A recent article discusses the semantic web’s potential to generate “scholarly serendipity.” The author writes, “The more I learn about the potential of Linked
Data, the more I am convinced that Linked Data’s biggest payoff for scholarship will be that it will rationalize and democratize a certain kind of scholarly serendipity. The scholarly value of serendipity usually comes up in discussions of browsing, and in calls for maintaining large, open, physical collections of library materials. Scholarly serendipity generally involves the unexpected discovery of some connection among people, places, things, or concepts that others have not yet discovered.” Read more

Semantic Tech & Business Conference - London

The world's largest, most authoritative conference on semantic technology for enterprise computing professionals runs September 26-27, 2011 at Hotel Russell. It covers every major technology and application area you'll need to know.  Register today.

Life Technologies is searching for a Senior Bioinformatic Application Scientist/Software Developer in Carlsbad, CA. According to the post, the company is looking for “candidates with a background and experience in bioinformatics software technologies and products design, development and support for molecular biology, genomics and synthetic biology. The candidate will employ expertise in bioinformatics, data analysis, biological insight, and software engineering to bring an engineering perspective to the practice of molecular biology, in order to promote the newly developing field of synthetic biology. The ability to communicate with customers, lead and manage projects, design, test, document, and communicate results to diverse audiences are important aspects of this role.” Read more

According to a recent article, iGlue makes virtually any webpage more informative through rich annotations: “There are plenty of projects out there vying to ‘annotate the Web’ in different ways, from Apture to Google SideWiki and Pushnote, but iGlue is different because it combines a simple concept with rich data and a wiki-like approach. The idea behind iGlue is to add rich background information to any web page, automatically, as an additional ‘layer’ on top of the page. Once you’ve installed this browser plugin, a click of the iGlue button will load up yellow highlighted marks over words in the text on the page you’re looking at.” Read more

Bill Guinn, CTO Product Enablers, Amdocs Product Business Unit, delivered a keynote at the 2011 Semantic Technology Conference in San Francisco. His talk was one of the highlights for anyone interested in how Semantic Technology can be used in enterprise systems.

“I truly believe that semantics can be a game changer in just about any B2C model.” – Bill Guinn, Amdocs

Amdocs, a company focused on innovating in the space of Customer Experience Systems, is a $3 Billion company that provides customer care, revenue management, and operational support for large telecommunications companies. To do this requires heavy duty transaction processing systems, with Amdocs processing a few billion transactions per day, resulting in petabytes of information. In his keynote, Mr. Guinn addressed how Amdocs leveraged Semantic Technology to “improve revenue, reduce cost, and improve customer satisfaction.”

The full keynote is presented in the video below. Read more

 A recent survey of media buyers conducted by semantic advertising vendor Peer39 revealed – as you might expect – an intense interest among that audience in page quality and quality controls on their online campaigns. Only five percent of respondents said page quality doesn’t matter, and only eight percent said they don’t currently use quality controls. For 87 percent of them, about 50 percent or more of campaigns require quality controls.

The top quality attributes for campaigns, they say, are content-rich environments (52 percent), home pages (51 percent), and user-generated content (55 percent).

UGC is a tricky problem in the online advertising space, because it adds more risk – site owners do what they can to ensure that comments don’t transgress boundaries but moderation only goes so far, or is otherwise subject to time-, resource- or cost-constraints. Not to mention that user comments that some advertisers may find inappropriate aren’t necessarily something that would be flagged as problematic by human moderators or automated systems.

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A recent article reports, “Digital Trowel is offering new services through the DataMarket on Microsoft’s Windows Azure Marketplace that allow customers to electronically send their Company and Business Professional records for refinement and enhancement, and receive cleansed and enriched data from Digital Trowel’s proprietary Powerlinx database. The new Data as a Service (DaaS) solutions allow customers to search for Companies and Business Professionals in Powerlinx, one of the largest and most comprehensive databases of US private and public companies, and employed professionals.” Read more

Cambridge Semantics says it’s aiming at moving organizations from business intelligence to operational intelligence. “The data is real and you can bring in new data in minutes. And business users can create and change reports and ask ‘what if’ questions themselves,” explained EVP Steven Kludt at the SemTech conference. “We can be event based—if something changes in the data we can respond to that with rules around the data, like kick off a workflow. We can accommodate on the spot so that the business is constantly tuning things right away.” (Video after the jump)

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Spry, Inc. is looking for a Junior Information Architect in Baltimore, MD. According to the post, “Spry, Inc. is a strategic information management consulting company focused on providing analytics to the Department of Defense. Our current project is one of the leading implementations of semantic technologies. We are growing rapidly and looking for a junior level information architecture/business analyst. This would include recent grads or those with 0-3 years experience working in consulting or a related field.” Read more

A recent article reports, “Draft version 0.5 of rNews, a standard model for embedding machine-readable metadata in online news, was approved at the International Press Telecommunications Council’s [IPTC] Annual General Meeting in Berlin, Germany. This version clarifies, simplifies and expands the rNews model and incorporates much of the feedback that the IPTC has received about the first draft. The IPTC is also releasing the recommended RDFa implementation for rNews 0.5 and plans to provide mappings to other markup mechanisms, such as HTML5 microdata and JSON. This will give publishers a choice of how to implement the model, using the technologies that best meet their needs.” Read more

We recently reported on a growing start-up known as Klout, a service that uses ranking algorithms and semantic analysis of social media content to determine a user’s level of influence on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. A new article reports that the social marketing platform Involver is partnering with Klout “allow brands to interact with and reward their fans on Facebook based on their Klout score. Basically, Involver allows brands to create a Klout widget on their Facebook page that engages users to measure their Klout score. Brands can then see which of their users have the most influence on Facebook and the social web, and reward users for signing-up and/or interacting with the brand. And brands can see which fans have Klout in their particular product area.” Read more