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s Richard MacManus recently predicted, in 2008 we'll witness the rise of semantic web services. From the native support for Microformats in Firefox 3, to the New York Times' utilization of rich headers metadata, to this week's release of the Social Graph API by Google, semantics are starting to slip onto the web. The impact is being felt because large companies are really starting to focus on structured information. In the same vein, last week Reuters - an international business and financial news giant - launched an API called Open Calais. The API does a semantic markup on unstructured HTML documents - recognizing people, places, companies, and events. This technology is the next generation of the Clear Forest offering, which Reuters acquired last year. We have profiled Clear Forest on ReadWriteWeb and in this post we will look at what Reuters opened up and why.

CrunchBase is the free database of technology companies, people, and investors that anyone can edit.

A user can start a Web crawl through 80legs's Web-based interface. The form on the company's site lets them set parameters for the project and upload custom code needed to control how the crawler does its job. For example, a user might want the crawler to find images and check them against a database of copyrighted ones. Deysarkar says his company's crawlers are capable of processing up to two billion pages a day. The company charges $2 for every million pages crawled, plus a fee of three cents per hour of processing used.

A user can start a Web crawl through 80legs's Web-based interface. The form on the company's site lets them set parameters for the project and upload custom code needed to control how the crawler does its job. For example, a user might want the crawler to find images and check them against a database of copyrighted ones. Deysarkar says his company's crawlers are capable of processing up to two billion pages a day. The company charges $2 for every million pages crawled, plus a fee of three cents per hour of processing used.

Silobreaker is a search and aggregation service for news and current affairs that looks at the data it finds like a person does. It recognizes things - companies, people, topics, places - and puts them in context. By filtering out the noise and building up a meaningful picture from the information that matters, Silobreaker enables its users to spend more time learning from the web, and less time searching it.

Semantic CrunchBase is an RDF/SPARQL interface to CrunchBase, the free directory of technology companies, people, and investors.

If companies cannot develop a culture of knowledge sharing and innovation, it's primarily because they are having a hard time measuring the benefits. All metrics of intangibles -and KM in particular- are shaky, and the most promising ones, based on network analysis (VNA) still have a long way to go before they become generally accepted practices. In the meantime, organizing a knowledge market might be the best way to go. Let's imagine what it would look like… First, a separate organization for shared knowledge services would have to be set up, if it doesn't exist already. For lack of a better phrase, let's cal it the corporate university. The problem is that corporate universities, when they exist, are focused on executive programs, which is a very small part of the problem.

Launched in 1999, the Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes are the first global indexes tracking the financial performance of the leading sustainability-driven companies worldwide. Based on the cooperation of Dow Jones Indexes, STOXX Limited and SAM they provide asset managers with reliable and objective benchmarks to manage sustainability portfolios.

Cogenz is a hosted social bookmarking service for companies wishing to harness the collective intelligence of their employees using social software in a simple and effective way. Think del.icio.us for the enterprise and you won't go far wrong.

MindCanvas is a research service to help companies gather insights about customers' thoughts & feelings. We use Game-like Elicitation Methods (GEMs) to let online users participate in answering the complex questions that you face in designing a product or service.

This is Draft 2.0 of The Open Group's SOA ontology. This draft is being exposed for comment outside The Open Group prior to formal Open Group company review. Interested parties are invited to sent comments, and those comments will be addressed in the version submitted to formal review by The Open Group.

BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) is Yahoo!'s open search web services platform. The goal of BOSS is simple: to foster innovation in the search industry. Developers, start-ups, and large Internet companies can use BOSS to build and launch web-scale search products that utilize the entire Yahoo! Search index. BOSS gives you access to Yahoo!'s investments in crawling and indexing, ranking and relevancy algorithms, and powerful infrastructure. By combining your unique assets and ideas with our search technology assets, BOSS is a platform for the next generation of search innovation, serving hundreds of millions of users across the Web.

A quiet land rush is under way among the buttes of southeastern Wyoming, and it is changing the local rancher culture. The whipping winds cursed by descendants of the original homesteaders now have real value for out-of-state developers who dream of wind farms or of selling the rights to bigger companies.

The technology to make biobutanol, a non-food based biofuel, cost-competitive with gasoline isn't here yet, but companies in the know say that it could be by 2010.

Computers and common sense

17 November 2008 - The international open standards consortium, OASIS, has formed a new group to standardize a Web services interface specification that will enable greater interoperability of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems. The new OASIS Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) Technical Committee will advance an open standard that uses Web services and Web 2.0 interfaces to enable information to be shared across Internet protocols in vendor-neutral formats, among document systems, publishers and repositories, within and between companies.

Semantic web and social networking technologies offered by KnowledgeHives can become foundations to delivering dedicated solutions supporting knowledge management in your company.

TagCrowd is a web application for visualizing word frequencies in any user-supplied text by creating what is popularly known as a tag cloud or text cloud. TagCrowd is taking tag clouds far beyond their original function: * as topic summaries for speeches and written works * as blog tool or website analysis for search engine optimization (SEO) * for visual analysis of survey data * as brand clouds that let companies see how they are perceived by the world * for data mining a text corpus * for helping writers and students reflect on their work * as name tags for conferences, cocktail parties or wherever new collaborations start * as resumes in a single glance * as visual poetry

Online study group community Cramster announced today that the company has raised a $3 million investment and after checking out the site, we can see why. This active, full featured and well design service looks really compelling for students and has a solid business model. Members can participate in forums about homework, get quick answers to questions 24 hours a day and access explanations of problems from more than 200 of the most popular text books in 7 subject areas. There are free and paid membership levels at $10 per month and users deemed helpful by others can receive financial rewards like gift certificates.

GATE is... * the Eclipse of Natural Language Engineering, the Lucene of Information Extraction, a leading toolkit for Text Mining * used worldwide by thousands of scientists, companies, teachers and students * comprised of an architecture, a free open source framework (or SDK) and graphical development environment * used for all sorts of language processing tasks, including Information Extraction in many languages * funded by the EPSRC, BBSRC, AHRC, the EU and commercial users * 100% Java reference implementation of ISO TC37/SC4 and used with XCES in the ANC * 10 years old in 2005, used in many research projects and compatible with IBM's UIMA * based on MVC, mobile code, continuous integration, and test-driven development, with code hosted on SourceForge

Seth Grimes is a business intelligence expert with a special interest in text analytics. In this conversation with host Jon Udell, he discusses how a new breed of tools is enabling companies to build "voice of the customer" applications that extract useful signals from the noisy chatter that's erupting everywhere online.