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Good-Bye to 2012: Continuing Our Look Back At The Year In Semantic Tech

Jennifer Zaino — Thu, 27 Dec 2012 09:15:20 +0000

Courtesy: Flickr/LadyDragonflyCC <3

Yesterday we began our look back at the year in semantic technology here. Today we continue with more expert commentary on the year in review:

Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead:

I would mention two things (among many, of course).

Schema.org had an important effect on semantic technologies. Of course, it is controversial (role of one major vocabulary and its relations to others, the community discussions on the syntax, etc.), but I would rather concentrate on the positive aspects. A few years ago the topic of discussion was whether having ‘structured data’, as it is referred to (I would simply say having RDF in some syntax or other), as part of a Web page makes sense or not. There were fairly passionate discussions about this and many were convinced that doing that would not make any sense, there is no use case for it, authors would not use it and could not deal with it, etc. Well, this discussion is over. Structured data in Web sites is here to stay, it is important, and has become part of the Web landscape. Schema.org’s contribution in this respect is very important; the discussions and disagreements I referred to are minor and transient compared to the success. And 2012 was the year when this issue was finally closed.
On a very different aspect (and motivated by my own personal interest) I see exciting moves in the library and the digital publishing world. Many libraries recognize the power of linked data as adopted by libraries, of the value of standard cataloging techniques well adapted to linked data, of the role of metadata, in the form of linked data, adopted by journals and soon by electronic books… All these will have a profound influence bringing a huge amount of very valuable data onto the Web of Data, linking to sources of accumulated human knowledge. I have witnessed different aspects of this evolution coming to the fore in 2012, and I think this will become very important in the years to come.

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Picking the President: Twindex, Twitris Track Social Media Electorate

Jennifer Zaino — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 14:43:49 +0000

The U.S. is a mere three months away from choosing who will be its leader for the next four years. The semantic web is a supporting player in the action.

This week, of course, saw the debut of the Twitter Political Index (Twindex), a joint effort between Twitter, Topsy, and the Mellman Group and NorthStar Opinion Research polling groups. Since the Semantic Web Blog last spoke with Topsy execs here, the company has refined its sentiment analysis to the point where it could be released for the Twindex. The sentiment analytics engine ingests hundreds of millions of English-language tweets a day and computes sentiment for all terms in Twitter, though that’s not publicly available yet.

In its Twindex incarnation, Topsy aggregates the underlying sentiment score minute by minute, and then that is rolled up into an hourly and daily score for each candidate, says Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, co-founder and chief scientist at Topsy Labs. Behind the scenes, “that score is normalized so that it is on 0 to 100 scale comparing to all the other terms people talk about,” he says, which is important for keeping perspective on the candidates in context relative to whatever else may be on the mind of the collective social media conscience. It also is weighted to include the scores of the previous two days before its publication at the end of the day, and smoothed out so that it doesn’t jump around in helter-skelter fashion.

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Semantic App Helps Researchers Understand Prescription Drug Abuse

Jennifer Zaino — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 10:10:23 +0000

There’s been a lot of attention given to the issue of prescription drug abuse, in the wake of violent crimes such as one last year that left four people dead in a pharmacy shooting in Suffolk County, New York. A recent study from the Workers Compensation Research Institute also shows that prescription drug abuse is the fastest growing drug problem in the United States, with over fifteen thousand people dying last year from an overdose. And, the U.S. Senate in late May approved an amendment to reclassify drugs that contain hydrocodone, a highly-addictive substance found in Vicodin and Lortabas, among other drugs, as Schedule II substances, while giving law enforcement more tools to monitor distribution of such drugs and also decreasing access to them for non-medical purposes.

What, you may ask, does any of this have to do with semantic technologies? Dr. Amit P. Sheth, Wright State University Kno.e.sis Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge-enabled Computing director and LexisNexis Ohio Eminent Scholar, and Dr. Raminta Daniulaityte of the school’s Center for Interventions, Treatment and Addictions Research (CITAR), have a ready answer : PREDOSE, an application for understanding pain-killer drug abuse through the semantic analysis of social media conversations. More specifically, it’s automated data collection and analysis tools to process web-based data to determine the knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors of addicts, related to buprenorphine, OxyContin and other pharmaceutical opioids. It’s a National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded project created by a partnership between Kno.e.sis and the CITAR.

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Twitris Awarded Patent for Semantic Analysis Methods

Angela Guess — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 13:00:09 +0000

Our own Jennifer Zaino recently reported that semantic social web application Twitris, a program at Wright State University, was tackling coverage of the Occupy Wall Street movement as well as the presidential election. Now Twitris will be busier than ever: “Wright State University has been assigned a patent for core analysis methods used by the Twitris system.” continued…

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Twitris Social Media Analysis Tackles Occupy Wall Street, 2012 Elections

Jennifer Zaino — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 08:40:11 +0000

Semantic social web application Twitris, a project of Kno.e.sis at Wright State University, recently added to its social media analysis event lineup coverage of Occupy Wall Street, and Election 2012 is set to debut in the next couple of weeks.

These join earlier efforts such as the India Against Corruption Twitris site, and across all of them users can explore the popular topics about the event in the Twittersphere for that day; see related information by clicking on a tag; browse topics by location and see how they trend across different segments of society; search and explore questions related to a topic; view sentiments associated with a particular entity in the topic set; and more.

Leading the effort is Kno.e.sis Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge-enabled Computing director and LexisNexis Ohio Eminent Scholar Dr. Amit P. Sheth, who coined the term citizen-sensing and has written on the topic of continuous semantics to analyze real-time data.

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