News

Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

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 Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt (pictured) at the University of Southampton.

“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.

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Microsoft'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:

Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

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.

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.

“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.”

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.)

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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.

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