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Semantic Web Company Newsletter September 21, 2009 EDITORIAL Better Access to Government Data Dear Subscriber! While data interoperabilty in the public sector has been around for some time now, opening up governmental data by using Semantic Web standards has become a hot topic over the last few months. According to Tim Berners-Lee, who has been appointed a high level advisor to the US government, it is basically about transparency and accountability of public agency. He wrote a brief manifesto how to publish governmental data to the Open Data Cloud. The US government has recently started initiatives like Data.gov or Recovery.gov where huge data sets are being provided for further reuse. These initiatives are often critizised for just providing raw, often inconclusive data without any ready-to-use end-user services. This criticism misses the fact that it is not the duty to provide the public with preconfigured information but to enable access to ressources that can be resued by the public to develop their own services and decide for themselves which information is most relevant to them. A small project called ThisWeKnow has took advantage of this approach and started to add more semantically reasonable structure to these sets aiming at exploring trends and knowledge discovery based on newly linked data sets. [Reviews of this project available from ReadWriteWeb and CMS Wire.] It will be interesting to observe how European governmental bodies will react to this trend and if we soon will see more government information online that serves the needs - not just of the Semantic Web - but first of all the citizens. With best regards, Your Semantic web Company
VOICES Herwig Rollet: "Xohana helps people better articulate what they really want."
SWC UPDATE SWC offers webinars for quick-start in Semantic Web
SWC UPDATE SWC
recommends: Semantic Web Technology
MARKET SCAN BeliefNetworks to Provide Forbes.com With Technology to Enhance Access to Relevant Content and Ads
MARKET SCAN SeaChange Incorporates Jinni's Search-and-Recommendation Engine into its VOD Platform
MARKET SCAN Improve Reporting with a Semantic Information Delivery Architecture
TECHNOLOGY SCAN Google Adds Semantic Web, Facebook Support for Video Search
TECHNOLOGY SCAN Oracle delivers native support for Thomson Reuters' OpenCalais service
TECHNOLOGY SCAN Making news more searchable and identifiable with hNews: could it even lead to a new business model for journalism?
BLOG SCAN Q&A: The Now and Future Web
BLOG SCAN Web's Future: More Content, Fewer Sites
BLOG SCAN NetBase Thinks You Can Get Rid Of Jews With Alcohol And Salt
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Recent
Publications 
Foundations of Semantic Web Technologies This book is unique in several respects. It contains an in-depth treatment of all the major foundational languages for the Semantic Web and provides a full treatment of the underlying formal semantics, which is central to the Semantic Web effort. It is also the very first textbook that addresses the forthcoming W3C recommended standards OWL 2 and RIF. Furthermore, the covered topics and underlying concepts are easily accessible for the reader due to a clear separation of syntax and semantics … This book will be well received and play an important role in training a larger number of students who will seek to become proficient in this growing discipline.
Event Tip SEMAPRO 2009 - Third International Conference on Advances in Semantic Processing Sunday, 11. - Friday, 16. October 2009, Sliema / Malta The inaugural International Conference on Advances in Semantic Processing, SEMAPRO 2007, was initiated considering the complexity of understanding and processing information. Semantic processing considers contextual dependencies and adds to the individually acquired knowledge emergent properties and understanding..
Event Tip TMRA
2009 | 5th International Conference on Sunday, 11.- Tuesday, 13. November 2009, Leipzig/Germany TMRA 2009 will be the fifth event in the annual series of international conferences on Topic Maps Research and Applications. TMRA is the advanced scientific and industrial forum whose main object is connecting the key players in the Topic Maps community. Here you will find researchers and users in government and industry, as well as the vendors, the luminaries, and the standards creators gathered for an exchange of ideas in a stimulating setting.
Event Tip SAMT 2009 | 4th International Conference on Semantic and Digital Media Technologies Wednesday, 02. December 2009 to Friday, 04. December 2009, Graz/Austria The 4th International Conference on Semantic and Digital Media Technologies (SAMT '09) targets at narrowing the large disparity between the low-level descriptors that can be computed automatically from multimedia content and the richness and subjectivity of semantics in user queries and human interpretations of audiovisual media - The Semantic Gap.
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Knowing the intentions of your customers is a crucial asset in rapidly
evolving markets. Xohana, a recently launched intentaion platform,
uses semantics to help customers better articulate their needs and
demands. CEO Herwig Rollet, former high level researcher and specialist
in semantic technologies, gives us an insight into his platform
and explains the pricinples of an emerging intention economy.
