Semantic-Powered Health Sites for H1N1 InformationJennifer Zaino Swine flu has been sweeping the nation – or at least the news media. Some of the most recent reports put 22 million Americans as having suffered through H1N1, with 3,900 of them having died as a result of swine-flu related causes. With flu season already underway—and with peak flu season just around the corner in January—Semanticweb.com thought we’d explore how some of the new health sites that leverage semantic web concepts are helping their users manage through the tough times. Below we present three.
Data.gov.uk Soon to See Light of DayJennifer Zaino
“It’s following the [Obama administration] data.gov idea but we’re making it available as linked data,” said Shadboldt in a recent discussion with SemanticWeb.com. “That will be a significant amount of data in semantic web format.” And, “as you start to make more of this public sector information available there are all sorts of opportunities for commercial exploitation or to generate social or economic value.” Lest privacy advocates worry about those potential outcomes, the project is geared to making only anonymous data public. Chow Bella SemanticoJennifer Zaino In Italy, Quattroruote is a leading online magazine for car aficionados and buyers, with its reputation built on testing and evaluating models and its own blue book-like price estimates for vehicles. Now it’s a leading-edge user of semantic web technology, too. It has deployed Expert System’s Cogito semantic solution to help add value to user searches for used cars in its portal to the world of classified car sales. “Semantic tools are extremely beneficial to being able to properly understand classified ads and categorize them correctly and accurately,” says Luigi Conti, director of publisher Editoriale Domus. “Semantic capabilities ease the way people interact with our search engine, and we want the search experience to be as easy as asking a question to a live person.” The company has a marketplace where it offers traditional search services, but its semantically powered CheAuto “is a completely different story,” he says. CheAuto’s mission, Conti says, is to provide users a unique point of search for used car classified ads, adding two elements to the search results. First, the amount the seller is looking to spend is compared with what Quattroruote deems to be the official value of the used car, when possible.” In Italy, the Quattroruote Used Car Value is a quasi-standard de facto,” he notes. Second, all of the different classified ads are categorized and ordered according to Quattroruote Infocar, a database of all the cars (make, model, and so on) sold in Italy since 1980. “CheAuto is a meta search engine that allows users to search not only within one marketplace, but within many of them, ultimately having insight into every significant marketplace in Italy,” Conti says.
Audio: How Semantics Can Help Our Healthcare System
Scott Koegler As principal consultant of Semantec, and also principal consultant for The Intelligent Healthcare Practice, Stephen Lahanas is involved in trying to solve issues around one of the most talked-about areas of U.S. concern - the health care system. Listen to my interview with Lahanas for the specifics of his take on how semantics can and should be leveraged to help our healthcare system. Stephen covers several key issues in this conversation, including: *The existing highly different, and often proprietary platforms storing medical data present tremendous difficulty when trying to consolidate the data from these different systems.
He compares the choice of semantic technologies with the previous set of W3C standards, most prominently XML, and comments on how the adoption of XML actually increased the complexity of integrating systems because of its highly flexible structure. Lahanas sees an end product as a system that allows users to query a unified system for information they need, rather than rely on the current system static reports. The ultimate goal is to redefine the healthcare IT lifecycle management, going beyond the management of practice information and simple data storage, to the exploitation of the knowledge contained within the data. Lahanas points to the efficiencies that can be gained by creating a transparency between and within huge healthcare systems such as the Army or Air Force. The Pedantic Web Group to the RDF Rescue!Jennifer Zaino How’s your RDF? If it could be in better shape, some folks may be able to help: The Pedantic Web Group was recently formed by researchers at Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) and Institute AIFB at the Universitaet Karlsruhe (see previous article).
