The Cogito team has been working on applying semantic technologies to customer service operations. The team writes, “We’re proud to announce our work with Vodafone, one of the world’s largest mobile communications groups. Working with technology partner Assist, we’re using our Cogito Answers semantic platform to provide SMS based customer service that is now successfully handling more that 500,000 SMS requests each month. When a user sends an SMS to the system—“how much will I pay for calls to London?”—Cogito Answers interprets and categorizes the request and quickly retrieves the answer from the internal knowledge base.” Read more

Semantic Tech & Business Conference Returns to San Francisco

Semantic Tech & Business Conference returns 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!

— MILAN STANKOVIC, ANTHONY DEFILIPPO, DEBBIE GOLDGABER

The Web has connected people in ways that were unimaginable just a few years ago. In particular the remarkable rise of social networks has increased the possibility of staying in contact with family, friends, colleagues and even bare acquaintances. It has created an environment for collaborative working. Real-time Web has allowed us to experience the presence of others while on-line and share our lives with them. Most importantly, the Web has integrated itself in our everyday activities. We communicate, we buy, we publish, we read, we give presentations, we organize content, we rate, we mate … on the Web.

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World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee declared the Semantic Web ‘open for business’ in 2008, celebrating the ratification of the SPARQL query specification by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C); the organisation of which he is Director. “I think we’ve got all the pieces to be able to go ahead and do pretty much everything,” he stated in an interview. “You should be able to implement a huge amount of the dream, we should be able to get huge benefits from interoperability using what we’ve got. So, people are realising it’s time to just go do it.”

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XML Keyword Search is still a popular academic subject. It has not reached or been recognized by XML and Internet commercial products yet. The concepts involved are also very important to the semantic web. The semantics industry today with its work on higher level semantics like ontologies and taxonomies has overlooked the importance of utilizing the semantics of hierarchical structured data like XML. When working with hierarchically structured data, the first level of handling semantic understanding must be recognizing the hierarchical structure and its (lower level) hierarchical semantics. This is then used to eliminate false keyword search results that can show up as matches in hierarchical structures; otherwise they will go undetected to the higher level semantic processing which will also not detect them since they are not concerned with the structure of the data. This will cause unmeaningful results to be returned. 

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