Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

In the spirit of keeping up with product updates to some of the interesting semantic web offerings we’ve seen the last couple of weeks, it seems time to take note of the enhancements and partnerships recently announced for a few other technologies we’ve covered.

Calais

Version 3.1, the latest release, has gone live and touts as one of its main features improved company and geographic disambiguation. The reference database of tens of millions of company names and their variations now will include a broader range of companies on an ongoing basis, Thomson Reuters says. Expanded name cross-referencing and textual hints, such as location or industry, should work to clear up ambiguities around whether a reference is, for example, to Acme Inc., Acme Corp., or Acme Ltd.

Geographic disambiguation uses elements of Metaweb’s Freebase and other public data assets to determine to which town, city, state and/or country a given document is referring, as well as hints in the text to refine results. Calais 3.1 also returns geographic coordinates, which can help jump start developers working on mapping applications, the company says.

When SemanticWeb.com spoke to Thomson Reuters in May at the time of its Version 2 release, Thomas Tague, Calais evangelist and project lead, said to expect a dramatic expansion in knowledge domains over the coming year.

“What’s important is we proved a model where we can use open data sources, like Freebase, combined with NLP (Natural Language Processing) to generate entities more rapidly,” he said at the time. Among the additional semantic entities in the Calais 3.1 vocabulary are PatentFiling, PatentIssuance, FDAPhaase, PersonEmailAddress and PersonEmployment, as well as new elements for PersonAttributes and SecondaryIssuance. PersonRelation is an entity that extracts references to symmetric relationships between people in the areas of business, academics, military service or politics, as well as friendship or marital status.

Cognition

The company recently said its semantic map — 500,000 word stems and 4 million semantic contexts strong when we wrote about it in August — announced that the scope of that map now is more than double the size of any other computational linguistic dictionary for English. It includes over 10 million semantic connections that are comprised of semantic contexts, meaning representations, taxonomy and word meaning distinctions.

“Our Semantic Map has grown substantially and now is the largest and most complete of the English language,” says CEO Scott Jarus.

Delve Networks

Delve has continued to add a few features to its semantically enabled and speech recognition savvy video search platform. It now has support for RSS feeds so that people can subscribe to publishers’ video content via iTunes and get it delivered to Apple’s devices. Also, it now has the ability for customers to schedule when and how often video will be published, avoiding the manual task of, as an example, publishing on the day after the election a retrospective of videos from the Obama campaign, according to CEO Alex Castro.

EveryZing

The search optimization vendor — which provides the ezSEARCH and ezSEO software-as-a-service platform for helping big companies merchandise their audio and video media — has launched MetaPlayer. The video player platform utilizes the company’s patented technology for generating high-quality meta-data and its “jump-to” capabilities to let consumers navigate within video content clips through time-stamped tags, searching across its full transcript or by using EveryZing’s scene-based thumbnail navigation.

MetaPlayer also offers viral video features that enables media companies to allow their end-users to create clips from within a video, as well as share, embed or e-mail the clips, while still retaining control of the advertising and branding elements of the video experience. Finally, it integrates YouTube and other third-party players, letting companies add those channels to their end users’ content experience, while maintaining a seamless, branded player experience on their sites, EveryZing says. It’s being used by the Dallas Cowboys to increase discovery and monetization of its premium content for fans.

Expert System

The company announced a strategic partnership with Neighborhood America, which has developed ELAvate, a social networking solution for enterprises. Customers of ELAvate who are building online communities can use Expert’s COGITO Monitor and COGITO Semantic Advertiser to monitor and analyze consumer sentiment online, as well as increase advertisement revenue through semantic content matching.

The goal would be to help Neighborhood America’s customers better leverage the collaboration environment by analyzing sentiment and intent within the discussions that occur inside their communities in real-time, Neighborhood America says, so they can more quickly address customer needs.

Garlik

Garlik, the online identity semantic web startup, joined up with U.K. recruiter Jobsite to protect jobseekers against online identity and financial fraud with a new service called FraudAlert. U.K. jobseekers who put confidential information on their online resumes, such as date of birth and national insurance numbers, could make themselves more vulnerable to identity theft.

But online fraudsters could also work with more common details such as name and address. The new service lets them know if their personal details appear on traded or compromised personal and financial data sources, and provides advice on how to protect themselves.

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