The Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School is about making law accessible and understandable, for free. It’s been engaged in that mission since the early ’90s, and semantic web technology today plays a role in furthering that goal.

The organization this month published a new electronic edition of the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), which contains a bevy of rules across 50 titles that impact nearly all areas of American business. Work underway at LII, dubbed the Linked Legal Data project, seeks to apply Linked Open Data principles enhances access to the CFR, with capabilities such as  being able to search its Title 21 Food and Drugs database using brand names for drugs (such as Tylenol), and receiving the generic name for the drug (acetaminophen) as a suggested term. “You cannot look for regulatory information on Tylenol in the CFR because Tylenol will never be there,” says Dr. Núria Casellas, who is a visiting scholar at the LII spearheading work on the project. “That is a brand name. What you actually want to look for are components, such as acetaminophen.”

While the general citizenry might find reasons to leverage the fruits of this effort, businesses that must comply with these requirements are a more likely target – not just the lawyers and paralegals, but those responsible for tasks, for example, such as storing and caring for products their company exports or imports, including understanding the safety regulations that apply to it. The Tylenol-acetaminophen example, she says, is very interesting because it showcases how using the wrong word or the incorrect approach can hamper a company from being able to find the relevant regulatory or safety information it needs to take into consideration.

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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 !

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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Nature Publishing Group has joined the linked open data community. The organization recently announced that NPG “is pleased to join the linked data community by opening up access to its publication data via a linked data platform. NPG’s Linked Data Platform is available at http://data.nature.com. The platform includes more than 20 million Resource Description Framework (RDF) statements, including primary metadata for more than 450,000 articles published by NPG since 1869. In this first release, the datasets include basic citation information (title, author, publication date, etc) as well as NPG specific ontologies.” Read more

Eileen Brown recently reported that SWiPE hopes to make querying search engines a less frustrating experience. Brown writes, “If you struggle with RDF triples (Resource Description Framework) and SPARQL (Query language and protocol for RDF) do not despair. SWiPE (Searching WIkiPedia by Example) allows semantic and well-structured knowledge bases to be easily queried from within the pages of Wikipedia. If you want to know which cities in Florida, founded in last century have more than 50 thousand people you will be able to enter the query conditions directly into the Infobox of a Wikipedia page. Swipe activates certain fields of Wikipedia that generate equivalent SPARQL queries executed on DBpedia.” Read more

How to help the bench biologist get value out of the wealth of life sciences Linked Data sets? Startup Metaome Science Informatics proposes to offer some help with its DistilBio semantic search and data integration technology, by streamlining the approach to posing user queries. The Distil in DistilBio stands for Data Integration using Semantic Technologies in the Life Sciences.

Metaome, which was founded by CEO Kalpana Krishnaswami and CTO Ramkumar Nandakumar as a bioinformatics services provider before transitioning to a product vendor, contains a few more than a dozen life sciences public data sets so far. Infomaticians in the life sciences space have the expertise to query such data across sets via SPARQL, but the front-line biologist isn’t necessarily an infomatician. So, DistilBio has created a query interface that makes it easier for them to ask large and complex questions in a simplified way across data sets while building a graph in the process.

“How does a user say what are the drugs used for Alzheimer’s disease and do have they have certain protein targets and are those protein targets implicated in other diseases?” says Krishnaswami. “To ask that in one shot right now is hard without working through a SPARQL endpoint using all the SPARQL syntax.”

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Last week the New York City Council gave its nod of approval to legislation that would require city agencies to publish public data sets in a common format on an online portal for the public’s use. Mayor Bloomberg just signed off on it, with the Open Data Bill legislation to be phased in over six years.

But semantic tech startup Ontodia hopes to help speed up the development of the Big Apple as the Digital City of the Future with NYCFacets, a Smart Open Data Exchange for the developer community just released that catalogs all the NYC-related data sources already present in the New York City Open Data Catalogue.

“There are about 900 data sets in the New York City Open Data Catalogue,” says Ontodia co-founder Joel Natividad. Last year, while at TCG Software Services, he was part of a team that won the Large Organization Recognition Award at BigApps 2.0 – the city-sponsored contest for developers to use NYC Open Data – for participating in creating NYC Data Web, which integrates the NYC.gov data sets into a single web of data for developers. The team also included Revelytix and Spry. “Now that the Open Data Bill just passed, there will be a tsunami of data,” he says.

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Semantic Web Community: I’m disappointed in us!  Or at least in our group marketing prowess.  We have been failing to capitalize on two major trends that everyone has been talking about and that are directly addressable by Semantic Web technologies!  For shame.

I’m talking of course about Big Data and NoSQL.  Given that I’ve already given my take on how Semantic Web technology can help with the Big Data problem on SemanticWeb.com, this time around I’ll tackle NoSQL and the Semantic Web.

After all, we gave up SQL more than a decade ago.  We should be part of the discussion.  Heck, even the XQuery guys got in on the action early!

Check out this Google Trends diagram.

NoSQL came out of nowhere in 2009, and now dominates much of the database conversation on the web.  Document stores like MongoDB and CouchDB, distributed, key-value stores such as Riak and Cassandra, and other weird stores like Hadoop-as-database (never understood that usage myself) now dominate the conversation as the alternative to traditional, SQL databases.

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Coming in June from start-up Meronymy is a new RDF enterprise database management system, the Meronymy SPARQL Database Server. The company, founded by Inge Henriksen, began life because of the need he saw for a high-performance and more scalable RDF database server.

The idea to focus on a database server exclusively oriented to Linked Data and the Semantic Web came as a result of Henriksen’s work over the last decade as an IT consultant implementing many semantic solutions for customers in sectors such as government and education. “One issue that always came up was performance,” he explains, especially when performing more advanced SPARQL queries against triple stores using filters, for example.

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Richard Wallis continues his coverage from SemTechBiz Berlin with a recap of the first day of the conference. Wallis writes, “Something that struck me throughout the day was the number of references to the Kasabi Data Marketplace during the day.  Well yes, you might say, you are a Kasabi Partner and Kasabi Staff members Knud Möller and Benjamin Nowack gave presentations.  Of course you would be right.  However, I also noticed references to it in other presentations and in general conversations.” Read more

Attendees at the fast-approaching Semantic Tech & Business Conference in Berlin will find one of the opening conference sessions, The Simple Power of the Link, to provide a good introduction to the value proposition of Linked Data.

Presenter Richard J. Wallis is happy to be on the docket early, so that those in the audience who aren’t coming from a died-in-the-wool semantic web background will get a sense of the big-picture benefits to be realized, and incented enough to explore the possibilities that they won’t be scared off by the more technical discussions later in the program. “Later on, when presenters start talking about graph models and SPARQL endpoint performance, hopefully they can harken back to the simple basic benefits I’ll be discussing,” says Wallis, who will be conducting the session as an independent associate on behalf of Kasabi, the Linked Data marketplace from Talis Systems Ltd. Wallis, currently Kasabi technology evangelist, is launching his own semantic web consultancy this month.

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