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Dr. Bernhard Haslhofer works as instructor on Web Information Systems at Cornell Information Science. Just recently he gave a course which examined technologies for building data-centric information systems on the World Wide Web. Semantic Web Company (SWC) had the opportunity to talk with Dr. Haslhofer to examine the question "How to teach Linked Data?".

Social technologies and collaboration tools start to find broad acceptance in the enterprise domain. As well, semantic technologies have been around for a while, offering a range of benefits in the handling of information, including the pervasive linking of content, fostering new forms of content discovery and navigation, and improving content metadata and information retrieval.

Today there are probably 1,000+ content management systems in use in the European Union. Very few of these are using semantics-based technologies, which holds the promise to substantially improve employee productivity and how we use our skills online.

A new search engine allows users to search for good news. According to the article, "Jurriaan Kamp editor of Ode Magazine in San Francisco has created a new search engine. Ode Wire, available here in its beta form uses semantic search technology to spot optimism on the web, and delivers users news stories from an 'uplifting' angle.

While there may not be a semantic application that can go to work on every issue that requires grappling with Big Data, it certainly has a role to play in many of them. Throw out outliers such as using power grid data to optimize power distribution, and "the lion's share of big data problems are semantic problems," says Dachis Group CTO Erik Huddleston.

In Barbara Starr's (Ontologica) session this week at Semtech 2011, San Francisco, she presented a detailed timeline outlining the adoption of RDFa and semantic search enhancements by the major search engines.

As the fundamental flow of energy through the marketplace transforms from 'push' to 'pull,' organizations will need to become more active and participative social networkers.  New opportunities will show up first on the myriad of non-structured, social media sites that cater to people who want to collaborate to solve problems, start trends, influence the masses and build support.

"We are no longer a general purpose search engine," Kavanaugh tells us. Instead, Ask.com uses proprietary, semantic search technology to deliver answers from its own content banks, community, experts, and from all over the web.

The growing company "offers an advanced semantic page-level analysis that surfaces reader emotions, behaviors, motivations and intentions in order to match ads with similar emotional appeal, without using tracking cookies. 

"Search is evolving to fit the needs of users who don't just want a web site, but the actual answer to the question driving the search. To stay on top semantic search technologies are key."

Anyone who has seen a slide presentation on Semantic Web, Linked Data, or related technologies, has most likely seen the Linking Open Data (LOD) Cloud diagram. Since its debut in 2007, the diagram has grown to its current size which includes 295 datasets in the form of a connected cloud. The data sets in the LOD cloud consist of over 31 billion RDF triples and are interlinked by around 504 million RDF links.

A big problem with contextualizing information is that machines still cannot think. They are only able to do calculations, so everything we do to contextualize data in a software system must be "reduced" to statistics and mathematics. When a certain problem cannot be solved using mathematics (and there are many of them!) then the user must jump in.

Alex Boyer recently shared his thoughts on why it's time to move past the file and how semantic technology can take us there. He writes, "Files are an outdated concept.

We are happy to announce the beta release of RDFaCE (RDFa Content Editor). RDFaCE is an online text editor based on TinyMCE. It supports authoring of RDFa content.

"Silk is an app for the web that helps you collect, sort and view the information that you need without making you comb through the data yourself. It also allows content creators to provide their content in a more structured manner on the web. This is an app that will allow you to better navigate the semantic web seas, also known as Web 3.0." 

"Virtually everywhere one looks we are in the midst of a transition for how we organize and manage information, indeed even relationships. Social networks and online communities are changing how we live and interact. NoSQL and graph databases - married to their near cousin Big Data - are changing how we organize and store information and data. Semantic technologies, backed by their ontologies and RDF data model, are showing the way for how we can connect and interoperate disparate information in ways only dreamed about a decade ago. And all of this, of course, is being built upon the infrastructure of the Internet and the Web, a global, distributed network of devices and information that is undoubtedly one of the most important technological developments in human history. There is a shared structure across all of these developments - the graph. Graphs are proving to be the new universal paradigm for how we organize and manage information. Graphs have an inherently expandable nature, and one which can also capture any existing structure. So, as we see all of the networks, connections, relationships and links - both physical and informational - grow around us, it is useful to step back a bit and contemplate the universal graph structure at the core of these developments. Understanding that we now live in the Age of the Graph means we can begin studying and using the concept of the graph itself to better analyze and manage our interconnected world. Whether we are trying to understand the physical networks of supply chains and infrastructure or the information relationships within ontologies or knowledge graphs, the various concepts underlying graphs and graph theory, themselves expressed through a rich vocabulary of terms, provide the keys for unlocking still further treasures hidden in the structure of graphs."

We live in a connected society, where devices and data are being pulled together to profoundly change business, our personal lives, society and even nations. In this introduction to this PublicTechnology.net Agenda, I want to try to outline, in non-technical terms, some of the benefits to the sector (and ultimately the taxpayer) of extracting and linking data.

The PANDA Project, a winner of this year's Knight News Challenge, is what developer Brian Boyer calls a "newsroom data application," a tool that helps find context and relationships on the fly. Boyer, the news applications editor at the Chicago Tribune, will lead the project, which plans to create a set of web-based open source tools that will allow any newsroom to set up their own PANDA to analyze data whenever the need arises.

Another example of the increasing focus on content intelligence - salsaDev - http://bit.ly/riy5BV

A question for you: How does discovering and sharing online information make you feel? [I'd bet a good number of you are frustrated, feeling the negative effects of what Eli Pariser calls the "filter bubble"...] Well, here's something else to consider: discovering and sharing information - and the means for curating it - should be serendipitous. Really, it should. A Form of Collective Intelligence I had the fortunate pleasure of meeting up with my friend Jarno Koponen while in Helsinki this past week. Jarno and his founding partner, Marko Anderson, have spent the last two plus years building a predictive discovery engine, called Futureful.