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TEMIS and HighWire Press Join Up to Semantically Enrich Content

By Unlimited Priorities on October 26, 2011 in Blog

HighWire Press, an industry leader in high quality hosting and web publishing for scholarly publishers worldwide and TEMIS, a Semantic Content Enrichment solution provider for the Enterprise has announced they have entered into a strategic technology and business partnership. HighWire will integrate the full suite of Luxid® software within its ePublishing Platform. This will allow for automated content annotation, enrichment and linking for its existing customers.

…while Luxid® can effectively tag content using taxonomies, it also performs advanced semantic analysis to identify the new discoveries happening on the cutting edge of research, those that our publishers value the most. — John Sack, Founding Director, Highwire Press

Users have become much more sophisticated in their use of online information and are on the lookout for easier and more efficient ways of locating the information they need most. Publishers are recognizing the need to make their content more findable as part of any efforts to improve customer satisfaction. Semantic content enrichment has become a strategic means to help both consumers and publishers make better use of information.

HighWire’s Founding Director, John Sack says “This new partnership allows us to increase discoverability inside the platform with richer metadata and outside the platform by connecting to the semantic web. The broad discipline coverage and the complete suite of customization tools offered by Luxid(R) give HighWire’s publishers the opportunity to access the full scope of the industry’s most advanced semantic toolset. Also, while Luxid(R) can effectively tag content using taxonomies, it also performs advanced semantic analysis to identify the new discoveries happening on the cutting edge of research, those that our publishers value the most.”

Managing Director, Tom Rump continued, “Luxid® marries well with our new tools for rapid product presentation and content aggregation. They’ll enable publishers using HighWire’s open platform to quickly develop new products and deliver them to market, whether on the web or mobile. It allows us to advance the intellectual and commercial interests of scholarly publishers, by having content reach its full potential and its full audience.”

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Peeling Back the Semantic Web Onion

By Unlimited Priorities on November 15, 2010 in Articles

Written for Unlimited Priorities and DCLnews Blog.

An Interview with Intellidimension’s Chris Pooley & Geoff Chappell

Chris Pooley is the CEO and co-founder of Intellidimension. His role is to lead its corporate development and business development efforts. Previously, Chris was Vice-President of Business Development at Thomson Scientific and Healthcare where he was responsible for acquisitions and strategic partnerships.

Richard Oppenheim

As stated in the first article, “the Semantic Web is growing and coming to a neighborhood near you.” (Read Richard Oppenheim’s first article here) Since that article, I had a conversation with Chris Pooley, CEO and co-founder of Intellidimension. Chris understands how the web and the Semantic Web work today. So let’s peel back some of the layers surrounding the semantic web onion and bring the hype down to earth.

Chris has spent years working with and developing applications specifically for the semantic web. Along with Geoff Chappell, Intellidimension president, our conversation ranged around the semantics of the Semantic Web and, more importantly, the impact it will have for access to information resources.

The vision of the founding fathers of the World Wide Web Consortium was for information to be accessible easily and in large volume with a process enabling the same information to be used for infinite purposes. For example, a weather forecast may determine whether your family picnic will be in sunshine or needs to be rescheduled. For the farmer the weather forecast is a key to what needs to be done for the planting and harvesting of crops. The retail store owner decides whether to have a special promotion for umbrellas or sunscreen lotion. The same information is used for different questions and actions.

Data publishers of all sizes and categories have information available. These publishers range from newspapers to retail stores to photo albums to travel sites, and a lot more; get the breaking news story, buy a book, connect with family albums, or book a flight. The web provides access to these benefits in endless combinations. The sites are holders of large volumes of data waiting for you to ask a question, or search. The applications are designed for human consumption so that people can find things when they choose to look.

The Semantic Web is a modified information agent in that there are one or more underlying software applications designed to aggregate information and create a unique pipeline of data for each specific user.

The foundation of the Semantic Web is all about relationships between any two items…

One of the key attributes of the web is that we can link any number of individual pages together. You can be on one page and click to go to another page of your choice. You can send an email that has an embedded link to allow the reader one click access to a specific page.

Chris emphasizes that the Semantic Web is not about links between web pages. “The foundation of the Semantic Web is all about relationships between any two items,” says Chris. Tuesday’s weather has a relationship to a 2pm Frontier flight leaving from Denver. Mary’s booking on that flight means that her ticket and seat assignment also has a relationship. In the semantic web sense, there is a relationship between Tuesday’s weather and Mary.

