Companies and government agencies – from global firms dealing with legal e-discovery issues across their offices worldwide to intelligence officials working on watch lists – need to be able to search across and extract meaning from unstructured text – and not just in English. Multi-lingual text analytics vendor Basis Technology Corp., which develops the Rosette linguistics platform, says such needs are driving a seeing a renewed focus on the internationalization push.

“By and large I think the market as a whole has been getting more sophisticated in both their understanding and use of text analytics,” says Steve Kearns, Rosette product manager. “So the forward movement in the semantic web and all the related fields really has given rise to a better customer for us, people who understand the issues, and we now see a big multilingual focus…. People are seeing they need to make search work in other languages, make it function as it should across different locations and languages.”

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When Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the protocols that became the Web in 1991, he was thinking mainly about scientific information. He would have been surprised to learn that in 2010, music, dating and shopping had been completely changed but that scientific publishing had NOT been fundamentally disrupted. The disruption of STM (Scientific, Technical, Medical) publishing has been the most forecasted event that never happened. In a further irony, the peer review process at the heart of STM publishing became the inspiration for Google Page Rank. That changed the web and made $ billions but left STM publishing mostly unaffected.

So STM Publishing is currently only in Act 2 of the Creative Destruction 7 Act Play. The old guard players are firmly in place and the few innovators are like straws blowing in the wind of change. The debate about when we will move to the later acts, when disruptive change will finally happen, rages within the STM business. Our view is that we ARE on the cusp of disruptive change and that it will be brought on by the implementation of social networking and semantic technology.

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B2B Media has a tremendous opportunity to leverage the semantic future of the web. The next phase of the Internet will be about creating value from masses of data; data on a scale that is almost unimaginable and almost all of it totally free.

Figuring out how to make money when the base data is free is a challenge. Just ask the software industry which has had to work out new models to leverage open source. Conceptually the problem is the same.

Lots of data that publishers sell is already in the public domain or owned by somebody else. The value is in how it is put in context and how it is delivered. That is a core publishing strength.

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In a world of 24 hour news, it’s almost inevitable that something happens while you’re asleep that is going to affect your next workday. That’s true whether you’re a journalist covering international terrorism or a corporate brand manager protecting the reputation of your company and its products. The problem is how you quickly and efficiently figure out what happened that really is relevant to you, so that you can act on that information.

The latest version of Expert System’s semantic platform COGITO Focus, released today, aims to further streamline that search and analysis process.

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Think Different. That slogan has taken Apple pretty far. Can it do the same for William Dyson, founder of Factoetum? The third part of our innovation series continues (the first two stories are here and here.)

The creator of the service – which aims to change both the way content is created on the Internet and search (reported on here)—says that to be innovative, one has to be critical of the status quo, immune to the feedback of market surveys, and focused on making a product intuitive enough to be embraced by ten-year-old kids and 93-year-old grandmothers alike. He uses Rapid Application Development (RAD) to quickly create his prototypes – and then constrains them to the point where he thinks both ends of that age spectrum could quickly grasp how to use what he’s developed.

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The Semantic Web Blog had a chance to speak with Evri CEO Will Hunsinger and Radar Networks CEO Nova Spivack, in separate interviews, right after the news of Evri’s acquisition of Twine broke. They provide some insight into the deal, and what it portends for T2, the next version of Twine that Radar Networks has been working on over the last few months.

Hunsinger says the two companies are a good fit because, though each was looking at different types of content, each also was trying to solve the same problem: “Enabling the end consumer to filter through the noise and get the precise, relevant results set,” as he explains it. “Twine was going after verticals and content areas that were more semi-structured or even structured data, like recipes, where we are going after temporal trending data, like news and tweets. But you put the two together and you have the ability to address the problem for consumers of getting the most interesting, relevant information. …We were never focused on evergreen content like recipes, and so on, but with T2 we can bring these together and can apply these technologies for a much richer, deeper and broader consumer experience.”

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There have been rumors afoot for some time that Radar Networks’ Twine was being acquired, possibly by Microsoft. Turns out the acquisition is by Evri. The Microsoft connection? Maybe it’s that Evri and Twine have had backing by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.

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Boy, that last post on B2B Media sure was gloomy! How about some root canal for light relief? Seriously, lets look forward to the bright future. In this post we will look at 12 firms that are doing very well as intermediaries between buyers and sellers in a B2B market. We call these the "12 straws in the wind of change." From these successes we will draw 10 general lessons about the future of B2B Media. We call these the "10 themes songs from the future."

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For our next look at the inspirations for semantic web innovation, we spoke with Michael Osofsky, co-founder and chief innovation officer of NetBase. (See the first in the series here.) As we reported here, NetBase is the creator of the semantic search technology that powers tools including ScienceBase, HealthBase and most recently ConsumerBase, to help researchers in the scientific, medical, and CPG spaces, respectively, harness the wealth of content and social media commentary on the web for insights. Earlier this month it announced that it has raised $9 million in venture capital funding, completing its Series C round with Altos Ventures and Thomvest Ventures Inc.

You might say NetBase was inspired by a young engineer’s disappointment: Some time ago, Osofsky was a passionate employee of Ariba in its earlier days as a B-to-B marketplace, and saw a project he’d worked on for a year get the axe. Looking back, he understands that that kind of thing happens all the time in the business world, but at the time it fueled his determination “to not see that happen to any work I did or any other engineer did.” So he headed for MIT’s Sloan School of Management to learn how to do innovation the right way. There he learned that innovation is a successful combination of understanding the needs of consumers and customers, and understanding what new technologies and inventions are available that might be applied in interesting ways to address those needs.

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B2B Media is the unglamorous sibling in the media family.

Historically what we used to call trade publishing was as unexciting as the actuarial business; and equally profitable, consistently profitable, consistently for decades. The kind of rock solid cash flow that you could take to the bank. Which is precisely what a lot of folks did during the Great Leverage. These old trade-publishing businesses were bought and sold like pork bellies. Just when the Internet was kicking into it's next cycle, just before the smelly leverage stuff hit the fan and precipitated the Great Recession and about the time when a generation was coming into the workforce saying "what is a print magazine Daddy?" So, B2B Media is right now in the really scary Act 4 of The Creative Destruction 7 Act Play.

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The semantic web is an innovation upon an innovation. As this blog regularly covers, innovations are being built upon its broad shoulders all the time. But what is the inspiration for the innovators who see the potential in using semantic technologies in new and creative ways? And how do they continue to drive that innovation as their services gain traction and their start-ups begin growing?

The SemanticWeb Blog thought this was a topic worth exploring. So this week, we are, having raised the question with a few minds behind some recent semantic web start-ups, and we hope to continue bringing such perspectives as part of our regular coverage going forward.

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The game of tag in the web world isn’t as clear-cut as it is in the schoolyard. On the playground, when you tag someone, you know that person is “It.” Everyone else does too, and they take appropriate action based on that knowledge – that is, run. On the web, when you tag a photo, a video, or other rich or high-density content you create, you know what you’re talking about, but your meaning isn’t always as clear to others who also could take appropriate action if they had a better understanding of what you’ve posted.

Bueda is a hosted services startup that’s trying to help publishers of this user-generated content increase its value by improving their understanding of it. The basic idea is that an outfit – a YouTube or Flickr, for instance – could send Bueda the tags users attach to their content, and in return receive clean metadata and categories to add to that content to better match it to advertising opportunities, enhance additional content recommendations, and increase search accuracy. “It’s the usual things you can do with the semantic web but in a low friction and easy way,” says Bueda CEO and co-founder Vasco Pedro.

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