Seevl, the music discovery service built on Semantic Technology that I wrote about a few months ago, has released a significant update to their plugin for YouTube. The plugin is still only available for the Google Chrome browser, but other browser plugins are in the works. You can grab the Chrome plugin here.

Once the plugin is installed, the user has new options available when visiting YouTube. First, there’s a new search option next to the standard YouTube search bar.

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Semantic Tech & Business Conference Returns to San Francisco

Semantic Tech & Business Conference returns to San Francisco in June! Join us from June 3-7 for complete coverage of Big Data, Linked Data, Extreme Information Management, and Semantic Web. From breakthrough approaches to solving business problems to the big data implications of fast–evolving technologies, SemTechBiz provides you with an unparalleled interactive experience and delivers tangible business value. We're offering a special early rate when you register by February 17. Sign up now!

Yesterday, I wrote about how I’ve been using Seevl as a music discovery service. Today, I catch up with Dr. Alexandre Passant, CEO and Founder of Seevl.net, for a deeper look at the music discovery service.

Q: How would you describe Seevl?

A: We initially defined ourselves solely as a music discovery website, and we’re now developing several products around the data we gathered for building it. Our main focus is to bring context to music, and we want to help people to know more about the cultural and musical universe of the bands they like, to discover new ones and most importantly, to understand the connections between all.

Q: Where does the name “Seevl” come from?

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A video on YouTube is educating viewers about “Making Video Search Semantic with Semex and Media Globe.” According to the video description, “Semantic search for multimedia is a problem every video site would like to solve. Imagine being able to search for a person and getting results for every video they appear in, without needing a text description included underneath. Or trying to locate every video posted about a specific location. Or getting the context of several videos all about baseball or your favorite movie character.” Read more

The Internet hasn’t quashed TV yet. The Nielsen Company just reported that Americans watched more television than ever last year, logging about 34 hours per week for broadcast networks and basic cable channels. While a lot of that time appears to be spent watching dramas like Hawaii Five-O, sports, and musically-infused Fox hits like American Idol and Glee, viewers are also tuning into news and other information programs that mix multiple stories and often provide opinions about those topics (whether from hosts or guests).

Call it the cloud of linear media – that’s what Critical Mention CEO Sean Morgan dubs it, and it’s a cloud he wants to own, organize and semanticize. The idea is to enable corporate general counsels and vice presidents of everything from corporate communications to PR to crisis communications to know in real-time not only that something’s being said about their client or corporate brand on broadcast TV –and radio, too – but what viewpoint is being taken, as well. Is the polarity expressive of positive or negative sentiment or opinion?

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Here are two words that don’t necessarily spring first to mind when you think of implementing cutting-edge semantic web technology: Video and non-profit.

 Yet that’s exactly the direction taken by ViewChange.org , a project of Link Media’s LinkTV nationwide news, events and culture television channel and website. With funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, ViewChange.org uses video to tell stories about progress in global development, with an eye to influencing action on the part of everyone from average citizens to the media to policymakers to NGO staffers. Non-profit organizations, film distributors and individual filmmakers contribute to its own videos their documentaries, news reports, and other films to the site, and as users click through video links in featured topics, from water and sanitation to governance and transparency to environment, the site uses semantic web technologies to dynamically generate links from the video being viewed to related video media, news stories, topics and actions – links that change based on where you are in the video.   

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Come tomorrow, you may be looking for a chance to do some relaxing reading after the Thanksgiving football and food fest and the Black Friday shopping chaos.

To that end, The Semantic Web Blog thought it would offer some guidance on a few analyst reports and surveys that you might enjoy spending some time with – and find useful for your business efforts, especially as they relate to how you can help drive value by better engaging with the exploding world of social media  – for your weekend reading:

 

•  Gleansight: Social Media Monitoring: A new analyst firm, Gleanster LLC, has produced a new report on what companies are learning about the emerging area of mining social media content as they attempt to better understand the voice of the customer to improve marketing and consumer satisfaction and reduce research and support costs, among other things. That includes, of course, using text mining apps to identify topics and using semantic technologies to classify comments by positive or negative sentiment. The report focuses on the challenges — the technological ones, of course, such as finding the valuable nuggets in the volume of data.

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Changing the future of e-business Malta Business Weekly We are moving away from Web 2.0 and into the era of Web 3.0. Facebook, YouTube, social networks and blogs, that form part of Web 2.0, are only a pixel of …

Advocacy Site ViewChange.org Taps Semantic Web Technology MediaPost Publications Aiding this goal, semantic Web technology, which sees the entire Web as one big database, does more than scan for keywords in content across the Web. … LinkTV Building a YouTube for Social Change GigaOm (blog) Link TV to Launch ViewChange.org — a Digital-Media Hub to Spark Progress on … SYS-CON Media (press release) all 5 news articles »

ROCHESTER, NY – June 16th, 2009. Forget about trying to find text by simply using keywords or entities. Today at the Semantic Technology Conference, TextWise announces the release of their Semantic Cloud providing companies the ability to mine content using digital DNA – Semantic Signatures®. Semantic Signatures® represent a deeper meaning from text than either keywords or entities can provide. Semantic Signatures® encode the meaning of text by creating a unique ‘signature’ for every document providing superior retrieval and categorization of information without the ambiguity of keyword or entity services.

The TextWise Semantic Cloud provides a service for enterprises to retrieve real-time, highly relevant matches within their own private and secure dynamic content collections.

Using Semantic Signatures® a whole new class of search and matching applications is possible using documents as exemplars for finding very similar documents. TextWise has created one such application – Similarity Search and Matching (SSM). SSM enables fast and accurate information discovery for unstructured text.

Semantic Signatures® are customizable for any domain or content type, from blogs and online advertising to patent or pharmaceutical verticals, and new languages. Signatures quickly adjust to chromosomal variances among domains, languages, and collections. Signatures facilitate application development for a wide range of applications from social CRM, to difficult verticals such as patent lead generation and medical/pharma SSM.

“Semantic Signatures® are a big leap forward for jumpstarting wider adoption of semantic applications. The Signatures serve as a bridge between keyword search and entity extraction to the promise of scalable RDF-based inference systems that won’t deliver for a few years” said Connie Kenneally, TextWise CEO. “Now, companies can start making semantics a reality by utilizing automated concept-encoded text, a document’s digital DNA, to facilitate relevant retrieval of information with large volumes of unstructured text.”

SemanticHacker API for Testing and Developing:

A free version of SSM is available on the TextWise API site www.semantichacker.com.

Developers can organize and match their content against our public content collections of news, blog articles, Wikipedia articles and images, Flickr images and YouTube videos.

Web publishers can experience the power of Semantic Signatures® immediately with our Similarity Search widget or WordPress plug-in also available on our API.

Enterprises can place their own content in our semantic cloud to facilitate SSM against their own content.

To quickly experience the power of SSM in action, try our hands-on demo or view the video at www.textwise.com.

 

— DENNIS THOMAS, SANJEEV MISHRA

Executive Summary

The future web is expected to evolve into a situation aware web that surfaces the hidden knowledge of enterprises and individuals and enables greatly more powerful paradigms. Actualizing these requirements demands a semantic technology that is magnitudes greater in efficiency and performance than conventional layered technologies.

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