had already started. In May, 2010 at DrupalCon San Francisco, Dries Buytaert – creator and project lead of Drupal – reaffirmed the community’s strong support for RDF in Drupal 7 by showing what sort of applications this will enable. A few days later, Facebook announced the Open Graph protocol, a new protocol based on RDFa which allows for turning any webpage into a rich object in a social graph. Clearly, the future is in the Semantic Web. This webinar presents some brief history about semantics in Drupal and the various facets of RDF and RDFa which are available today as part of Drupal 7 alpha.

At the SemTech 2010 Conference in June, Stéphane Corlosquet, Lin Clark, Alex Passant and Axel Polleres will present a hands-on Tutorial on "How to build Linked Data sites with Drupal 7 and RDFa."

Relevant links mentioned during the webinar:

• - Drupal project
• - Download latest Drupal 7
• - Produce and Consume Linked Data with Drupal! paper (PDF)
• - RDF browsers:
  • - Sindice inspector (including a bookmarlet to add to your browser)
  • - URI burner
  • - Tabulator
• - Who uses Drupal:
  • - The White House
  • - New York Observer
  • - more
• - Semantic web and Drupal video presented at DrupalCon San Francisco keynote.
• - Semantic Drupal for all news on Semantic Web in Drupal and how to get started with RDF in Drupal.
• - Follow Stéphane Corlosquet on twitter to keep up to date with the latest developments.

Presenters:

Stephane Corlosquet
MGH / Partners

Stéphane Corlosquet has been the main driving force in incorporating Semantic Web capabilities into the Drupal CMS. His ‘RDF CCK’ and ‘evoc’ contributed modules to Drupal 6 have naturally evolved to be accepted as standard within the core of the upcoming Drupal 7. He co-authored the ISWC 2009 Best Semantic Web In Use Paper titled "Produce and Consume Linked Data with Drupal!". Stéphane recently finished an M.Sc. in Semantic Web at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), Ireland and joined MassGeneral Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease (MIND), MGH as a Software Engineer to work on the Science Collaboration Framework, a Drupal-based distribution to build online communities of researchers in biomedicine. For more information, see http://openspring.net/

The BBC has provided a W3C Semantic Web Use Case on how Semantic Web Technologies are used on some of the BBC’s Web Sites. The main characteristics of the BBC’s approach is to use the Web as a Content Management System. Sites like the BBC Music, BBC Programmes, or the BBC Wildlife Finder rely on external, publicly available datasets like Musicbrainz or Wikipedia; the BBC sites themselves show an aggregated view of this information, put in a BBC context. Furthermore, the BBC also creates Web identifiers for every item it has interest in; RDF representations of these Web identifiers allow developers to use the BBC’s data to build applications.