News

Federated Media's ExecTweets pulls up sponsored resources next to leading business' leaders postings.

It’s been a little over a week since Facebook acquired semantic tech vendor Chai Labs for a reported $10 million. Founded by former Google AdSense executive Gokul Rajaram, the buy of the structured content extraction system and search platform was seen by some as giving Facebook an edge in delivering Google-like ads around improved editorial content – including opportunities to help companies that maintain pages on the social network dynamically deliver materials suitable to SEO queries.

Well, there’s more news that touches on the semantic advertising acquisition front today – Federated Media, which helps online publishers sell ads, has acquired a portion of startup TextDigger's technology. Founded by Tim Musgrove, who will now take on the role of chief scientist at Federated Media, the SaaS service pulls together themes across documents it searches, without those themes being pre-defined. It provides a way for publishers to get more value out of existing inventory, and ideally more pull with search engines, by dynamically pulling together content whose previous inter-relationships weren’t obvious into custom landing pages. Also, its semantic smarts can analyze content to determine what words to add to articles to boost search engine relevancy.

Customers include the San Jose Mercury News, which uses it to automate tagging stories and generating topic pages.

continued...

What a yo-yo act the last few days have been for Google and its Android platform. The downs -- the ’Net aflutter with accusations that Google colluded with or at least kowtowed to Verizon on net neutrality for the sake of its mobile OS, and Oracle launching a lawsuit against the search engine giant for Java patent infringement in the mobile OS – collided with the ups. That included research firm Gartner pointing to a 50 percent second-quarter rise in sales for Android-based phones to move Google’s OS ahead of Apple’s IOS-based iPhone, iPad and iPod touch, and Digitimes Research's statement that it expects Android smartphone shipments to hit the 55 million unit worldwide mark this year.

Well, put another tick in the up column: AdaptiveBlue has made its GetGlue semantic app available for the Android platform, following up its iPhone debut. It hadn’t been the next OS on AdaptiveBlue’s agenda to get the mobilized version of the service, which lets users check in to share books or movies or other media they consume, see what their friends are watching or listening to, and get on-the-go suggestions of the same. But vp of business development Fraser Kelton says the Android crowd couldn’t wait.

“We were getting email to the tune of ten or more per day saying you need to support this – bold, all caps, exclamation point emails,” he says. “That level of intense anticipation wasn’t something we thought that the community had.” He suspects part of the appeal is that, as with the iPhone, Android devices are beckoning primarily to tech-friendly consumer users who get excited about social apps.

continued...

Photo credit:Yes Virginia/CBS

Last week we took a look at a new way to do some research in the jobs space thanks to TrueKnowledge culling jobs data from the deep web.

Alas, the sad truth seems to be that while you can leverage semantic web technologies to help you research the jobs space, that doesn’t mean it’s going to get any easier any time soon to find a job – at least in most sectors.

continued...

The Semantic Web blog has explored job opportunities that are emerging for those in the RDF/SPRQL/ontology/etc. space (in a few articles, such as this and this). And we’ve also explored how some job search engines themselves are or are becoming more semantic to service industries of every stripe (see here and here).

Now there’s also a venue emerging for anyone who’s just wondering about what he might earn if he ever can get a job as a civil engineer in Decatur, or maybe who is just generally interested in studying the pay scale for different occupations. Semantic technology vendor True Knowledge posted on its blog this week that it’s been combing the dark web (aka the deep web) to directly answer questions related to jobs data.

continued...

The IKS (Interactive Knowledge Stack) Open Source Project, a European Commission-funded effort to bring semantic technologies to vendors’ content management systems, is moving into its next stage this week. Helsinki will be the site of its Semantic Editor Hackathon, an event for testing some of the basic technologies the group has been working on for building a semantically-capable text editor that could be dropped in in place of common tools like TinyMCE and FCKEditor. The forum also is an opportunity for generating new ideas about how different tools can enter the picture at the editing phase for faster and smarter indexing and tagging of content.

continued...

MyTipTop.com, a recent addition to the FeelTipTop.Com semantic engine – which extracts data in real time, mostly from Twitter posts, to match search terms – wants to help make search a community Q&A experience.

continued...

There’s a new semantic web association in town – well, not this town, but the northern Trentino Valley in Italy. Founding members of the Semantic Valley Consortium include tech players Expert System, IBM and Oracle in partnership with Italian universities, such as the Università degli Studi di Trento, with strong programs in computational linguistics.

continued...

Google has updated its News feature. At first look into the behind-the-scenes mechanics, it doesn’t seem to be leveraging any specific or cool semantic technology to align stories with what users indicate they’re interested in reading about, and from what sources. But we're doing a write-up just the same, because the revise is generating a lot of angst among the Google News crowd. A lot of them want their old Google News back.

Below a few samples of the outrage:

Dig a bit deeper into the messages and you’ve got users complaining that it’s a ploy to create a more ad-sales friendly layout; that what was a nice, clean and easy-to-absorb web page is now a busy mess that’s actually more splattered with stuff they don't care about; and that if users wanted personalized news instead of pre-categorized news, darn it, they’d go to one of the tons of other sites that let them get that.

The change affects only U.S. Googlers as of this point. And it's quite possible many of them like the change -- the dissidents are always the most vocal in the online world. But hey, if you are one of the folks unhappy with Google's revision, apparently you can choose Canadian English as one of the other News Editions options and get your old Google News back, one tipster on the message board reports.

Yolink has been around for awhile, as a browser add-on that lets you search better within search results. It mines the hyperlinks of returned results, navigating through the data within those pages and online documents, to bring you right back to the block of text in the content that fits the context of your keyword search.

But that’s not where the action is going to be – an API for search is, it thinks. So this Tuesday sees the formal launch of the Yolink API, which will let others apply its ability to, on the fly, look at content behind links and surface the key information behind keyword searches. The greatest value will be for multi-task, multi-step searches that go beyond the casual user’s quests – research purposes, for example. The decision to go the API route, says Brian Cheek, director of business development at parent company TigerLogic (30 years in the information management trade), took into account the fast-moving conditions around semantic search.

continued...

"It is done - RIF (Rule Interchange Format) is a new recommendation standard of W3C and part of the Semantic Web stack." That's the word just in to us from our friend Adrian Paschke who leads the Corporate Semantic Web project at the Free University of Berlin.

RIF is a standard for building rule systems on the Web to allow translations between data sets in different vocabularies in a distributed, transparent and scalable manner. It's important for linked data applications, for instance, as it's only possible to find data using the same vocabularies, and RIF translates between them.

Described in the release announcing its publishing by the W3C, it is:

- A new standard for the interoperation and interchange between various rule languages and rule engines;
- A concrete XML serialization language for, e.g., model-based languages such as OMG PRR, OMG SBVR, and the RIF RuleML subfamily of the overarching RuleML language family;
- A standard for rules on the (Semantic) Web supporting data integration, and for business rules, making businesses more agile.