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By Javier Carbonell, June 24, 2010 2:25 pm

During June month news and movements related to semantic technologies have continued gaining pace, perhaps as a prelude of a successful SemTech conference (we will not include SemTech news in this post as it has just started) .
Advertisement is getting momentum as an area where Semantic Technologies have an important say. During this month Crystal has announced that will be focused on licensing its Semantic Advertising Technology  and Admeld And Peer39 formed an alliance.

Editorial industry is relying on semantic technologies to manage information, too. Thus, Elsvier has adquired semantic technology provider Collexis Holdings, and  in  the field of 2.0 applications, Huffington Post bought Adaptive Semantics to keep up with 100,000 comments a day
As technological innovation, it must be highlighted the launching of  AllegroGraph 4.0, the first Native RDF database in the industry by Franz
Other relevant announcements have been: Experts System adopts COGITO(R) Monitor Platform to Semantically Search and Analyze Online Sentiment, the startup Primal that is taking the approach of trying  to understand the actual meaning of a user’s commands  to create a webpage that contains the exact information he is looking for, TechAmerica will try  Monster’s Semantic 6Sense Search Technology in its hiring process. or that Yummly Launches World’s First Semantic Search Platform for Food and Recipes

Very fascinating is the initiative from Expert System to create a semantic valley consortium in Italy to promote Semantic Technologies. Some time will be required to know if this proposal will be followed by others
The interest and trust in Semantic Technologies can be seen in the fact that startups focused on these technologies are getting funding, for instance Inform Technologies (dedicated to semantic search) has risen 4$ million from VC, and wordster (that tries to provide the correct meaning of a word based on the context) one million.

There are some curious news as an article claiming that  Semantic Technologies could have prevented the BP oil disaster. And some good articles of dissemination and analysis of Semantic Technologies:  How Semantic Technology Can Help Real-World IT or, Toward the Semantic Web

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By Javier Carbonell, May 4, 2010 12:23 pm

A new month and a new post about Semantic Technologies news. The most outstanding fact during this period has been the acquisition of Siri by Apple. As you all know, Siri is a Personal Virtual Assistant that had raised lot of buzz during this last year, mainly after its presentation in SemTech 2009. Now Apple has done a bet on its technology to improve the iPhone usability, including intelligence reasoning and the excellent voice recognition capabilities from Siri. In some months we will see the reach of this movement.

Social media trend continues as the great opportunity for Semantic providers, this has been the case of Attensity that has acquired social media monitoring solution provider Biz360 to offer new solutions in this field. Other company, Glue,  a social browsing assistant that shows ratings and recommendations of movies, books, restaurants, stocks, and other things as you surf the Web (via a browser plug-in), has launched  new personalization features that use your past “likes” in facebook to help you pick your next favorite movie, album or book.

Related to media companies, the Chicago Tribune Media Group announced a partnership with LOUD3R, a real-time content discovery publishing platform, to power its Chicago-area blog network.

SemTech 2010 is getting closer and we begin to know more about what themes will be “hot” in this edition, for example “Marketing and advertising on the semantic web”  or XBRL

Other area where semantic is playing an important role is that of advertising, Peer 39 is the company best positioned in this field, though others are working on it, for instance the start up Kehalim .

Research field is another field where semantics are very feasible to be used, it is very common to hear about developments in this area. This month North Carolina Research Community has given this step selecting Collexis Holdings, Inc., a leading developer of semantic technology and knowledge discovery software, to link its community of 5.000 researchers.  Nasa has announced too, an incursion in the semantic search realm with an internal solution that enables employees to search more than 50 years of information related to its manned space-flight program. Other relevant announcement is the commercial version of the semantic software solution Intellexer Categorizer 1.2 from EffectiveSoft for document sorting and categorization.

The analysis carried out by Richard MacManus and published in Readwriteweb about the performance of linked data called “Modigliani test” is a “must read”. The conclusion is that: “there is still a lot of work to be done, because we cannot expect wide usage and interest in the Semantic Web if writing such a query takes more than an hour and a lot of technical knowledge”. It is very interesting too this analysis about the role of metadata in integration.

