Back in March, The Semantic Web Blog wrote an article about FIBO, the Financial Industry Business Ontology that’s on its way to being an Object Management Group series of standards. There, we explored its value as an open semantic standard that can be used by financial institutions and industry regulators, both to support conformance to federal regulatory reporting requirements and for internal business processes and risk analysis.

To continue the discussion about the operational value of FIBO, we recently spoke with key participants developing the standard: David Newman, Strategic Planning Manager, Vice President, Enterprise Architecture, Wells Fargo Bank, who is lead of the industry team collaborating on semantics OTC (over-the-counter) derivatives proof-of-concept, and Mike Atkin, managing director at the Enterprise Data Management (EDM) Council, where FIBO was born and is included as content of EDM’s Semantics Repository.

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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 !

Earlier this month 16 out of 42 papers were accepted for the upcoming Linked Data on the Web (LDOW) 2012 Workshop in Lyon, France in April.

What might be discerned from the tenor of the submissions is something of a shift in focus in the Linked Data space, according to workshop chair Dr. Michael Hausenblas, Linked Data Research Centre, DERI, NUI Galway, Ireland. Other organizing committee members include Tim Berners-Lee, Christian Bizer and Tom Heath. “In 2008 to 2010 it was more like we were establishing the field, getting people to talk about what they do in terms of publishing and best practice around Linked Data, Open Linked Data and Linked Enterprise Data,” says Hausenblas. Now, with the web of Linked Data having grown to about 32 billion RDF triples last year, “we’re moving more towards the consumption – publishing is a necessary precondition but not an end in itself.”

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A recent interview with Daniel Mayer, author of a paper entitled Network Content Manifesto, delves into the concept of networked content: “According to the Manifesto, networked content, ‘creates a network of semantic links between documents that enable new forms of navigation and improves retrieval from a collection of documents.’ It uses text analytics techniques to extract semantic metadata from documents. This metadata can be used to link documents together across the organization, thus providing a rich source of connected content for use by an entire company.” Read more

Jobs are in the news. But the national jobs market is background noise. We want to know the job trends related to our skill sets. We dug around in the job search engines, Indeed and SimplyHired, to see what trends jump out. Bad news: Semantic Web is not as hot as Twitter. Oh, you already know that? Good news: semantic jobs are on the rise.

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This Keynote is presented in six parts.

Moderated by: Carla Thompson, Guidewire Group
Speakers:
Andrew Tomkins, Yahoo! Search
Peter Norvig, Google
Riza Berkan, hakia
Scott Prevost, Powerset division of bing
Tomasz Imielinski, Ask.com
William Tunstall-Pedoe, True Knowledge

Semantic technology changes the rules of the search marketspace, but exactly how, and by how much, are the key questions. Announcements are made daily for new companies with niche search applications, and clearly lots of start-ups are betting they can gain enough market share to create value for their investors. Meanwhile the major players are rapidly adding semantic enhancements to existing services to improve relevancy, create new query services, improve ad targeting and provide more customization options for users. The field is full of innovation, competition and new investment.

This Keynote Panel session brings together major incumbents with promising upstarts to assess the current and future state of the semantic search market. Can semantic technology open up truly differentiated search services? Will success be won with technological advantage, creative branding and positioning, or sheer market dominance? The executives represented on the panel bring deep technical expertise and business savvy.

PART I: Introductions and Differentiators

Executive Round Table: Semantic Search – PART I: Introductions and Differentiators from Semantic Universe on Vimeo.

PART II: Why do we need to change search?

Executive Round Table: Semantic Search – PART II: Why do we need to change search? from Semantic Universe on Vimeo.

PART III: How do you measure the "Semanticity" of a search engine?

Executive Round Table: Semantic Search – PART III: How do you measure the “Semanticity” of a search engine? from Semantic Universe on Vimeo.

PART IV: Search vs. Answers

Executive Round Table: Semantic Search – PART IV: Search vs Answers from Semantic Universe on Vimeo.

PART V: New Services – Wolfram Alpha

Executive Round Table: Semantic Search – PART V: New Services – Wolfram Alpha from Semantic Universe on Vimeo.

PART VI: New Services – Bing and Siri

Executive Round Table: Semantic Search – PART VI: New Services – Bing and Siri from Semantic Universe on Vimeo.

Stephen Wolfram generously gave me a two-hour demo of Wolfram Alpha last evening, and I was quite positively impressed.  As he said, it’s not AI, and not aiming to be, so it shouldn’t be measured by contrasting it with HAL or Cyc but with Google or Yahoo. 

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Palm oil is a multi-billion dollar industry, yet to date no attempt has been made for complex knowledge modeling within the Palm Oil industry. As oil palm plantation industries contain numerous changing conditions and since relevant decision making parameters are dynamic as well, an intelligent Decision Support System (DSS) that is context sensitive, environment specific and localized for the user is needed. Our proposed solution empowers the end-users through semantic and ontology development methods, where the involvement of domain experts and end-users drive the application development.

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Executive Summary

The current information management tools and techniques have not kept pace with the dramatic growth of data within the enterprise. Much of this new data is represented in an unstructured or semi-structured format. The volume of the data makes it unmanageable by humans and the structure of the data makes it unavailable for machine processing. This has created a situation where information is now hidden or lost within the enterprise. This lost information has a significant business impact in the form of unmanaged risk and lost opportunities for revenue or savings.

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