Michael Dunn, CTO of Hearst Media has been quoted saying, “Video, in its native form, is a blob of content… and it’s hard to extract data from it.” Thankfully, semantic technologies are starting to take video “beyond the blob,” and that is precisely what panelists at the upcoming Semantic Technology and Business Conference in San Francisco will discuss.

The panel discussion Beyond the Blob: Semantic Video’s Coming of Age is set to begin at 2:25 on Monday, June 3 at SemTechBiz and will feature a panel of semantic web professionals with a broad range of experience regarding semantic video. The panel will be moderated by Kristen Milhollin, Project Lead & Founder of GoodSpeaks.org, an organization aimed at creating a nonprofit media and data distribution network that increases public awareness and support of the work done by nonprofit and other charitable organizations.  Read more

Friend of SemanticWeb.com Dr. James Hendler recently shared his perspective on the arrival of Watson at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute: “Every single student in the Department of Computer Science here at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has the potential to revolutionize computing. But with the arrival of Watson at Rensselaer, they’re even better positioned to do so. Watson has caused the researchers in my field of artificial intelligence (AI) to rethink some of our basic assumptions. Watson’s cognitive computing is a breakthrough technology, and it’s really amazing to be here at Rensselaer, where we will be the first university to get our hands on this amazing system.” Read more

The BBC has posted a new video discussing the Internet’s next frontier, particularly the Internet of Things. According to the description of the video, “In its early days the internet was seen simply as a way of transferring data across large distances but it is now playing an ever increasing part in our lives. David Reid reports on what is seen as the next big frontier for the web – called the internet of things – allowing you to use your smartphone to control your home heating, pay for parking and even monitor your own fitness.” Read more

The recent International Semantic Web Conference produced a number of excellent sessions, including a very popular Big Graph Data Panel, captured on video by the folks at VideoLectures. The panel was moderated by Frank van Harmelen (Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Sciences, VU University Amsterdam), with panelists Tim Berners-Lee (W3C), John Giannandrea (Google), Mike Stonebraker (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT), and Bryan Thompson (SYSTAP).

According to the description of the video, “The Semantic Web / Linked Data has grown immensely over the past years. When the Semantic Web community started working over a decade ago the main question was where to get the data from. By now the question of how to process ever increasing amount of semantic/linked data has come to people’s utmost attention. The goal of this panel is to shed light on the various approaches/options for Big Graph Data processing.” Read more

Irene Celino recently shared a presentation on Linking Smart Cities Datasets with Human Computation: the case of UrbanMatch at the eleventh annual ISWC conference in Boston. The description of the presentation states, “To realize the Smart Cities vision, applications can leverage the large availability of open datasets related to urban environments. Those datasets need to be integrated, but it is often hard to automatically achieve a high-quality interlinkage. Human Computation approaches can be employed to solve such a task where machines are ineffective.” Read more

IBM recently announced “the formation of a collaboration to advance Watson’s use in the medical training field. The IBM team of researchers that created Watson will work with Cleveland Clinic clinicians, faculty and medical students to enhance the capabilities of Watson’s Deep Question Answering technology for the area of medicine. Watson’s ability to analyze the meaning and context of human language and quickly process information to piece together evidence for answers can help healthcare decision makers, such as clinicians, nurses and medical students, unlock important knowledge and facts buried within huge volumes of information.” Read more

Kyield founder Mark Montgomery has posted a new video entitled Kyield Enterprise – Data Tailored to Each Entity. the nearly eleven minute presentation is the third video in a series on Montgomery’s “revolutionary system that provides adaptive data management based on the self-managed profiles of each entity.” Watch the full video below. Read more

Bill Carter of the New York Times reports, “Inspired by a pillar of antiquity, the Library of Alexandria, Brewster Kahle has a grand vision for the Internet Archive, the giant aggregator and digitizer of data, which he founded and leads. Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, in the company warehouse in Richmond, Calif. ‘We want to collect all the books, music and video that has ever been produced by humans,’ Mr. Kahle said. As of Tuesday, the archive’s online collection will include every morsel of news produced in the last three years by 20 different channels, encompassing more than 1,000 news series that have generated more than 350,000 separate programs devoted to news.” Read more

The OCLC has created a video entitled Linked Data for Libraries. The fourteen minute video provides an introduction to the concepts and technology behind linked data as well as how linked data works and how it is used in libraries.

According to the organization website, “OCLC is a nonprofit, membership, computer library service and research organization dedicated to the public purposes of furthering access to the world’s information and reducing information costs. Read more

Ryan Lawler of TechCrunch reports that semantic video technology company Affine has a new name: “Affine Systems first came to market several years ago with a product that helped advertisers deliver video ads with some pretty impressive brand safety features. Using a semantic video technology, Affine could scan videos frame-by-frame and group them together by relevance, enabling advertisers and agencies to build their own channels or content to run campaigns against. The only problem? No one could pronounce ‘Affine’.” Read more