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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Announcing Semantic Tech & Business Conference - San Francisco 2012

Semantic Tech & Business Conference is returning 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!

A new paper has been published entitled “Systems Chemical Biology and the Semantic Web: What They Mean for the Future of Drug Discovery Research.” The paper was written by David Wild, Ying Ding, Amit Sheth, Lee Harland, Eric Gifford, and Michael Lajiness. It can be downloaded for a fee of $27.95. According to the abstract, “Systems chemical biology, the integration of chemistry, biology and computation to generate understanding about the way small molecules affect biological systems as a whole, as well as related fields such as chemogenomics, are central to emerging new paradigms of drug discovery such as drug repurposing and personalized medicine.” Read more

To accompany our recent podcast looking back on 2011, we’ve accumulated some additional perspectives from thought leaders in the next-wave Web space on the year that’s quickly passing us by.

Some highlights follow. You’ll see respondents hit on some common themes throughout, such as Big Data, sentiment analytics, specific vertical industry adoption, and the standards space:

 

• SKOS has become an increasingly popular entry point for organizations that want to use semantic technology in practical applications without worrying about the more complicated aspects of semantic web technology. – Bob  DuCharme, solutions architect, TopQuadrant

 

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Andreas Blumauer reports that the PoolParty team has released an improved version of their WordPress plugin which enables linked data enrichments. Blumauer writes, “Users and developers benefit from: automatic annotation of all blog entries displayed as tooltips; a comfortable search facility with auto-complete over all concepts from the linked thesaurus including semantic search over the whole blog; an integrated thesaurus browser; plus a corresponding linked data frontend including RDF/XML serialization of the underlying thesaurus + SPARQL endpoint.” Read more

Bioinformatics software provider IO Informatics recently released its free Knowledge Explorer Personal Edition. Version 3.6 of the Personal Edition can handle most of what Knowledge Explorer Professional 3.6, launched in October, can, but it does all its work in memory without direct connectivity to a back-end database.

“In particular, a lot of the strengths of Knowledge Explorer have to do with modeling data as RDF and then testing queries, visualizing and browsing the data to see that you have the ontologies and data mappings you need for your integration and application requirements.” says Robert Stanley, IO Informatics president and CEO. The Personal version is aimed at academic experts focused on data integration and semantic data modeling, as well as personal power users in life sciences and other data-intensive industries, or anyone who wants to learn the tool in anticipation of leveraging their enterprise data sets for collaboration and integration projects.

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The latest U.S. jobless rate report that came out late last week gave some reason for hope, with the numbers dipping to their lowest level in two years. The percentage came in at 8.6 percent, down from the 9 percent mark it’s been stalled at this year.

Semantics matter here as everywhere else, though, since analysis pointed to the rate dropping as a result of some 315,000 people stopped looking for work. Just 64 percent of Americans are participating in the workforce, down from 64.2 percent. On the other hand, companies have added more jobs and small businesses hiring intentions are up.

If you happen to be an information technology professional, job site Indeed.com adds to the good news, showing a 13 percent change on the positive side in year-over-year comparisons of the industry’s employment trends as of October. What of technology professionals with expertise in semantic web?

Well, there’s some creep-up in the postings in most cases (not all), though things are not near peak (so to speak) levels of a couple of years ago, according to the site’s analysis. See the graphs below for the percentage of some job postings that list semantic web standards and technologies:

 Here’s one interesting new term on the comparative upswing, though:

Also, among the top job trends related to technology, interesting to see HTML 5 at the top of the list, given that richer semantic markup of documents is part of the close-to-finalized spec. And we’ve been hearing more about MongoDB and experimentation with it as a semantic triple store:

 

 Of course, you can find out more about semantic-related job openings every day right here on our web site (just search on “jobs”).

The W3C SPARQL Working Group has published two new working drafts. The first is a working draft of SPARQL 1.1 Overview: “This document is an overview of SPARQL 1.1. It provides an introduction to a set of W3C specifications that facilitate querying and manipulating RDF graph content on the Web or in an RDF store. Comments on this document should be sent to public-rdf-dawg-comments@w3.org, a mailing list with a public archive.” View the working draft here. Read more

Ten years (and change) since the publication of The Semantic Web article in Scientific American, co-author Jim Hendler says he is “very, very happy and optimistic about the state of semantic technologies and the Semantic Web.”

And, he notes, government has been an exciting partner in its progress.

Hendler, professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, home of the Tetherless World Constellation, will provide evidence of that in his presentation at the upcoming Semantic Tech & Business Conference in Washington D.C. this month. TWC works on opening and linking government data using Semantic Web technologies, and Hendler also freely provides his expertise to the U.S. data.gov project, through which he’s in contact with many other governments’ open data projects. Those attending Hendler’s keynote at the conference will get a look at TWC’s new International Open Government Dataset Search (IOGDS) app based on metadata extracted from some 400,000 government datasets on catalog websites. These were converted to RDF Linked Data and then republished via TWC’s LOGD SPARQL endpoint. “That proves we can use metadata to help people find the right data when there is so much available,” Hender says, and yield better visualizations of it, too.

Some 25 countries currently are represented, inclusive of datasets from the U.S., U.K., Singapore, Spain, Italy, Brazil, Kenya, and China. “What’s exciting to me is we see this happening all around the world,” Hendler says. “The extent to which the ecosystem is forming around this area is really surprising.” TWC features a few dozen demos here, which provide some insight into how much of a game-changer it is for government to couple open and Linked Data, providingthe ability to do things more quickly and in a more web-friendly way, and at lower costs. Hendler points to TWC’s creating infographic visualizations from several government datasets in hours, not months, and at a cost of pennies, not tens of thousands of dollars.

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[Editor's Note: This is Juan Sequeda's final report from the International Semantic Web Conference in Bonn, Germany. See his other reports here:
Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5 ]

Day 5 of ISWC 2011 was the third full day and last day of the conference. It started with a keynote from Gerhard Weikum title “For a few more triples“. The rest of the day consisted of sessions on Outrageous Ideas, Social Web, In-Use: Content Management,  Ontology Evaluation, Ontology Matching and Mapping, User Interaction and In Use: Applications. The highlight of the day was the Closing Ceremony, where the winners of several prizes were announced.
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It’s that spooky time of year again – in your neighborhood and on the Semantic Web, too. Put on your goblin getups, and see how some semantic webbers and related sites are getting Halloween treats into their mix:

 

• We’ll start with a response we got to a query we posed about how you might have some fun with Halloween-oriented SPARQL queries. From Bob DuCharme, solutions architect at TopQuadrant, comes a query to extract a SKOS taxonomy of horror movies from DBpedia.

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