David Amerland of Imassera recently wrote, “It seems that $1 billion plus change these days is what’s required to buy a photo-sharing app (if you’re Facebook), a global phone manufacturer (if you’re Google) or a microblogging site (if you happen to be Yahoo). Beyond the jaw-dropping numbers that are casually bandied around for these acquisitions lies a game plan that has every major player struggling to position themselves for relevance and longevity in the semantic web. This ‘new’ web is characterized by two related things: data and connectivity and these happen to be the exact same building blocks out of which web verticals are created.” Read more

Yahoo! is looking for a Senior Research Scientist, Scalable Machine Learning in New York, NY. According to the post, “Machine learning and data mining are ubiquitous in Web research and stand at the core of Yahoo!’s products and platforms, involving important functions such as classification, prediction, ranking, clustering, sampling, compression, recommendation, dimension reduction, indexing, pattern mining and regression.  The technical challenges associated with these tasks have been extensively studied using standard computational models.  However, they still represent an open research area in large-scale, high-throughput data environments such as Yahoo!’s.” Read more

Courtesy: Flickr/ Sean MacEntee

Earlier this month word came of a revision to schema.org: Version 1.0a additions, according to this posting from Dan Brickley, include the Datasets vocabulary, and some supporting utility terms for describing schema.org types, properties and their inter-relationships. One of the gems in the update are additions related to the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI), an effort led by the Association of Educational Publishers and Creative Commons, which has as its goals making it easier to publish, discover and delivery quality educational resources on the web. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation helped fund the work.

With schema.org serving as a catalyst for its work, the LRMI developed a common metadata framework for tagging online learning resources, with the idea of having that metadata schema incorporated into Schema.org. With that now the case, it’s possible for publishers or curators of educational content to use LRMI markup and have that metadata recognized by the major search engines.

“One of the reasons why education was one of the first extensions of schema.org is that the education industry is going through some very interesting times,” says Madi Weland Solomon, head of Data Architecture Standards at education company Pearson plc, one of the LRMI project launch partners.

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Barbara Starr of Search Engine Land reports, “In a June 2010 Semantic Web Meetup in San Diego, Peter Mika of Yahoo!’s research division gave a presentation entitled, ‘The future face of Search is Semantic for Facebook, Google and Yahoo!’ As the title suggests, the presentation focused on the ever-growing use of semantic markup as a means for helping computers parse and understand content. The talk focused on what was then the current state of the Semantic Web, as well as upcoming formats/technologies in development and the research being done in the field of semantic search.” Read more

Google has scooped up news aggregation summary service Wavii for $30 million, according to Reuters. (Google and Wavii haven’t officially commented yet.) Wavii’s service has been influenced by expert machine learning natural language processing work, as explained by founder and CEO Adrian Aoun in our interview here. In February, a blog on the site also explained its use of classification for NLP tasks like disambiguating entities, automatically learning new entities and relationship extraction. Late last year Wavii announced its iPhone app.

Reports have it that Google and Apple were in a bidding war over acquiring the venture, which has been likened to Yahoo’s Summly buyout in March (see story here). TechCrunch says the Wavii team will join Google’s Knowledge Graph division.
When it comes to delivering personalized intelligence about what’s up in the world, Wavii aims to better understand users and what they’ll want to see in their feeds not just via explicit topic follows, but also via various signals. These include which other topics are involved in the events they comment on, how often they click into events about each topic, what topics they search for and what topic pages they visit. It also includes other attributes of stories they care about besides the topics, and their interest level in a topic to guess what the interest might be in related topics.

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John Abell of GMA News recently told the story of Summly, a company developed by 17-year-old Nick D’Aloisio and sold to Yahoo! for $30 million. Abell writes, “D’Aloisio’s youth—he’s 17—and windfall are interesting data points, even if all the work behind the magic algorithm isn’t the sole product of this high schooler’s brain. Like all really good ideas, Summly’s is simple: Anything can be summarized, but by having a computer do it,  the number of things you can summarize—and the speed with which it can be done—are massively increased. As an app, it filtered news stories and—Presto Chango!—spit out the CliffsNotes version, optimized for a smartphone’s tiny screen (and our infinitesimal attention span).” Read more

Greg Sterling of Search Engine Land reports, “Yahoo and Jybe announced that the latter was being acquired by the former. Jybe, which I had not heard of previously, is described by Yahoo as ‘a personalized recommendation company founded with the vision to help people find the things they love to do based on what’s trending in their social circles.’ It sounds like a ‘social search’ or ‘social discovery’ app. Indeed, all five Jybe team members are former search people — and former Yahoo employees: ‘As part of this acquisition, we’re welcoming an extremely talented group of engineers and data scientists who will join Yahoo!’s platform organization, focused on targeting and personalization. This will be a ‘coming home’ for the team — all five are former Yahoos. Arnab Bhattacharjee was the VP of Yahoo!’” Read more

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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Waqar Hasan, who in a past life was vp for data platforms at Yahoo, hasn’t lost his fascination with the power a business can gain when it knows what to do with its data – make that its Big Data. Now CEO of InsightsOne, Hasan and his company are focused on making predictive analytics accessible to the general B2C marketing organization via the cloud.

Among its early customers is online review site Angie’s List, which in mid-January selected the cloud-based predictive analytics solution to deliver a 1-to-1 consumer marketing experience to its members.

“We’re targeting B2C marketers to increase the relevance and profitability of their consumer interactions, by applying micro-segmentation on Big Data to extract all sorts of signals from the data and turn it to a more powerful predictor for the future – who will buy what and who is likely to churn,” Hasan says.

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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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