Kenneth Baclawski has proposed a new W3C community group, the Semantic Open Data group. According to the proposal, “This group intends to explore ways to leverage OData as a contributor to the Semantic Web vision and to help achieve a common understanding of both technologies as well as their relationship to each other. You are invited to support the creation of this group. Once the group has a total of five supporters, W3C launch the group and people can join to begin work.” Read more

According to a new article, “Tom Sawyer Software, the premier provider of software for building high-performance data visualization and social network analysis applications, announces the company’s product roadmap for supporting online geospatial data services. The first of these services to be provided is the Oracle Fusion Middleware MapViewer. Tom Sawyer Software‘s support of web-based geospatial services is in response to the growing need for visual analysis applications that integrate geospatial data with business data. With the added support for Oracle MapViewer, Tom Sawyer Software customers can now more quickly integrate complex data from disparate sources with different geospatial data services in their visual analysis applications.” Read more

Webnodes AS has announced version 3.7 of their content management system with schema.org support. According to the article, “With this release, Webnodes is the world’s first CMS with fully integrated and dynamic Schema.org support. This means that all content classes and properties in Webnodes can be mapped to corresponding types and properties in Schema.org dynamically.” Read more

Facebook now supports microformats in its Download Your Information feature: “The addition provides developers with a way to parse the profile information, posts, photos and videos contained in a Facebook user’s account. Although the change doesn’t have a direct impact on what a mainstream user can do with their Facebook data – you still can’t export your Facebook contact list, for example – it’s an important step for Facebook to make in terms of loosening its formerly tight control over user data.” Read more

Dr. Markus Krötzsch has announced the release of Semantic MediaWiki 1.6.0 (SMW). The announcement states, “SMW is a popular free and open source content management system based on the MediaWiki software that powers Wikipedia. It adds capabilities of semantic data management, querying, and export. Many extensions to SMW are available for adding further features ranging from faceted data browsing to RDFa support.” Read more

A recent article reports on the success of Smartlogic’s Semaphore with EPiServer 6 websites. Rufus Leonard, a London/Dubai-based digital agency, “completed a successful integration project where the semantic capabilities of Smartlogic‘s Semaphore software were used in conjunction with the popular EPiServer 6 web content management system. The result is a semantic website that appropriately models the client’s business while allowing users to locate unstructured content, efficiently integrated into a content management system.” Read more

We recently reported on a survey being conducted on the topic of controlled vocabularies. So far, 143 participants have given their feedback and the initial results of the survey are in. One article writer was surprised by the answer to the survey question, “What are the main application areas of controlled vocabularies from your perspective?”

The article states, “A bit surprising is the intermediate result, that it´s not ‘Semantic Search’ or ‘Support of multilingual applications’ which was considered to be the most important application. Instead of this it turned out that ‘Data Integration’ is king.” Over 57% of respondents rated data integration as “very important” while only 2.1% rated it as “not relevant.” Read more