Semantic technologies have made it to Gartner’s list of the top technology trends that will impact information infrastructure this year.

The research firm yesterday released the list of nine trends that it says will play key roles in modernizing information management and in making the role of information governance increasingly important. Semantic technologies come in at No.3 on the list – right behind closely-tied-to trends Big Data and modern information infrastructure.

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When the Nobel Prize winners for 2013 are announced in the fall, perhaps there also will be some challenges issued to the worldwide community of data enthusiasts to see what they can do with open Linked Data about the prizes that have been awarded since the beginning of the 20^th century.

Right now that’s just on the wish lists of Matthias Palmér and Hannes Ebner, co-founders of MetaSolutions AB, a spin-off from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and Uppsala University focused on semantic and scalable web apps. But a solid start has been made through their work with Nobel Media AB, which develops and manages programs, productions and media rights of the Nobel Prize within the areas of digital and broadcast media, including the Nobelprize.org domain, on the Nobel Prize Linked Data set.

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It shouldn’t be surprising that Entagen, which makes the semantically-enabled Big Data analytics and collaboration engine TripleMap, has had its sights set on the life sciences space. CEO Christopher Bouton has his Ph.D in molecular neurobiology and has worked at a number of bio tech firms, as well as been the head of integrative data mining at Pfizer – a company that’s using TripleMap for visualized knowledge maps of associations between domain-specific entities (see our story here).

“We see some really compelling and exciting applications of this type of technology in the life sciences space,” says Bouton. But TripleMap can be applied to any scenario where Big Data dots must be connected so that users can collaborate around the understanding of the associations between entities – health care, legal, retail and finance all come to mind.

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A new article on R Bloggers explains how to get “up and running on the Semantic Web” using SPARQL with R in under five minutes. The article states, “We’ll use data at the Data.gov endpoint for this example. Data.gov has a wide array of public data available, making this example generalizable to many other datasets. One of the key challenges of querying a Semantic Web resource is knowing what data is accessible. Sometimes the best way to find this out is to run a simple query with no filters that returns only a few results or to directly view the RDF. Fortunately, information on the data available via Data.gov has been cataloged on a wiki hosted by Rensselaer. We’ll use Dataset 1187 for this example. It’s simple and has interesting data – the total number of wildfires and acres burned per year, 1960-2008.” Read more

The winner of the Semantic Web Challenge at November’s International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) was EventMedia Live, a web-based environment that exploits real-time connections to event and media sources to deliver rich content describing events that are associated with media, and interlinked with the Linked Data cloud.

This week, it will begin a one-year effort under a European Commission-funded project to align its work with the Nokia Maps database of places, so that mobile users of the app can quickly get pictures of these venues that were taken by users with EventMedia’s help.

A project of EURECOM, a consortium combining seven European universities and nine international industrial partners, EventMedia Live has its origins in the “mismatch between those sites specializing in announcing upcoming events and those other sites where users share photos, videos and document those events,” explains Raphaël Troncy, assistant professor at the EURECOM: School of Engineering & Research Center, Multimedia Communications, and one of the project’s leaders.

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Photo Courtesy: Flickr/Lars Plougmann

In recent blogs we’ve discussed where semantic technologies have gone in 2012, and a bit about where they will go this year (see here, here and here).

Here are some final thoughts from our panel of semantic web experts on what to expect to see as the New Year rings in:

John Breslin,lecturer at NUI Galway, researcher and unit leader at DERI, creator of SIOC, and co-founder of Technology Voice and StreamGlider

Broader deployment of the schema.org terms is likely. In the study by Muehlisen and Bizer in July this year, we saw Open Graph Protocol, DC, FOAF, RSS, SIOC and Creative Commons still topping the ranks of top semantic vocabularies being used. In 2013 and beyond, I expect to see schema.org jump to the top of that list.

Christine Connors, Chief Ontologist, Knowledgent:

I think we will see an uptick in the job market for semantic technologists in the enterprise; primarily in the Fortune 2000. I expect to see some M&A activity as well from systems providers and integrators who recognize the desire to have a semantic component in their product suite. (No, I have no direct knowledge; it is my hunch!)

We will see increased competition from data analytics vendors who try to add RDF, OWL or graphstores to their existing platforms. I anticipate saying, at the end of 2013, that many of these immature deployments will leave some project teams disappointed. The mature vendors will need to put resources into sales and business development, with the right partners for consulting and systems integration, to be ready to respond to calls for proposals and assistance.

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Bob DuCharme has shared some interesting insights regarding SPARQL, RDF, and Big Data. He writes, “I think it’s obvious that SPARQL and other RDF-related technologies have plenty to offer to the overlapping worlds of Big Data and NoSQL, but this doesn’t seem as obvious to people who focus on those areas. For example, the program for this week’s Strata conference makes no mention of RDF or SPARQL. The more I look into it, the more I see that this flexible, standardized data model and query language align very well with what many of those people are trying to do.” Read more

Hadoop is on almost every enterprise’s radar – even if they’re not yet actively engaged with the platform and its advantages for Big Data efforts. Analyst firm IDC earlier this year said the market for software related to the Hadoop and MapReduce programming frameworks for large-scale data analysis will have a compound annual growth rate of more than sixty percent between 2011 and 2016, rising from $77 million to more than $812 million.

Yet, challenges remain to leveraging all the possibilities of Hadoop, an Apache Software Foundation open source project, especially as it relates to empowering the data scientist. Hadoop is composed of two sub-projects: HDFS, a distributed file system built on a cluster of commodity hardware so that data stored in any node can be shared across all the servers, and the MapReduce framework for processing the data stored in those files.

Semantic technology can help solve many of the  challenges, Michael A. Lang Jr., VP, Director of Ontology Engineering Services at Revelytix, Inc., told an audience gathered at the Semantic Technology & Business Conference in New York City yesterday.

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This week the United Nations revised its findings of three years ago that more than 1 billion people worldwide were going hungry. In its 2012 State of Food Insecurity in the World report, it revised its figures of undernourished people to closer to 870 million, about the same as it is today, according to reports.

The report actually presents new estimates of the number and proportion of undernourished people going back to 1990, finding that progress in reducing hunger has been more pronounced than previously believed – especially before 2007-2008. “The revised results imply that the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target of halving the prevalence of undernourishment in the developing world by 2015 is within reach, if appropriate actions are taken to reverse the slowdown since 2007–08,” the report states.

The U.N. isn’t the only organization tracking the state of global hunger, though. The Global Hunger Index (GHI) demo is a tool adapted and developed by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) to comprehensively measure and track global hunger – and standing behind it is LODSPeaKr (Linked Open Data Simple Publishing Kit).

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Today, the World Wide Web Consortium announced that R2RML has achieved Recommendation status. As stated on the W3C website, R2RML is “a language for expressing customized mappings from relational databases to RDF datasets. Such mappings provide the ability to view existing relational data in the RDF data model, expressed in a structure and target vocabulary of the mapping author’s choice.” In the life cycle of W3C standards creation, today’s announcement means that the specifications have gone through extensive community review and revision and that R2RML is now considered stable enough for  wide-spread distribution in commodity software.

Richard Cyganiak, one of the Recommendation’s editors, explained why R2RML is so important. “In the early days of the Semantic Web effort, we’ve tried to convert the whole world to RDF and OWL. This clearly hasn’t worked. Most data lives in entrenched non-RDF systems, and that’s not likely to change.”

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