Dear Ladies and Gentlemen!

Open Calais - a new and smart API from Reuters - finally does what critics say to be the greatest obstacle of the Semantic Web: Taking the metadata burden from the enduser by providing an automatic meta-tagging tool. The principle behind Open Calais is easy: Put in some unstructured text and get in return nicely structured RDF-data. Backed by powerful Text Mining and machine learning techniques the API automatically detects entities like persons, events, countries and other facts.

Open Calais takes account of the fact that the added value of content is hidden in its structure. Uncovering that structure and representing it in a interoperable format makes existing ressources more programmable and reusable.

But what is in for Reuters? Nothing less than the biggest structured content repository on the web. Should not we talk about this little fact aswell?

With best regards,

The Semantic Web Company

Werner Buhre is Communications Manager at Austria´s largest Telco. He is well renowned as one of the Web 2.0 forethinkers in his community. Andreas Blumauer talked with him about the impact of Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web on large companies like Telekom Austria.

Fast and efficient search and retrieval is a crucial factor in IT-projects. Lucene provides a platform neutral, open source developing framework which has attracted a lot of attention over the past few years. Its scalability, performance and universality - especially in the field of enterprise search - makes it an ideal alternative to proprietary solutions. The seminar will take place on April 4, 2008 in Vienna.

In 12 daily seminars you get step by step advanced in methods and technologies for your semantic project. A newly designed curriculum will provide you with a faster insight into the topics Semantic Web and Social Software. The courses will take place between May 27 - July 4, 2008 in Vienna. Each seminar is a stand-alone-module and can be booked singularly.

From September 3 - 5, 2008 TRIPLE-I 2008 will take place in Graz. TRIPLE-I is a joint venture of the conferences I-KNOW, I-MEDIA and I-SEMANTICS covering the topics Knowledge Management, New Media Technologies and Semantic Systems. The last years conference attracted 550 participants from 33 countries.

Reuters CEO sees "semantic web" in its future

At Money:Tech yesterday, I did an on-stage interview with Devin Wenig, the charismatic CEO-to-be of Reuters (following the still-not completed merger with Thomson). Devin highlighted what he considers two big trends hitting financial (and other professional) data.

A good place to see the true frontline in Microsoft's battle with Google is deep in the bowels of the British Library in London. In a room under the library's red brick building near St Pancras railway station, a Microsoft-funded team is working 14 hours a day to scan shelf upon shelf of books.

EU Tries To Get Its Members Together Online

The lack of interoperable government systems is being addressed by the European Commission through the Semic project, short for Semantic Interoperability Center, a program based in Brussels that is encouraging data experts working for EU national and state governments to adopt common standards for data collection and transmission.

OpenLink Software Inc. announces the immediate availability of the latest edition of OpenLink Virtuoso, its industry-acclaimed hybrid data-server and integration platform for SQL, XML, RDF, and Web Services. This release introduces a new approach to enterprise information and data-integration, leveraging recent advances in Semantic Web technology such as SPARQL and the best practices of HTTP-based Linked Data across heterogeneous data sources.

Large-scale digital music distribution is bringing about a profound revolution in the way we ‘consume’ music. The market is still in flux, but it is very clear that the hi-fi systems of the future will be significantly different to what we see today, say European researchers.

Following on its OpenSocial APIs for building cross-social network applications, Google has created a Social Graph API that searches the Web for explicit public statements of connections between people. The Web crawler looks for XFN (XHTML Friends Network) and FOAF (Friend of a Friend), which are standard formats used to indicate people connections.

Mike Bergman: The Semantic Web and Industry Standards

Proprietary is a Four-Letter Word I wrote the following in response to a recent press inquiry asking me to define the terms “semantic Web” and “industry standards”. It got me to thinking about how some new companies are misappropriating the terms: The “Semantic Web” is a vision first promoted by Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the [...]

If your Data Space was a Solar System, your personal Identity would be the Sun. I say this because your Identity is the conduit (access mechanism) to your data graph; the data you generate from various application interaction activities such as: Blogging, Bookmarking, Photo Sharing, Feed Aggregation etc.

Mike Bergman has just penned a post titled: Linked Data Comes of Age, that provides a nice 12 month summation of Linked Data and the Linking Open Data Community project's efforts to date. Like most of us in the Linked Data community, he sees the upcoming Linked Data Conference by Jupiter as a watershed moment.