SemanticWeb.com: Have you and your colleagues observed a growing trend of RDF data being published? What might that lead you to conclude about the growing maturity of the semantic web? Hogan: There is certainly an encouraging trend of growth in RDF data -- both in terms of quality, heterogeneity and quantity -- being published to the Web. Back in 2005 when I started working in the area of Semantic Web research, RDF Web data consisted of a number of interlinked FOAF profiles and some data published under the auspices of various research projects or geek curiosity. The quality of the data was, as I remember, quite poor. Publishers were reluctant to use URIs to name their resources, vocabularies were replete with errors, interlinking between datasets was either poor or nonexistent. My own FOAF file, at that time, was no different; they were certainly more innocent times. Jump to late 2009 and we've come a long way. More specifically, under the pragmatic guidance of the Linked Data movement, RDF data published on the Web has come a long way. The Linked Data movement has been integral to the maturation of RDF Web publishing, not merely by promoting a set of pragmatic best practices, but also by refocusing efforts on producing data: before, data was often published in RDF as an afterthought, or for the purposes of a specific application. Now, Linked Data advocates publishing RDF data on the Web as a worthwhile endeavor in itself. As such, we are now on our way to solving the chicken-and-egg problem with the Semantic Web with respect to which comes first: the data or the applications. Now is an exciting time for R&D into applications which can exploit the fruits of Linked Data. As compared to four or five years ago, data quality has improved as, for example, publishers understand the importance of using URIs to name things, and that those URIs should be dereferencable. Quantity and heterogeneity has also increased, as the March '09 LOD cloud [refer ttp://linkeddata.org] can attest to; data is being published by governmental and commercial entities and is becoming more 'general-interest'. And, the trend is continuing; for example, there were two exciting announcements at ISWC last week: that Drupal 7 core will support SIOC/RDFa exports by default and that the New York Times are planning to produce Linked Data exports. Bing Hopes to Get Search Bang From Wolfram AlphaMicrosoft's Bing search engine has generated a lot of buzz since its debut in June, grabbing almost 10 percent of the search market. Now Bing hopes to get to the next level by integrating "knowledge engine" Wolfram Alpha into its search results. Microsoft announced a partnership with Wolfram Alpha that will include health, nutrition and math data in Bing search results. (The Wolfram Alpha blog discusses the partnership, as does the Bing blog.) The New York Times's Bits blog explains how it works: When users type a food item like "chicken breast" into Bing, the results will include a box showing the nutritional information for it. Bing users will also be able to have access to a body-mass index calculator or to plot certain formulas on a graph. Here's a screenshot of what a Bing search for BMI calculator would turn up:
Risky Business: It Doesn’t Have to Be That WayJennifer Zaino The Book of Odds web site offers a forum for determining the odds of everyday life (see previous article), letting users combine odds statements in unexpected ways in real time to compare, for example, whether there’s a greater risk of dying from an encounter with a shark or a vending machine (it’s the latter).
Along with growing their toplines and controlling costs, risk is one of the most prominent issues Cambridge customers want to address, says CEO Michael Cataldo. “And the biggest risk is associated with questions you just don’t know and so you can’t answer,” he says. “One of the reasons I think semantics is going to be so hot is that it puts the capability of answering those kinds of questions in the hands of the end users.” Feed(ly)ing The EnterpriseJennifer Zaino Feedly, the Firefox plug-in that consumers have enjoyed for organizing their favorite sites into magazine-like start pages—presenting input from Google Reader, Twitter streams, and other services they subscribe to and interact with—has been offering a version of its service to businesses for a couple of months now.
“Semantic technology comes into play,” says Feedly developer Edwin Khodabkchian. “Imagine you are launching a new product or event and multiple sources start talking about stuff related to that. Our users expected us to increase Feedly’s smarts to understand that these articles are somehow related. That is where semantic technology comes together.” SiteScreen Takes the ASP RouteJennifer Zaino An ASP version of Ad Pepper Media’s SiteScreen ad network that enables advertising agencies to keep their clients’ ads from being placed next to content they consider objectionable is now available.