The webinars of the Semantic Web Company offer basics and practical
knowledge about methologies, technologies and standards of the Semantic
Web. Within 90 minutes you acquire an overview over latest developments
and topics relevant for your business and areas like Content-Engineering,
Knowledge Management, Business-Intelligence, E-Business and more.
Each webinar is a stand-alone-module and can be booked singularly.
Attendance is limited to ten participants.
BeliefNetworks, Inc. (www.BeliefNetworks.net), a leader in semantic
intelligence and predictive analytics, announced today an agreement
with one of the most trusted information resources for the world's
business leaders, Forbes.com (www.forbes.com), to provide innovative
technology that will serve semantically relevant display ad recommendations
to its users and additionally to provide its users relevant content
from other sites, blogs and real time Twitter conversations.
VOD, IPTV and advanced advertising technology provider, SeaChange
International, announced Wednesday the launch of a new VOD search
and navigation tool for cable and IPTV operators that is powered
by technology from Jinni, a company that offers a semantic search-and-recommendation
engine which it says is based on content genetics and user psychographics
(note: the company, whose CEO is Mike Pohl, formerly president and
CEO of nCUBE, a pioneering VOD technology provider that was sold
to C-COR--which was itself subsequently sold to Arris--back in 2004,
recently formed a partnership with OpenTV--see the article published
on itvt.com, August 12th).
The very early stage of business intelligence was stacks of format-nonchangeable
and plain text mainframe reports. In order to find a number, the
business users needed to flip through mountains of paper. The mainframe
reporting architecture was very basic. So when Excel and Access
became an option for reporting, business users were very happy that
they could have a mouse-clicking system for reporting. When the
volume of reports grew and customization of the reports became an
important requirement, people started to rely on Access and Excel
as a primary reporting function as long as data could be obtained
outside of the mainframe. But semantics and virtualization play
as the foundation for a loosely coupled new reporting architecture.
Google announced today support for enhanced markup for video search.
This will allow webmasters to include important information, such
as titles and descriptions, in machine-readable HTML along with
the JavaScript or Flash videos themselves. In a blog post, video
search project manager Michael Cohen wrote, "We wanted to offer
webmasters an additional tool, so today we're taking a page from
the rich snippets playbook and announcing support for Facebook Share
and Yahoo! SearchMonkey RDFa."
Thomson Reuters and Oracle today announced support for the media
giant’s OpenCalais metadata generation service within release
2 of Oracle Spatial 11g. The integration gives Oracle users and
developers direct access to OpenCalais’ natural language processing
(NLP) capabilities. More importantly, perhaps, direct integration
with an Enterprise product such as Oracle’s database says
much about how far the semantic technology community has come in
being able to offer solutions capable of scaling - robustly - to
meet Enterprise-scale demands.
In July the Media Standards Trust, a London-based nonprofit that
promotes high standards in news on behalf of the public, launched
a new draft microformat in conjunction with the Associated Press,
and the MST called for its adoption by others. The proposed microformat
is called hNews: it is a semantic mark-up that uses the HTML tagging
tools that are already part of the structure of the web to provide
machine readable metadata and information. In less technical terms,
it is code to be added into the HTML of an article that can tell
a search engine or human the article's title, author, the time of
publishing, and provides links to the usage rights and news principles.
Philippe Le Hégaret leads the W3C Interaction Domain, which
develops technologies in areas such as HTML and CSS. He recently
spoke with Dr. Dobb's Jonathan Erickson. Do we really need Web standards?
Le Hégaret: The most fundamental Web technologies must be
compatible with one another and allow any hardware and software
used to access the Web to work together.
For years, the focus for Web thinkers has been purely on driving
traffic, increasing page views, and keeping things on the site “sticky.”
Coupled with an almost cult-like obsession with search-engine optimization,
link exchanges, and analyzing statistics, one begins to see a blinkered
focus on individual Website properties instead of on distributing
information most effectively.
This morning I wrote about NetBase Solutions’ healthBase,
a semantic search engine that aggregates medical content from millions
of authoritative health sites including WebMD, Wikipedia, and PubMed.
But is it a semantic engine or an anti-semitic search engine? Several
of our readers tested out the site and found that healthBase’s
semantic search engine has some major glitches (see the comments).
One of the most unfortunate examples is when you type in a search
for “AIDS,” one of the listed causes of the disease
is “Jew.” Really.| Unsubscribe | Contact |
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