The growth of the Semantic Web will expand the properties of things to include lots of elements, such as price, age, meals, destination, and so on. The language for describing this information and associated resources on the web is the Resource Description Framework (RDF). Putting information into RDF files, makes it possible for computer programs (“web spiders”) to search, discover, pick up, collect, analyze and process information from the web. The Semantic Web uses RDF to describe web resources.

For end users, the continued adoption of the Semantic Web technologies will mean that when they search for product comparisons they will find more features in the comparisons which should make the process easier, faster, and provide better results.

Whether you seek guidance from the Guru on the mountain top or the Oracle at Delphi, information will range from numbers to statistical charts, from words to books, from images to photo albums, from medication risks to medical procedure analysis to doctor ratings.

Chris Pooley states, “For end users, the continued adoption of the Semantic Web technologies will mean that when they search for product comparisons they will find more features in the comparisons which should make the process easier, faster, and provide better results. For a business user or enterprise the benefits will be huge. By building Semantic Web enabled content, businesses will be able to leverage their former content silos; and the cost of making changes or adding new data elements (maintaining their content) will be reduced while flexibility will be improved, by using the rules-based approach for Semantic Web projects.”

With this vast increase in data volume, users should remember to be certain they trust the data that is retrieved. As part of the guidelines for proper use of the semantic web, we need to establish base levels of reliability for the sources being accessed. This requires some learning and practice to determine what maps appropriately to the level of accuracy needed. The weather forecast can be off a few degrees. Sending a space vehicle to Mars requires far greater accuracy since being off even one degree will cause the vehicle to miss its intended target.

Both end users and enterprise users will learn new ways to pay attention to the data validity. Trusting the source may require a series of steps that includes tracking the information over an extended time period. This learning process will also include a clear explanation of why that information is out there. For example, a company’s historical financial information is not the same as the company’s two year marketing forecast.

There is a chicken and egg aspect to approaching growing accessibility to more data. More data means more opportunity to collect valuable information. It also means that more care needs to be exercised to identify and separate meaningful relevant data from data noise. For example, the retailer Best Buy has started down this path by collecting 60% more bits of information from user clicks on their web site. This enriched data delivers added value to the retailer for more accurate and timely business decisions about products and selling techniques.

One of the intoxicating things about the web is that the vast majority of data, entertainment and resources are all free to anyone with an internet connection. While Chris acknowledges the current state of free resources, he also anticipates that in the future, there will likely be a need for some fee structure for the aggregator of content. With data demand growing exponentially, there will be a corresponding demand for huge increases in both storage capacity and internet bandwidth. The Semantic Web will require more big data mines and faster communications.

There is a significant difference between infrastructure and the applications that ride on that structure. Bridges are constructed to enable cars to use the span to get from one side to the other. The infrastructure of the bridge demands it holds all of the bridge weight as the weight of all cars at any one moment is insignificant to the bridge’s total weight.

Chris Pooley’s company, Intellidimension, builds infrastructure products delivering a useful and usable bridge for enterprise users. These users then create aggregating and solution oriented applications that travel along the appropriately named information super highway. Chris says, “The evolving Semantic Web technologies will offer benefits for the information producer and the information user that will enrich and enlarge what we see and how we see it.”

About the Author

Richard Oppenheim, CPA, blends business, technology and writing competence with a passion to help individuals and businesses get unstuck from the obstacles preventing their moving ahead. He is a member of the Unlimited Priorities team. Contact him by e-mail or follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/richinsight.

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A Web by Any Other Name

By Unlimited Priorities on July 29, 2010 in Articles

Written for Unlimited Priorities and DCLnews Blog.

Why We Need to Know About the Semantic Web

Richard Oppenheim

Some say “Look out — the semantic web is coming.” Some say it is already here. Others say: “what exactly is semantic about the web?”

Whether or not you have ever heard of the “semantic web,” you need to know more about it. Probably the first step for all of us is to get past the hype of yet another marketing term for technology. We know that technology will continuously create new phrases for new features that enable us to do more than yesterday. This includes terms like personal computer, smartphone, internet, world wide web, telecommuting, cloud computing and a lot more. Twenty-five years ago, only a few folks were even using computers, let alone smartphones, e-mail, social networks, and search engines.

Tim Berners-Lee, the person credited with developing the world wide web, said, “the semantic web is not a separate web but an extension of the current one, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.”

