SemanticWeb Research

Thomas K Landauer, Department of Psychology, University of Colorado at Boulder Peter W. Foltz, Department of Psychology, New Mexico State University Darrell Laham, Department of Psychology, University of Colorado at Boulder Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) is a theory and method for extracting and representing the contextual-usage meaning of words by statistical computations applied to a large corpus of text (Landauer and Dumais, 1997). The underlying idea is that the aggregate of all the word contexts in which a given word does and does not appear provides a set of mutual constraints that largely determines the similarity of meaning of words and sets of words to each other. The adequacy of LSA's reflection of human knowledge has been established in a variety of ways. For example, its scores overlap those of humans on standard vocabulary and subject matter tests; it mimics human word sorting and category judgments; it simulates word<>word and passage<>word lexical priming data; and, as reported in 3 following articles in this issue, it accurately estimates passage coherence, learnability of passages by individual students, and the quality and quantity of knowledge contained in an essay.

Andrew Lumpe & David Wicks, Seattle Pacific University Presentation at Sloan Conference, October 2009.

"The company is Israel-based MindCite, and its semantic-based software lets homeland security agencies and intelligence agencies collect, integrate, research, and analyze diverse types of information, from structured formats like databases and unstructured formats such as text, to solve crimes, crack cases and get alerts. The company's systems are installed in over a dozen countries, though not stateside yet. "

"The fourth of July holiday is upon us. And this year, why not celebrate democracy by checking out the open source project GovTrack.us, a site where you can follow the status of federal legislation and members of Congress? The government, of course, puts lots of data about the activities of the U.S. Congress on the web. THOMAS, for example, provides legislative information from the Library of Congress. But much of the time, the user interfaces to sites like this are less than optimal, and the data in each exists in its own individual silo. GovTrack.us is one graduate student's attempt to change the experience when it comes to getting information on pending legislation (and about a decade's worth of historical data on the topic), both in terms of a more accessible interface and pulling together data on the topic from multiple government sources. "

The Semantic Web Awareness Barometer 2009 aims at providing the reader with a brief overview over current trends and possible future topics in the fast evolving and dynamic field of web semantics. It also addresses Social Software, since these two areas are expected to condition each other. The data analysed in this survey was primarily collected among Semantic Web specialists from science and industry.

"The Voice of Semantic Web Business & Technology"

"Mainstream businesses increasingly are taking the semantic web seriously. Consider the U.K. Governments Technology Program's Market Blended Insight (MBI) project. While funded under that program as a three-year applied research project, it includes as part of its consortium the marketing departments of ParcelForce Worldwide, British Gas Business, AXA, Clydesdale and Yorkshire Bank (NAGE), 3M and pH Group. Having these partners on board helps ensure that the work it is doing to help companies improve their marketing activities has application in real-world scenarios. "

"While some people work heavily on the extension of the semantic web infrastructure, like Talis Connected Commons or OpenLink´s Amazon EC2 Instantiation others have started to bring the semantic web closer to the developers and therefore to a much broader audience: They offer search facilities or Linked Data Navigators like OpenLink´s Entity Finder or DERI´s VisiNav."

"Andreas Blumauer (Semantic Web Company) talked with Brian Donnelly about a new system on the market called "Semantic Discovery System" (SDS), which helps to do sophisticated queries across existing datasets. Also talking why complex scripts or triple stores should not be exposed to the end-users anymore."

"During the early days of the Internet in the mid and late 90's software professionals and Internet users waited in angst for computers to become as smart as people by using artificial intelligence (computers using human reason combined with processing power thousands of times faster than human brain's processing power). This never panned out [...]"

"Intro to the Semantic Web, LITA Social Software Showcase 2009"

"The Disco - Hyperdata Browser is a simple browser for navigating the Semantic Web. The browser renders all information, that it can find on the Semantic Web about a specific resource, as an HTML page. This resource description contains hyperlinks that allow you to navigate between resources. While you move from resource to resource, the browser dynamically retrieves information by dereferencing HTTP URIs and by following rdfs:seeAlso links."

"DBpedia is a community effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia and to make this information available on the Web. DBpedia allows you to ask sophisticated queries against Wikipedia, and to link other data sets on the Web to Wikipedia data."

Collection of publications on the activities involving the semantic web. This is a very useful resource.

"2009-09-01 [09:30 - 11:00] : Session 3A: Web, Semantics and Ontologies I" 2009-09-01 [14:00 - 15:30] : Session 4A: Web, Semantics and Ontologies II 2009-09-01 [16:00 - 17:30] : Session 5A: Web, Semantics and Ontologies III 2009-09-02 [09:30 - 11:00] : Session 6B: Semantic Web and Ontologies IV (short papers)

As JISC has recently announced an open call of funding for a study on Semantic Web technologies in teaching and learning we thought we'd use this opportunity to provide a bit of an update on Semantic Web developments. The JISC call seeks to fund a study which looks at pragmatic aspects of the actual use of semantic applications in real world scenarios. The successful applicant will review a number of case studies of real-world teaching and learning scenarios and look at the potential for use of semantic technologies. The key question they are asking is: "Can you convince us that semantic technologies offer one potential solution to some real problems?"

September 23, 2008 Research, done by MarketCap in cooperation with Aduna, shows that more than 60 percent of companies with over 200 employees, intend to invest in a project that uses semantic technology (Web 3.0) within a year's time. Almost 10 percent already uses semantic technology, or has already defined a semantic technology project. The fact that 60 percent of the companies plan to invest indicates an enormous increase of the use of semantic technology in the coming 12 months. Companies abound in information, but only a tiny amount is used by managers, either because most of the information is not visible or connections are not, or cannot be made. This is the situation mid-2008, but with the rise of semantic technologies this will change drastically in the coming years. More and more information will come to light and it will become easier to judge its usefulness.

Research interests in applied technologies and learning/teaching systems. Provides a rich collection of publications and conference presentations.

This document concerns the management of the output of insight generators, the software agents utilized in the insight generation systems. The solution to managing these reports involves the automatic creation of a repository for all materials generated by various insight generators; this repository allows the user to navigate through this continually growing space of marketing reports, gaining new insights about the relationships between items of interest and adding new insights in the process. The goal of the system is to make all marketing information and insights generated by the man/machine interaction available to the user, so that there is a convergence towards a "conservation of information". To use a geometric metaphor, the goal is to make the user equidistant from all information at all times, as illustrated below.