The online ad network and digital marketing technology provider also is behind the iSense Display and semantically enabled iSense network for matching display advertising content to remnant inventory based on category-targeted opportunities. The decision to provide an ASP version of SiteScreen was made after requests by the advertising agency community to apply its brand protection capabilities to clients beyond Ad Pepper’s own ad-targeting network, as well as within it. “Our semantic targeting suite and SiteScreen are definitely growing strong and very appealing to clients, but we are not the only ad network in the U.S. and not in Europe either,” says Sacha Carton, director of product and technology development and director of the board at Ad Pepper. “The advertising community recognizes the strength of the SiteScreen solution and said they want to continue to do things with us on our [targeting] network, but there’s a lot of activity happening outside that where they would equally like the same degree of protection. So to not do this would limit the potential of the technology. I don’t think it will cannibalize our network business but will add additional business lines that will be very complementary.” Linked Open Data Trend in Government: Citizen Awareness First, Government Accountability to FollowJennifer Zaino At last week’s International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2009), semantic web application development vendor TopQuadrant announced oeGOV. The initiative aims to create an open, W3C Semantic Web standards-based set of ontology models to encourage and facilitate the use of linked government data. SemanticWeb.com conducted an email conversation with TopQuadrant’s Dean Allemang, chief scientist, and Ralph Hodgson, co-founder and CTO, to learn more about the effort to help the government sector embrace semantically linked open data. Semanticweb.com: Why does TopQuadrant see a need for this initiative? TopQuadrant: Open Linked Data in the government is taking off in a big way. But there is a lot of data out there that has to be presented in a coherent, reusable way. Ontologies help that happen by providing support for aggregation, provenance and data quality – aggregation through everything having URIs and controlled vocabularies, provenance in terms of who was the source and when did the data appear, quality through units of measure and data types. Government data is available to the public, but not easily accessed at the moment. It isn’t even very big data – there aren’t any serious technical barriers to making it more available. We feel that now is the time to start up an initiative to bring public data to the public. AdaptiveBlue's Glue Guns For DevelopersJennifer Zaino
There were about a dozen applications built using the first version of the Glue API, says AdaptiveBlue CEO Alex Iskold. “The most notable ones were Glue To Go, which offered a bookmarklet for Glue to be used in browsers that we did not support and Movies application by UnHub.” The latter creates a one stop site for researching a movie. The new API adds a few powerful things for semantic web development, Iskold says. He enumerates: ● It’s possible to query, as an example, all the people who visited a particular movie on Netflix or IMDB by URL. This comes courtesy of the ability for any query of objects (such as movies) to accept an objectID that can be either a Glue ID OR a URL. ● The reverse lookup in this release enables developers to get all the links to an object on the web that Glue knows about. For example, they can send in a book key and get links to all locations of that book on Amazon, B&N, NYTimes reviews, and so on. “This is like what Google returns, except it’s highly filtered to the book vertical/quality links,” Iskold says. ● AdaptiveBlue also has expanded the set of things that are available via the API, as well as the set of sites it recognizes. Developers can get metadata for any URL from http://getglue.com/sites. The API is free to be used for up to 5,000 calls per day. For more than that, developers should contact AdaptiveBlue directly to determine how it can address their needs. Data Integration, Courtesy of SemanticsJennifer Zaino American Tower, an owner and operator of communications sites for the wireless and broadcast industries, announced this week that it is moving from using Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services for its data warehousing application to use Expressor Software’s semantic data integration system.
“We looked at our space and said how, for so many years people did data integration over and over the same way, mapping sources to targets, physical metadata to physical metadata, and it’s not the right way of doing it because there’s no abstraction,” says Michael Waclawiczek, VP of Marketing at Expressor. |
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The interface provides a very clean look with easily understood tabbed access to the multiple ways you might want to find information about the bug: Trusted health information, recent news, video, images, and blogs – not to mention drugs and substances, clinical trials and integrative medicine for the alternative slant. One of the core principles of the service was to use quality information sources in combination with its semantic health knowledge base, and it appears to be more or less keeping to that idea of mashing information from reputable sites. Its blog recommendations may seem a bit limited for exploring the swine flu, but at least those in search of serious health information won’t be directed to the ho-ho-ho one about Santa facing swine flu concerns.
Data.gov.uk is expected to launch in beta form next month, according to a report from the BBC. The project to deliver linked data about U.K. schools, crime, health and other information collected by the government is led by 
Lahanas points to the DoD's Alta program and the VA's VISTA program that, combined, have spent about $7 billion. These systems are looking at the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) to get the job completed. But because of the fact that there may be dozens, or even hundreds of data formats to deal with, Lahanas says that dynamically defined integration is likely to be the better choice.
To find out more about the new initiative, SemanticWeb.com recently conducted an email conversation with one of the group’s founders, Aidan Hogan, who is working on the URQ research stream at DERI, a work program to find the right trade-off between expressive knowledge representation and efficient, scalable reasoning and querying techniques in the open, distributed environment of the Semantic Web.
It’s interesting that the site is powered by 
What’s the draw of the service for the enterprise? For one thing, it’s the semantic technology embedded within Feedly, which uses the OpenCalais web service to get a clean representation of metadata behind content. That gives power to enterprise users such as marketing professionals, who might be subscribed to various blogs and feeds and services and different content that’s relevant to their brand. 
Right on the heels of its announcement of 
What is semantic data integration? In Expressor’s case, it’s a patent-pending solution that leverages what it calls smart semantics for data mapping. The traditional path to data integration—combining data from different sources into some sort of unified view of the information that the business requires—relies on mapping sources to targets against technical or physical metadata, and then writing business or transformation rules that are more or less tied to these physical metadata constructs. The result is that there’s too much time spent on mapping over and over again to each and every application a business needs, and as the volume of data grows exponentially the challenge does as well. 
