At last week’s International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2009), semantic web application development vendor TopQuadrant announced oeGOV. The initiative aims to create an open, W3C Semantic Web standards-based set of ontology models to encourage and facilitate the use of linked government data.

SemanticWeb.com conducted an email conversation with TopQuadrant’s Dean Allemang, chief scientist, and Ralph Hodgson, co-founder and CTO, to learn more about the effort to help the government sector embrace semantically linked open data.

Semanticweb.com: Why does TopQuadrant see a need for this initiative?

TopQuadrant: Open Linked Data in the government is taking off in a big way. But there is a lot of data out there that has to be presented in a coherent, reusable way. Ontologies help that happen by providing support for aggregation, provenance and data quality – aggregation through everything having URIs and controlled vocabularies, provenance in terms of who was the source and when did the data appear, quality through units of measure and data types. Government data is available to the public, but not easily accessed at the moment. It isn’t even very big data – there aren’t any serious technical barriers to making it more available. We feel that now is the time to start up an initiative to bring public data to the public.

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.

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.

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.

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

Slowing down their start-up investments, VCs aren’t raising as much money these days. Recently Thomson Reuters and the National Venture Capital Association said the third quarter saw the smallest number of venture funds raising money in a single quarter since the third quarter of 1994.

Just 17 venture capital funds raised $1.6 billion in the third quarter this year – in 1994’s third quarter, 17 funds were also raised and the lowest level of dollars were committed since the first quarter of 2003 when $938 million was raised during the dot-com bust. The NVCA says it expects commitment levels to remain modest the rest of the year, with gradual increases beginning in 2010.

Given the state of VC fund-raising and funding, semantic web start-ups perhaps won’t be as well-served by traditional West Coast venture capital firms as they may have been a couple of years ago. So why not try Houston instead?

That’s the location of Creeris Ventures, which is backing some innovative start-ups, including 80legs. In fact, if you happen to be a semantic web business that could leverage 80legs’ scalable web content crawling and processing service, you may want to give Creeris CEO Brad Wilson a call.

“We don’t have any semantic web technologies or companies in our portfolio now,” he says, “but that’s not to say we wouldn’t be interested in either forming or partnering with people [in this area] to create new companies...especially those that would make sense in combination with 80legs' core technology to drive 80legs usage and possibly higher margins.”

Also note he’s not interested in scientific type-research projects, which may be cool but have limited applicability – only those businesses that have potential for in-demand commercial applicability need apply.

(Speaking of 80legs, that company has just launched a developers’ challenge to create applications that use the platform they can sell — and keep 100 percent of the profits for — for its App Store that opens in November. The idea, 80legs says, is to make crawling even more accessible — so as to expand the market to the non-technically inclined — with a rich store of 80apps, so that anyone will be able to execute jobs.)

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.)

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.

The service can search through documents and identify themes without those themes having been previously defined. The program is being used by news organizations to build new landing pages that consolidate articles already in inventory, but not previously recognized as being related. Listen to Musgrove's example about baby gates and you'll get the idea.

What the service delivers is a boon to creating SEO pages with highly concentrated, related articles that are likely to be highly rated by search engines. It would seem that any active publishing company might find use for this kind of tool.

In addition, Textdigger's online demo for its keyword tools can analyze a web page and identify what words should be added to an article to make it more relevant to search engines. The Textdigger founder says several SEO consulting agencies have adopted this tool after finally seeing that semantic technologies can be helpful to their practices.

Hear Musgrove's explanations of Textdigger's capabilities and why he thinks that publishing and search can benefit from the use of semantic tech.

Click Start arrow below to hear Tim Musgrove interview.

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.

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.

You’ve heard of the Book of Love – now there’s also a Book of Odds.

Don’t take out your betting cards yet. Rather than being a tool to help you get lucky on the next horse race, Book of Odds is about providing the odds of everyday life. It defines itself as an ever-expanding semantic database of probabilities that helps users find unexpected links between odds statements – the odds of a man over 50 being diagnosed with heart disease is about the same as the odds that an adult is afraid of snakes (1 in 1.9x).

Launched in mid-October, the site claims to contain hundreds of thousands of carefully researched Odds Statements, each evaluated and graded for its underlying data quality. The site uses Cambridge Semantics’ semantic middleware technology to structure the data to help users in their searches for odds statement matches. Currently the site has four topic portals – Health & Illness, Accidents & Death, Relationships & Society, and Daily Life & Activities, each with their own sub-topics.

Users can search by keywords, key-numbers (finding events of a given likelihood through whole number searches), and visually. Semanticweb.com thought this presented lots of possibilities for whiling away a morning, so we thought we’d share with you some of the interesting odds we came across while perusing the site. Check them out on the jump, right below the screen shot of the Book of Odds home page.

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.”

The talk was only semi-successful - due to a number of factors (not least of which being a parade of revelers passing in front of the conference hotel wearing little more than paint ... and sometimes not even that) I had a number of people abandoning the talk about halfway through. However, I think the talk provides a good overview of how Semantic Web technologies factor into the field of Journalism ... though without the nude party-goers.

It's hard to believe that Drupal references and taxonomy definitions can't compete with naked, but based on Cagle's account, such appears to be the case.

Cagle's slide presentation is embedded below. It's very thorough and interesting, especially his view of the evolving role of journalists ("The significant journalists today are analysts. Their role today is to discern meaning and validity in a rushing tide of assertions. Increasingly less important is their role as reporters.") and how semantic technology is enabling this transition.

Oh, in case you were hoping, Cagle was good to his word: There are no nude party-goers in the slide show. You'd think he would have learned something from his recent experience.

Jinni and its Movie Genome project want to help. Formally launched this week, the site aims at classifying movie and TV content beyond genre, and enables users to search for what they might want to watch using natural language. Jinni hopes to overcome what it says are the limitations of relying solely on recommendations determined by past personal content consumption and collaborative filtering of similar consumptions; searching content catalogues by filters such as genre; or through keyword searches.

“Jinni indexes meaning -- that’s the semantic part of it,” says Yosi Glick, co-founder, president and COO. It understands, for example, that a movie like Little Miss Sunshine is about a dysfunctional family the same way as a human being reading a synopsis of it would know it was a story about a family that was a mess, he says. “Jinni understands that, and automatically gives it a semantic tag called dysfunctional family."

The semantic technology actually surfaces the meaning of that particular content, Glick continues, extracting that based on the raw materials of synopsis and reviews. In addition to accounting for the “just the facts” element of a story, Glick says Jinni also uses sentiment-analysis techniques to determine within its database the magnitude of particular subjectives around a movie -- for instance, whether it is a little humorous, medium-funny, or a laugh riot.

The movie genome, created by Jinni’s content team, defines more than 2,000 attribute vectors, and from that its algorithm then automatically assign some 30 to 50 semantic tags for each content item. In case you’re planning to see a movie a little farther out than this weekend, Glick says the database already can offer recommendations for movies due for release next January.

“We can do that because [our approach] is based on whether the story is the same," he says. "As the parameters become more the same, the similarity is greater. We use semantic tags to calculate what is similar as opposed to what is consumed, and we measure that to be more accurate and we can start making the calculations even before any consumption takes place."