Kendall Clark recently discussed what users can expect from Stardog next. Clark wrote, “The most pressing need in Stardog is support for SPARQL 1.1. We got stuck between the devil and the deep blue sea—trying to push the 1.0 release before the SPARQL Working Group was completely finished with the SPARQL 1.1 spec. We were motivated to avoid reimplementing any parts of SPARQL 1.1 because the spec shifted. So we decided SPARQL 1.10 for the Stardog 1.0 release. Then we told everyone that SPARQL 1.1 would be the highest priority item for the post-1.0 release cycle. And so it’s been.” Read more

Richard Wallis has written an article about the latest updates to WorldCat.org. He writes, “After we experimentally added RDFa embedded linked data, using Schema.org markup and some proposed Library extensions, to WorldCat pages, one the most often questions I was asked was where can I get my hands on some of this raw data? We are taking the application of linked data to WorldCat one step at a time so that we can learn from how people use and comment on it. So at that time if you wanted to see the raw data the only way was to use a tool [such as the W3C RDFA 1.1 Distiller] to parse the data out of the pages, just as the search engines do.” Read more

Dan Brickley has posted a great article on the Schema.org blog commenting on some major developments surrounding schema.org. He writes, “Schema.org was launched a year ago. This week several of the schema.org team returned to the SemTechBiz conference for a panel to discuss where we are, and where we’re going.  Schema.org is all about shared vocabulary, rather than any specific markup encoding. As we reported last year, the RDFa Working Group have been working hard to address feedback from schema.org and others. Yesterday’s panel gave us the chance to be the first to welcome W3C’s announcement that RDFa 1.1 is now a full W3C recommendation. This new standard, in particular the RDFa Lite specification, brings together the simplicity of Microdata with improved support for using multiple schemas together.” Read more

Marisa Peacock reports that the new release of Bottlenose introduces reader and newspaper modules. She writes, “With Bottlenose 3, more than 30 new features work to improve the way users can connect with more types of social accounts, discover and respond to more than 140 kind of messages, and interact through more user friendly interfaces. Most, if not all of these new and improved features were the result of feedback from Bottlenose’s more than 50,000 beta testers, who have spent an average of 60 minutes a day using Bottlenose. Still in Beta, Bottlenose has released two completely new apps, ‘Reader’ and ‘Newspaper,’ as well as an improved version of Sonar, powered by Bottlenose’s platform, called StreamOS.” Read more

Ryan DeShazer of Search Insider recently shared his insights on how SEO needs to adapt or in order to stay current with Google’s planned semantic search updates. DeShazer lists three pieces of advice. The first is, “Become a content strategist – technical on- and off-page factors will continue to see a decline in importance. The most compelling and desirable content will win. I can’t help but think how this new thinking gels perfectly with the concept of storytelling and content curation through social media channels. This construct would be the ideal ying-yang relationship to content marketing across search and social channels.” Read more

FirstRain recently announced some enhancements to their semantic Business Monitoring Engine which is “used by global business professionals to track the critical developments impacting their business.” According to the release, “Focusing on two major areas: role-based workflow improvements and mobile app availability, this newest release delivers a whole new level of simple yet effective intelligence integration into the daily workflow of sales, marketing and finance professionals.” Read more

The AKSW group recently announced the official release of DBpedia Live: “The main objective of DBpedia is to extract structured information from Wikipedia,
convert it into RDF, and make it freely available on the Web. In a nutshell, DBpedia is the Semantic Web mirror of Wikipedia. Wikipedia users constantly revise Wikipedia articles with updates happening almost each second. Hence, data stored in the official DBpedia endpoint can quickly become outdated, and Wikipedia articles need to be re-extracted. DBpedia Live enables such a continuous synchronization between DBpedia and Wikipedia. There was a preliminary PHP based DBpedia Live extraction framework available, which was, however, based on an older version of the DBpedia extraction framework and did not contain all necessary features to synchronise properly with Wikipedia.” Read more