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By Javier Carbonell, March 31, 2010 5:49 pm

New month, and more news about semantic technologies. We can observe that this trend is gaining momentum, and it is considered fundamental when referring to Trends in Business Intelligence for 2010. Other point that shows the relevance of semantic trend, is the number of companies that are been awarded in this area, this month Exalead was Named KMWorld “100 Companies That Matter” in Knowledge Management.

This month, undoubtedly the British Government announcement about the £30 funding to create the Institute for Web Science, has been the most commented piece of news related to semantic technologies. We edited a post about this fact recently. This center will help British tech companies to develop new semantic web technologies and support their commercialization. The institute will be headed by Tim Berners-Lee and will be hosted by Oxford and Southampton universities.

Continue reading 'Semantic Technologies Monthly Review. March 2010'»

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By Javier Carbonell, March 4, 2010 11:45 am

A new month, shorter than others in length but no in news intensity, at least referred to semantics. Related to Knowledge Management, we find several pieces of news about Companies that work with semantic technologies. For instance, Empolis an Attensity group company and leading provider in business user applications that generate value from unstructured data has been recognized as one of the world’s most important companies in the field of knowledge management by the prestigious list of “KMWorld’s 100.

But the most commented movement in this area has been the Open Text  acquisition of NStein, the Canadian company that offers some pretty nifty semantic technology, which helps generate semantic metadata for FT.com’s Newsift site. So, Open Text a Canadian company too, that is specialized in content management joins the semantic wave.
Continue reading 'Semantic Technologies Monthly Review. February 2010'»

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By Javier Carbonell, February 2, 2010 5:57 pm

Semantic Technologies are gaining momentum and month after month we have reiterative evidence of that. The number of companies that are getting funding for new Semantic projects, and the number of services that use semantics continued during this 2010 first month the pace of the last months.

Other thing that we observe is that the areas where Semantics are strong (search, ad, health…) continue betting on these technologies. Among these areas undoubtedly “Search is king”. During an interview and a preceding presentation, Scott Prevost, principal development manager for Bing search technology at Microsoft, touted developments in search, as well as possibilities during the Web 3.0 conference in Santa Clara, Calif. Microsoft confidence on those technologies moved this company to acquire Powerset two years ago. Now they think that Semantics will be paramount in the evolution of search and that Social Networks will be the key driver:
“When the revolution is happening in Iran and people are using Twitter as the only form of communication, ideally, the search engine should understand what that is, understand from the social network what are the important communications and help to organize that”, said Scott Prevost, principal development manager for Bing.

Continue reading 'Semantic Technologies Monthly Review. January 2010'»

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By Javier Carbonell, November 6, 2009 7:22 pm

Lots of news related to semantic technologies have appeared in the media during this month.

• As is usual some of them are related to search engines for example perfect search , or bing
• There are some mentions to some application of semantic technologies to concrete areas for example the patent research. In this area LexiNexis announces the introduction of  transparent semantic technologies in the search of patents. Or for example related to advertising, or to smarter aggregators
• In the area of the press, the NYTimes announces their contribution to the linked data cloud with first 5,000 Tags Released to the Linked Data Cloud
• In the field of social networks, Adaptive Blue’s Glue is a Firefox add-on that uses semantic technology to understand the subject of the page you are on and then shows you via a bar at the bottom of your browser whether your friends have commented or liked the item anywhere on the Web. During this month Glue’s destination site, GetGlue.com, has been launched. This  is a recommendation network for people with the same interests in books, music, movies and other products.
• The good moment for these technologies is demonstrated by the fact that new projects are getting funds, for example Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), in collaboration with an industry consortium facilitated by Fuji Xerox Australia have got a grant of 1,4 million $ from Australian Research Council (ARC). And by the fact that there are awards for the most innovative companies, for example 2009 Promise and Reality award tries to promote innovative technology solutions for implementing and integrating knowledge management practices into their business processes. Among the list of finalists some companies related to semantic area are included
• Semantic Technologies are still in the first phase of implementation but there is place for celebrations Thomson Reuters Celebrates Ten Innovative Sites And Services Using OpenCalais.
•  Semantic technologies applications are very diverse, among them we find very curious tools, one of them is the application of semantic technologies to the book of odds, a tool of a Boston company that is set to answer questions as these: What are the odds of being struck by lightning? Bitten by a rabid dog? Run down by a bus? Audited by the IRS?