The purpose of the semantic web is to enable words and phrases to provide links to resources, like Wikipedia, to reach across the universe of web-accessible data.

The dictionary definition of “semantics” is a range of ideas that has no defined limits. In written language, such things as paragraph structure and punctuation have semantic content. In spoken language, it is the study of the signs or symbols inside a set of circumstances and contexts. This includes sounds, tones, facial expressions, body language, foot tapping and hand waving.

There are lots of ways to refer to the huge storehouse of data outside our control, such as the internet, the web, cyberspace, geek heaven, or some other term. Whatever term you choose, know that the semantic storehouse is a repository for words, images, and applications that is way too big to measure. It is like trying to count the number of stars in the universe; only rough estimates are available.

To deliver or receive communication, we combine individual elements in small or large quantities to create spoken language, articles, books, web sites, blogs, tweets, photo albums, videos, songs, song albums, audio books, podcasts and more. Words can be from any one or multiple languages. Images can be still or moving, personal or commercial. Each element in our storehouse is always available to be used in any sequence and any quantity.

The semantic web invokes Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of every piece of data immediately accessible by anyone to use in any way they want. His vision expands the use of “linked data” to connect all web-based elements with every other web-based element. Wikipedia provides a peek into how, with its linking of terms from one posting to other entries in other posts. The resounding slogan shouted by Berners-Lee is “Raw Data Now.”

The purpose of the semantic web is to enable words and phrases to provide links to resources, like Wikipedia, to reach across the universe of web-accessible data. A current example is how CNN is expanding its resources. For on-air broadcasting, CNN summarizes its news feeds. You can login to the CNN website to access the “raw” news feeds to watch and listen without an analyst’s intervention.

Growing up, my primary reference material was a paper-based encyclopedia or dictionary or thesaurus. Books in my local town library were available, but it was hard to access books that the town library did not have. Today, all of those resources are accessible at any time without completing a weight training exercise. One fledgling example of this use of raw data is the DBpedia. DBpedia is a community effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia to expand the linkage of data. As of April 2010, the DBpedia knowledge base contains over one billion pieces of information describing more than 3.4 million things.

In 2010, you will not change your life and adopt only the semantic web over currently-used resources. Every forecast tells us that in the few years ahead there will be lots of new and rich resources available. The semantic web will enable us to collect data elements, assemble them, disassemble them and start anew or continue by adding more data elements. It will be one of the 21st century’s functional erector sets, useful for business support, personal search, and even customizable games.

The semantic web, however, is not a game. And it is, of course, under construction today and will likely be under construction for at least the rest of this century. The skeptics are stating that the goals are too lofty and not realistic. But a quick view of very recent history reveals:

The internet was first used by a few universities in the 1960s. Thirty years later, the world wide web started its revolutionary integration with our lives.
Bar code scanning was first tested on a pack of chewing gum in 1974. It was another ten years before grocery stores started to adopt the thick and thin bars. Today bar coding has grown way beyond grocery store checkout lines.
In 1983, Motorola released the first cellular phone for $3,000. 10 years later, the cell phone industry took its first leap. Today cellular and wireless technologies are essential tools for lots and lots of enterprises and individuals of every age.
In the past 10 years: LinkedIn was founded in 2002, Facebook in 2004, Twitter in 2006

Raw data without borders will enable, for example, each of us to create our very own Dewey Decimal filing system, including card catalogue, rolodex, and other customized information.

Technology will always ride the sea changes as new capabilities build on what has been tested and used before. Search engines enable us to ask questions and retrieve answers that are some combination of data, some precise, some tangential to the subject, and some totally unrelated to the topic. Today’s data libraries are single location silos, such as Wikipedia, that hold information beyond the capacity of my local library. With the semantic web, these silos will lose their standalone status. The new linking capabilities will deliver infinitely expanded ways to link data in any one silo with data in almost any other silo. Everything, including national security, will still require protection from criminals, hackers, and assorted bad guys.

Raw data without borders will enable, for example, each of us to create our very own Dewey Decimal filing system, including card catalogue, rolodex, and other customized information. Similar to the smartphone app world, we will have a large selection of end-user applications that integrate, combine and deduce information needed to assist us in performing tasks. Of course, we may choose to perform information construction ourselves. This would be like answering our own phone or typing our own correspondence or driving our own car. We can choose to adapt, adopt, or discard any feature that becomes available. The semantic web is real and it is growing. It has the potential to expand beyond any estimate.