George Thomas recently wrote about the exciting advances in adding clinical quality linked data to Health.Data.gov. Thomas also presented on this topic at last week’s Semantic Technology Conference. Thomas writes, “In addition to making flatfiles available to download on the Web, and providing applications that enable programmatic access to backend databases through the Web, imagine using the Web itself as a database: a massively distributed, decentralized database. This is what Linked Data is about – putting data in the Web. As part of our ongoing collaboration to democratize open government data with Data.gov, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services are now publishing Clinical Quality Linked Data on Health.data.gov, beginning with Hospital Compare.” Read more

Semantic Technology Conference - LONDON

The world's largest, most authoritative conference on semantic technology for enterprise computing professionals runs September 26-27, 2011 at Hotel Russell. It covers every major technology and application area you'll need to know.  Register today.

A recent article announces that OpenText has released “a new version of OpenText Integration Center featuring an enhanced, native connector to OpenText ECM Suite 2010. Customers can help better leverage their structured and unstructured content to reduce costs and improve efficiency. OpenText Integration Center unifies access to multiple sources of disparate information from OpenText ECM Suite for applications such as business systems integration, legacy decommissioning, in-place content management and content migration.” Read more

A wide array of products, applications, and other advances in the world of semantic technology were announced at last week’s Semantic Technology Conference. Announcements came from such industry heavy-hitters as Franz, Revelytix, and Expert System. Below are a collection of announcements from event sponsors who used the forum of SemTech to reveal their latest updates. Read more

There are three trends that I observed at SemTech 2011 in San Francisco last week.  First was the increased role of native XML databases used in combination with RDF data stores.  Second was the many natural-language processing tools and vendors at the conference.  And third was the role of semantic annotations and standards directly in web content.  I think these trends are related.

One of the keynote presentations at the SemTech 2011 conference was done by the BBC.  They presented their core architecture for managing web content as having two main components: a native XML database(MarkLogic)  for content and a RDF triple store for “metadata.”  These tools were at the core of their architecture for their web sites.

Another presentation was done by the Mayo Clinic.  They also are using MarkLogic for web content and are also using semantic web technologies.  Their diagrams show that there are many ways for these systems to interact.

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Mark Johnson recently took over as the CEO of Zite, a personalized news magazine app that delivers news stories tailored to users’ interests. According to Zite, “Mark has been an advisor to Zite for almost two years and was instrumental in our pivot from Worio to Zite. He brings a strong product and technology background with experience at several successful search startups: Powerset (natural language search, acquired by Microsoft), Kosmix (categorized search, acquired by Walmart), and SideStep (travel search, acquired by Kayak). Most recently, he led product at Bing in San Francisco. We’re really excited to have him leading the team to help change the way people discover and browse content.” Read more

Amazon is looking for Software Development Engineers, Semantic Web & Information Retrieval in Seattle, WA. According to the post, “Amazon.com’s External Content Team is looking for exceptional software engineers who want to work on incredibly complex problems and come up with solutions that will change the world. As a member of the team, you will have a great opportunity to build platform level features and systems for integrating with authoritative content like Wikipedia, IMDB, DPReview, etc, extracting semantic information and mapping them to products on Amazon.com. In this role, you will be driving the analytics and mining of content so that we can surface them in the most relevant way on the site as well as build algorithms to match Amazon destinations (e.g. products, entities, search queries) to the content.” Learn more and apply here. Read more

Ask a group of Semantic Web professionals where the data should live when you’re doing data integration projects – which is just what Cambridge Semantics VP Lee Feigenbaum, acting in his capacity as co-chair of the W3C’s SPARQL Working Group, did at a panel at last week’s SemTech – and don’t expect to get a single, agreed-upon answer.

Among the choices:

“Federation will crush warehousing,” Eric Prud’hommeaux of the W3C and its Semantic Web Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group said with an eye to provocation. “Leave data where the authorities have it and take advantage of individual domain contributions.” The basic idea of federation is that data stays in its source systems and you do integration dynamically, querying source systems on the fly.

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Paypal’s Praveen Alavilli presented at SemTech 2011, San Francisco, on Social Commerce and the Semantic Web. Alavilli explained that “ecommerce involves much more than just buying and selling.”  There are many aspects involved with ecommerce and many online retailers are focused only on the transactional part of an online sale. For example, the point where a consumer is on a website making a purchase within a shopping cart. And, as Alavilli explained, “the buying cycle of a consumer is much larger than the point at which a transaction occurs.”  In each step of the buying cycle, there is an opportunity to influence the consumer. Online consumers may go through one, or all, of the following steps in an ecommerce buying cycle:

• Inspiration: A consumer “wants to do something” like become a writer, for example.
• Investigation:  A consumer looks for products that help accomplish a task(s).
• Research:  A consumer does research on products and solutions.
• Search:  The consumer searches the web for product.
• Transaction: The experience the consumer has when they purchase online.
• Use: Determine how the product is used.
• End of Life: What happens when the consumer is finished using the product.

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The Cogito blog concluded its coverage of last week’s Semantic Technology Conference with a recap of Laura Campbell’s closing keynote address. Campbell is the director of strategic initiatives at the Library of Congress. Her keynote was entitled Semantic Technology at the Library of Congress: “Campbell began her presentation by explaining that one of the most pressing problems in wanting to ensure the acquisition and preservation of the largest collection of knowledge and easy access to the best examples of American creativity (strategic objectives of the Library of Congress), is management of our changing connections to available content.” Read more

Creative Commons and the Association of Education Publishers (AEP) have announced the Learning Resources Metadata Initiative, “a project aimed at improving education search and discovery via a common framework for tagging and organizing learning resources on the web. The learning resources framework will be designed to work with schema.org, the web metadata framework recently launched by Google, Bing, and Yahoo!, as well as to work with other metadata technologies and to enable other rich applications.” Read more