UK’s BIS Dissolves Public Data Corporation
Mark Ballard has commented on the UK’s Department of Business, Innovation and Skills’ recent action to dissolve the Public Data Corporation “while its confused policy Cabinet joint Office initiative team works out how to make open data workable. The Cabinet Office rushed out a revamped Open Data strategy on 29 November, ‘delivering on its commitment to establish a Public Data Corporation’. BIS had already established the Public Data Corporation as a private company on 11 November 2010. But the company had laid dormant for a year while the departments and the Local Public Data Panel worked out how to get an HM data-set free-for-all round the vast bellies of such comfortable institutions as the Ordnance Survey, Land Registry and Met Office.” continued…
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Semantic Web Jobs: GE Global Research
GE’s Global Research segment is looking for a Semantic Scientist in Niskayuna, NY. According to the post, “As a Semantic Lead Scientist, you will work with multi-disciplinary teams to develop tools and ontologies for application to a diverse set of industrial, service and financial problems. You will demonstrate a strong technical background and independently execute projects in areas of model development, semantic and ontology technology specification and development, and information extraction.” continued…
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Kyield Announces Pilot Program for New Semantic Enterprise Platform
Kyield recently announced “a new pilot program for its recently patented semantic enterprise platform. The artificial intelligence system provides a holistic architecture that extends advanced business intelligence and predictive analytics to all information workers in the organization with an adaptive approach to data optimization.” Kyield CEO Mark Montgomery stated, “We are inviting well-matched organizations to collaborate with us in piloting our breakthrough system to bring a higher level of performance to the information workplace… In addition to the significant competitive advantage exclusive to our pilot program, we are offering attractive long-term incentives free from lock-in, maintenance fees, and high service costs traditionally associated with the enterprise software industry.” continued…
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James Hendler on the State of the Semantic Web
James Hendler was recently interviewed regarding the state of the World Wide Web and advances in semantic technology. Asked about the proliferation of the web, Hendler commented, “The Web is changing very fast and it has a very rapid effect on our economy. Consider something like aeroplanes which, as a subject, has been studied all along. On the contrary, the Web has happened so fast and hit so many places that we never really had time to understand it. Many of the periodical works on the Web are being done on the data collected in 1999. In 1999 Facebook didn’t exist. Twitter didn’t exist. A lot of people study Twitter. But again that is just one thing. Wikipedia has been successful, while most ‘wikis’ have failed. Online, we are now discovering the power of the (individual’s) voice and governments do not know how to deal with it.” continued…
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The Semantic Link with Guest, Denny Vrandecic – February, 2012
On Friday, February 10, a group of Semantic thought leaders from around the globe met with their host and colleague, Paul Miller, for the latest installment of the Semantic Link, a monthly podcast covering the world of Semantic Technologies. This episode includes a discussion about data; specifically, the recently announced “wikidata” project with special guest, Denny Vrandecic.
At the recent SemTechBiz Berlin conference, Denny presented a talk titled, “Wikidata: The Next Big Thing for Wikipedia.” As evidenced in the “Wow’s” expressed by the panelists in this month’s podcast call, this is indeed a big deal for Wikipedia and for Semantic Web. continued…
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Synchronising dataspaces at scale
So, I have a question for you – how would you approach the following (engineering) problem? Imagine you have two dataspaces, a source dataspace, such as Eurostat with some 5000+ datasets that can take up to several GB in the worst case, and a target dataspace (for example, something like what we’re deploying in the LATC, currently). You want to ensure that the data in the target dataspace is as fresh as possible, that is, providing a minimal temporal delay between the contents of source and target dataspaces.
Don’t get me wrong, this has exactly nothing to do with Linked Data, RDF or the like. This is simply the question of how often one should ‘sample’ the source in order to make sure that the target is ‘always’ up-to-date.
Now, would you say that Shannon’s theorem is of any help? Or, you look at the given source update frequency and decide based on this how often you hammer the server?
Step back.
It turns out that one should also take into account what happens in the target dataspace. In our case this is mainly the conversion of the XML or TSV into some RDF serialisation. This is, in cases where the source dataset has, say, some 11GB, a non-trivial issue to address. In addition, we see some ~1000 datasets changing in a couple of days time. Which would leave us, in the worst case, with a situation where we would still be in the conversion process of parts of the dataspace while already updated versions of the datasets would be pending.
On the other hand we know, based on our experience with the Eurostat data, that we can rebuild the entire dataspace – that is, downloading all 5000+ files incl. metadata, converting it to RDF and loading the metadata into the SPARQL endpoint – in some 11+ days. Wouldn’t it make sense to simply only look at the update every 10-or-so days?
We discussed this today and settled for a weekly (weekend) update policy. Let’s see where this takes us and I promise that I keep you posted …
Filed under: FYI, Linked Data 
W3C’s Provenance Data Model
Luc Moreau recently reported on the current status of the W3C‘s Provenance Data Model. He wrote, “The Provenance Working Group began its activities with a charter naming some 17 concepts relevant to provenance, such as resource, process execution, use, derivation, version, etc. For the first 3 months leading to our first face to face meeting, we debated definitions for these concepts. Importantly, for the social cohesion of the group, we developed a common vocabulary shared by members to communicate.” continued…
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Zemanta CTO on the Smart Personal Assistant
Ryan Kim recently spoke to Zemanta CTO Andraz Tori regarding the company’s role in the growing smart personal assistant field. Kim writes, “When I first heard of Zemanta, I thought of it as a great tool for bloggers, helping recommend links, content and images. And it does that quite well, helping some 80,000 active users. But after talking with Zemanta’s CTO and co-founder Andraz Tori, our conversation turned to the bigger picture of what New York-based Zemanta is doing. And it’s really in a similar vein as Apple’s Siri, IBM’s Watson and other services. We’re now entering the age of the smart personal assistant, as computers increasingly listen and understand what we’re saying and fulfill our requests and questions in real time.” continued…
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Semantic Web Jobs: GHG Corporation
GHG Corporation is looking for a Senior Software Developer in Houston, TX. The company is looking for someone with the following qualifications: “At least 7 years of solid experience in JAVA Programming and J2EE/JavaEE based Web application development. Experience in using frameworks and tools such as JSF, Hibernate, Spring, XML, EJB, JSP, JDBC, ANT, JUnit, and Log4J. Experience in developing Web Service components using one or more of the following technologies: SOAP, REST, XML-RPC, WSDL, XML/XSLT, JAXB, JAXP. Experience in developing applications with multi-tier architectures. Knowledge and Experience in Relational Database systems (Oracle, MySQL, or SQL Server) as well as proficiency in enterprise environments.” continued…
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Learning about WikiData at #SemTechBiz Berlin
Richard Wallis is reporting from SemTechBiz in Berlin this week. He recently wrote, “One of the more eagerly awaited presentations at the Semantic Tech & Business Conference in Berlin today was a late addition to the program from Denny Vrandecic. With the prominence of Dbpedia in the Linked Open Data Cloud, anything new from Wikipedia with data in it was bound to attract attention, and we were not disappointed.” continued…
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