Today marks International Women’s Day 2013, and Dow Jones & Company is marking the date with a video and infographics that looks at women’s evolution in business. The data informing these elements comes from its Factiva information service, which recently enhanced its metadata and taxonomy credentials with MarkLogic Corp.’s search technology (see our story here).

Factiva was used to map media mentions of women executives in search of the top 20 over the past ten years. The featured individuals are ranked in the infographic according to the number of mentions received in publications ranging from The Wall Street Journal to Barron’s to China’s People’s Daily.

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Real-time macroeconomic and geopolitical events and sentiment about them now figure into RavenPack News Analytics 3.0, to help financial firms react more quickly to what’s happening in the world.

The solution is aimed at quant finance shops, such as hedge funds, banks, and some financial research houses, where the machines are doing the trading. It’s a part of the market that’s had some rough times of late because of some trading errors, but in general quant firms represent a growing piece of the financial space, says RavenPack Head of Sales and Business Development Hugh Taggart.

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Just a little over a year ago The Semantic Web Blog introduced our readers to Gravity in this article. The project, spearheaded by former MySpace execs, is focused on building the Interest Graph. The team’s been pretty quiet about development efforts since that time — until just this month, when it announced Gravity Labs to let the public in on a little more about its underlying Interest Graph infrastructure and to showcase the platform. It also announced that it was open-sourcing some of the “plumbing” code it came up with during development, while understandably keeping its core IT, ontology and algorithms under wraps.

The announcement noted that the internally-named Gravity Interest Service for personalizing content at scale, in real-time, went live at production-scale 6 months ago. So far the technology has created over 400 million user interest graphs; served over 13 million pieces of personalized content per day; personalized the daily Internet experience of tens of millions of users per month; and processed over 25 million inbound interest signals per day, the company says. It expects that at this rate, that in under six months it will be handling 10X all of these numbers.

The Semantic Web Blog once again caught up with Gravity CTO Jim Benedetto to talk some more about the Interest Graph, a term he acknowledges gets thrown around quite a bit these days, with a lot of web sites claiming they’ve got the goods. But, he says, “what they effectively are saying is that buried deep within the data of our logs or deep in the data of how our users interact with our site, we know there are interest indicators there. But a lot of them are not doing much with their data.” Interest Graphs, he says, aren’t owned, but interest data resides in individual places and across the web at large — and they need the Gravity platform to help unlock that to create dynamic and personalized experiences for users, Benedetto says.

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The Wall Street Journal reports on Google’s incorporation of semantic search into its keyword-search system. The article states, “Google Inc. is giving its tried-and-true Web-search formula a makeover as it tries to fix the shortcomings of today’s technology and maintain its dominant market share. Over the next few months, Google’s search engine will begin spitting out more than a list of blue Web links. It will also present more facts and direct answers to queries at the top of the search-results page. The changes to search are among the biggest in the company’s history and could affect millions of websites that rely on Google’s current page-ranking results. At the same time, they could give Google more ways to serve up advertisements.” Read more