Sanjiva Nath of InfoWorld recently wrote, “The problem of integrating enterprise applications is not new. But the demand for integration and the complexity of implementing it keep increasing, thanks to rising adoption of SaaS and market forces that push teams to improve their collaboration and delivery capabilities. Traditional enterprise application integrations have proven time-consuming and expensive, typically involving months of effort and significant cost. A big contributor to this overhead is the fact that integration schemes typically lack any formal representation of application data — that is, metadata. As a result, the interpretation of the application data and its mapping to any integration scheme becomes a manual, tedious, and nonrepeatable process.” Read more

Ron Callari of InventorSpot recently discussed the role Google Glass could take in small business. He writes, “The small business folk I’m thinking would gravitate to Glass are journalists and bloggers who would be able to report instantaneously while on a remote assignment, in advance of returning to their computers. Store owners with the use of QR codes would be able to promote specials and discounted promos to consumers who are passing their shops. Imagine being able to conduct a meeting while walking down the street, while simultaneously reading your emails. You could collaborate with co-workers, read their documents while communicating with them verbally. Small business owners could solve mundane issues quicker, allowing them to spend less time on the tactical and more time on the strategic side of their business.” Read more

Barry Levine of CMS Wire reports, “Norway-based content management provider Webnodes AS is out with version 4.5 of its .NET-based, semantic Web CMS platform. Enhancements include more options for load balancing, ontology merging, and content synchronizations between installations. Last summer, Webnodes released version 4 of its Web CMSt. The company distinguishes its approach to content management with a core Semantic Content Engine, aligning the system with the growth of the semantic Web. The Semantic Content Engine allows a custom ontology, or content model, to be created for each project. The result is content that is structured by meaning, able to be shared in a presentation-agnostic format or used to create a website’s navigational structure based on meaning relationships rather than page relationships.” Read more

Marketers, SEO experts and businesses not yet on-board with retooling their approaches to the new world of semantic technology and semantic search need to seriously rethink their positions.

Why? Check out the Q&A below with writer, speaker and analyst David Amerland, author of the new book Google™ Semantic Search: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Techniques That Get Your Company More Traffic, Increase Brand Impact, and Amplify Your Online Presence. Amerland also will be participating in this session, The Semantic Web Has Killed SEO; Long Live SEO, at the Semantic Technology & Business conference in New York City in October.

Semantic Web Blog: What was your motivation for writing Google Semantic Search?

Amerland: After working as a chemical engineer who wrote pieces for newspapers, and in cultural and business journalism, I became a communications director for a U.K. blue chip company, and part of my role was overseeing the changes of taking a massive company from the 19th century, where it was stuck, to the 21^st century. Part of that was to create a web presence. And in different capacities I’ve guided other web companies. So I have seen the things I talk about around marketing in action.

I want to demystify SEO. I hate things to be cloaked in mystique. When there’s a mystique around things you do away with everything from comparison metrics to the opportunity to have best practices. That’s really bad for business. So that’s my motivation. Just as I used to demystify science in my early days as a journalist. I’m trying to open up SEO as it is today as much as possible.

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David Amerland, author of Google Semantic Search and speaker at the upcoming Semantic Technology & Business Conference in New York, has given his take on Microsoft’s acquisition of Nokia’s Devices & Services division. In his analysis, he talks about the Semantic Web and how the company that stands to lose the most in this deal is neither Microsoft nor Nokia, but Yahoo!

Amerland posits, “In the semantic web there are specific vectors driving growth that revolve around relevance and the end-user experience. In order to guarantee both you need a means to constantly acquire quality data and control the environment. Apple gets this to the extent that it locks out virtually all third-party providers from its iPhones and iOs, Facebook got it which is why it launched its own app designed to help it take over users’ phones and Google gets it having recently launched Moto X, in addition to the Android environment being present in many third-party phones.”

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426 billion tweets, dating back to the very first one in 2006. The entire history of Twitter – as well as tools to analyze in real-time tweets’ influence, relevance, sentiment and geo-inference —  are to be contained in Topsy’s social data index as of 11 AM EST  today. It’s available to users both of its free social search service and its Topsy Pro Analytics offering. The feature, known as AllTweets, also is to be available in all of its API offerings that developers use to access information programmatically in order to make any application social.

“The key here is instantaneous validation of information,” says Jamie de Guerre, Topsy’s SVP product and marketing. “Our deep expertise and data infrastructure can provide instant insights across 425 billion tweets at scale like no other analytics provider can do.”

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What’s the advantage of looking at machine learning from the platform perspective? Breadth and depth, says Skytree co-founder and CEO Martin Hack. In contrast to a single point algorithm that learns about one thing really well for a particular need as it goes about analyzing more and more Big Data sets, Skytree takes the tack that there’s a whole universe of algorithms and methods that can be applied to support a variety of use cases.

The company is a startup, closing a Series A funding round this spring to the tune of $18 million. Skytree’s algorithms are available in different packages for application across industries, or even to fit different needs within the same industry or company. The six biggest machine learning use cases across industries, Hack says, are classification, regression, clustering, entity estimation, dimension reduction and multidimensional querying, and those six tasks, individually or in combination, provide the foundation for performing advanced analytics such as outlier detection or value prediction, among others, that are applicable to various scenarios. “Outlier detection could be used in trying to detect fraud or to find terrorists,” he says. “It’s virtually the same platform. The data changes and the output changes, but the computation part is the same.”

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Aaron Dobrow of the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas recently wrote, “Language isn’t always straightforward, even for humans. The multiple definitions in a dictionary can make it difficult even for people to choose the correct meaning of a word. Katrin Erk, a linguistics researcher in the College of Liberal Arts, refers to this as ‘semantic muck.’ Enabled by supercomputers at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, Erk has developed a new method for visualizing the words in a high-dimensional space. Instead of hard-coding human logic or deciphering dictionaries to try to teach computers language, Erk decided to try a different tactic: feed computers a vast body of texts (which are a reflection of human knowledge) and use the implicit connections between the words to create a map of relationships.” Read more

Thomas Zadvydas of The Deal recently wrote, “Venture capital investors are going to school on the education sector, hoping to help drive changes in the primary, secondary and post-secondary systems. According to a July analysis done by Chicago education-focused advisory shop GSV Advisors LLC, there were 168 venture and growth placements in the education sector in 2012, as compared to 80 two years earlier. And the MoneyTree Report, an analysis of Thomson Reuters Corp. data by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP and the National Venture Capital Alliance, venture capital investment in education businesses has grown 80% since 2005 to more than $632 million in 2012. ‘Education technology is a hot space. Many VC funds are active here,’ said partner Emilio Ragosa of law firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP. He cites Union Square Ventures, First Round Capital and FirstMark Capital as particularly energetic participants.” Read more

Automation Technologies, Inc. is looking for a “Senior Java Developer with an Ontology background” in the Fort George Meade, Maryland area. The position requires an Active Top Secret/SCI (TS/SCI) with Polygraph Clearance.   This is an additional position added to the ATI team.

While the main role is Java development, the person in this role “partners with senior customer leadership to provide strategic support to help organizations improve performance by using ontologies, triple stores and reasoning for analyzing situations, identifying gaps, and proposing solutions. Serves as a performance change agent; influences stakeholder decisions by “selling” strategic performance concepts. Uses a variety of performance strategies, tools, and interventions (i.e., organizational development, needs or trend analysis, needs assessment, training evaluation, etc.) to implement change, monitor solution implementation, and assure organizational success. Develops networks and alliances, and collaborates across boundaries with a wide range of stakeholders. Serves as an expert resource for customer executives. ”

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