News

Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

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.”

continued...

Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Right on the heels of its announcement of GetGlue.com, AdaptiveBlue wants to get sticky with developers. This week it’s unveiled its new Glue API, some five months after its initial steps to woo third-party developers to build Glue applications that leverage its technology's ability to connect people and interests around the web.

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 company has opened up its metadata and links to more than 3 million objects (books, movies, music), and each one has 20 to 30 links to its locations on the web. “One app that can be built, for example, is a targeted search engine for each vertical,” Iskold says. “In fact, Glue API already offers search so all that needs to be done is to put up a search box, get the matching Glue Key, let the user select and then output the links to this object onto a page.” Iskold says that developers also can build applications that mine patterns in its giant network of people and things (for example, people who are interested in this movie are also interested in this book, and so on).

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.

Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

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.

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.

“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.

continued...

Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Got a question about the semantic web? There’s a new site that aims to help you answer it: SemanticOverflow launched this week. It follows the model of stackoverflow.com for asking programming-related questions, leveraging wiki, newsgroup, social media and reputation-ranking features to spur community involvement and good discussion.

Created by The Wandering Glitch blogger and programmer Andrew Matthews, the site aims to help both the technical and non-technical semantic web community pose questions on topics that run the gamut from development to broader explorations of where the field is going.

One of the interesting questions posted on the site is what web site would you use to show someone the power of the semantic web. Here are some of the answers SemanticWeb.com might provide, based on some of the sites (both in the upper- and lower-case versions of Semantic Web) we’ve noted in the past and a few new ones to add to the mix:

● DailyMe: DailyMe processes articles from hundreds of news sources, using OpenCalais’ semantic web technology to help power the categorization behind its personalized news web site and delivery service. It enables a more fine-grained understanding of content and the entities users have expressed interest in, from people to companies, through their reading habits, to enable continual and dynamic news personalization.

● BooRah: Spokane, Charlotte, and Honolulu have recently joined the list of metro areas whose restaurants are subject to the “Boos” and the “Rahs” of the users who visit and care to comment about them. The site applies semantic and patented natural language processing technology to map any entity on any web page it crawls and associate that with the correct local business, then extract sentiment terms around food, ambiance or service to contribute to overall ratings in those areas.

continued...

An application for online answer engine Wolfram Alpha apparently is a big hit with iPhone users. Here's an email we received today from the Wolfram Alpha team:

We are happy to announce that the Wolfram|Alpha App for the iPhone and iPod touch popped up on the App Store's "What's Hot" list today. We are delighted that Apple selected the app to be featured, recognizing the intense interest and excitement being shown in Wolfram|Alpha.

We were pleasantly surprised, too, to see the Wolfram|Alpha App appear on the store's "Top Grossing" list on the second day it was available and remain there through the week. We've also been thrilled by the positive feedback from those who have purchased the app, visible in the reviews on the App Store.

If you haven't seen the app yet, check it out: http://products.wolframalpha.com/iphone

Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Officially launched Tuesday, GetGlue.com represents a new dimension for semantic web start-up Adaptive Blue – and its users, too.

Glue is the semantic recognition technology for helping users find what they may like next in the way of movies, books, music and so on based on what they, their friends, and others using the social network already like. One big change is that now Glue is a destination, not just a browser plug-in, with a continuous stream of suggestions, recommendations and the like available right at the GetGlue.com home page. It’s integrated with Facebook and Twitter so the tastes of your other social network connections will be part of the real-time connections users can make for their own streams, too.

(View the Glue Promo from AdaptiveBlue on Vimeo and read more on the jump.)

continued...

Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

At the recent workshop co-organized by W3C and XBRL International on improving access to financial data on the web, a few key issues related to the semantic web took center stage.

The goal of the workshop was to identify opportunities and challenges for interactive access to financial data expressed in XBRL and related languages, and the broader opportunities for semantic technologies.

The workshop took place against the background of mandates by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for large U.S. public companies to file reports in XBRL, but worldwide XBRL is being adopted as a standard way of recording, storing and transmitting business financial information.

Workshop chair Dianne Mueller, vice chair of XBRL International, provided SemanticWeb.com with insight into some of them in advance of publishing her findings from the workshop in the next couple of weeks.

continued...

Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Unemployment is hovering near 10 percent, and last week a survey of 44 professional forecasters released by the National Association for Business Economics predicted the unemployment rate would in fact hit that mark in the first quarter of 2010 before dropping to 9.5 percent by year’s end. But it will be 2012 before the market regains most of the jobs lost in the recession, NABE says.

That might get you thinking what the job market is like for Web 3.0 specialists. Job search engine Indeed.com is one tool to help you get a feel for things.

First, the not-so-good news: IT Job postings in general have decreased 33 percent since September, while clicks on Information Technology jobs have increased 71 percent since September 2008, according to the site’s stats. For IT workers looking for a job, the opposite situation would clearly be preferable. Job trends are based on Indeed’s index of more than 50 million jobs a year.

When it comes to Web 3.0, however, there may be a more encouraging story to tell. Exploring some of the specific technologies behind the semantic web, for example, it seems there’s a rising call for expertise in working both with RDF, the data format for representing metadata about web resources and exchanging information among systems, and SPARQL, the query language behind the semantic web for data that is stored either as RDF or viewed as RDF via middleware, based on the results of a search pairing those terms. Those jobs – which span the spectrum from IT roles such as web platform developers to database architects to knowledge and software engineers, all the way to non-IT gigs such as research scientists—pay well too, plateauing at an average of $134,000.

Split them up for separate searches, though, and it appears the term SPARQL actually carries more weight than RDF in the job postings category.

continued...

Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Researchers have high hopes that semantic technology will help them deal with the issues of making academic and scientific information more easily explorable and accessible.

AcaWiki, built using Semantic MediaWiki, launched this month, its goal being the creation of a Wikipedia for academic research that often is locked behind firewalls or hidden in academic journals, where it languishes rather than ignites discussion and provokes action. The site lets scholars, graduate students and bloggers posts summaries under the Creative Commons Attribution license of peer-reviewed academic papers in disciplines ranging from anthropology to business to economics and psychology.

continued...

Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

The Internet is a huge source of health information for consumers – and that makes the health care and life sciences publishing and advertising community a good market for some semantic web companies to tap into.

One of those companies is Knewco, whose semantic platform combines knowledge discovery for the user with contextual advertising for content providers and marketers.

The company, which is working on commercializing the product this quarter with the goal of fully rolling out the technology next year, recently named as CEO Dave Rothenberg, the founder of physician-focused online health care media company MDLinx.

“I learned at MDLinx the power of targeting and micro-targeting,” Rothernberg says of his previous company, which created hundreds of newsletters and websites aimed at a host of medical sub-specialties, supported by targeted sponsorship. “What I like about Knewco is we can identify hundreds of thousands of health-care concepts, so when people want to find out more about a particular concept such as a disease or condition, we can help them not just discover and learn about that but match micro-targeted marketing messages along with that.”

continued...