Six months ago, Ontodia’s NYCFacets walked away with the win at New York City’s BigApps 3.0 conference. In the months since, the Smart Open Data Exchange that catalogs all the NYC-related data sources (which we first covered here) has been busy expanding its team, moving into the NYU-Poly hosted incubator, and getting ready to launch its Smart City platform for general use next year.

A preview of that platform will take place at the upcoming Semantic Technology & Business Conference in NYC. “We are going to our original mission of really creating that data exchange using semantic technology,” says Ontodia co-founder Joel Natividad. It’s putting the focus not on raw data or learning new technologies, but on being a linked answers marketplace – converting raw data to answers rather than just linking raw data.

Read more

Semantic technology is scoring more goals in the sports world. The BBC, for example, which created the FIFA World Cup 2010 website that leveraged semantic technology, is at it again as London prepares for the 2012 Summer Olympics. Brazil has gotten into the action, too, with an Internet portal there taking soccer to the semantic web set. At the upcoming SemTech conference in San Francisco, attendees will have an opportunity to hear the latest details about both efforts.

Over at the BBC, for example, the 2012 Olympics site accompanies a completely redesigned BBC Sports site, both based on technology including Fluid Operations’ Information Workbench to support the editorial process for the BBC’s Dynamic Semantic Publishing strategy, from authoring and curation to publishing of ontology and instance data following an editorial workflow. The BBC environment since the World Cup also has been updated to use the MarkLogic document store for managing rapidly changing statistics, navigation and ultimately all content objects, as lead architect Jem Rayfield described it in this blog posting. Today, the triple store that’s been behind the BBC’s past work is extended to cover every team, athlete, venue, discipline, country and so on, Rayfield told The Semantic Web Blog.

Read more

While much of the publishing industry still is getting up to speed on what semantic technology can do for business, it’s already deep within the DNA of The Tribune Company – to the point where Keith DeWeese, Director, Information and Semantics Management, can comfortably use the word “ontology” in discussions with non-tech employees, and enjoy the fact that they’re equally comfortable using it themselves.

DeWeese has been with the company since 2007, putting in place a sophisticated semantic system for auto-tagging and indexing content using natural language processing and controlled vocabularies, and leveraging its taxonomy for projects such as providing advanced search functionality. Thanks to building a collaborative communication channel with Tribune executives, producers, and editors, “now I actually am in meetings with executives who say how exciting it is that we now can be part of a community of people applying semantic technologies to content,” he says. “The other day I was at a meeting where a top executive used the word ontology all the time. I kept smiling and later I thanked her.”

Closely engaging with his business customers also is helping make it possible to push the semantic vision further at the company.

Read more