Believe in the Apps, and set your API product vision

The app that RPI TWRC team built for our application marketplace is featured at data.gov site.

End of 02-2010

Gates foundation is funding ViewChange (check some nice music ) which is leveraging linked data and Freebase, Zemanta, OpenCalais, and other open APIs.

Bueda turns your tags into RDF

Reflect gets into SecondLlife

Give to small companies a chance

From Abstracting & Indexing to Tweeting & Indexing?

No one knows where Turkey is heading?

"Potential energy" in financial markets.

"Data finds data"

"Organizations that are unable to switch to the “data finds data” paradigm will be less competitive and less effective"

A must read piece from Jeff Jonas and Lisa Sokol for any information specialist, product and technology people who are developing information products and architecture to support these.

Better search options (finally) form Google and RDFa

Google introduced new refinement options today that will improve how user gets additional insights from the search results and moving away presenting "dumb" search results. If they move these refinement to Google Scholar it would be great for research community. Also their adoption of microformats and RDFa is an excellent move to provide rich snippets , btw Yahoo has similar options too where we tested this with Ben Adida and Zepheira team last year. Let's see which STM publishing company will leverage the value of this (RDFa) first.

Talis gets "web of data"

Talis which has been doing a lot of innovative stuff just launched "Talis Connected Commons"

Semantic Web and illumin8 and 60s

illumin8 does not have any "hippieness" and still it's kick-ass product for any research organization.

Paul Miller summarized nicely semantic web for 2008: “Semantic web has a lot of academic baggage but 2008 has seen a lot of things come together.” via Living Semantic Dream


60's Poster
Originally uploaded by Morpheus Down

Linked Data and scientific publishing

As Tim Berners Lee states at TED 2009 we need to figure out a way to let our raw data out and linked to others.

Meaningful connections with semantic web

"semantic-aware applications hold the potential to organize and display information embedded in our data in meaningful ways that make it easier to draw connections"

2009 Horizon Report puts "Semantic-Aware Applications" under technologies to watch.s

Semantic web where publishing community should be investing

A recent HBR article "What you need to know about Semantic Web" by Tom Ilube who is the CEO of Garlik emphasizes once more why publishers must invest in semantic web to enhance customer experience and move from presenting content as documents to "items of data that are linked by both meaning and relationship"

"Your technology team will have to devise an architectural road map for the semantic web over the next three to five years and to undertake the difficult work of transition" and in order to do this each organization must have a team/person that is dedicated to semantic web today.

Semantic web in action

Computer Science base show how you can turn facts into knowledge using Freebase platform

Ingenta putting RDF in action

Ingenta will introduce Connect Complitations which "enable publishers to assemble 'virtual' publications from their existing content on connect. Compilations are given titles, descriptions, links and logos such that they look similar to conventional publications. They may be organised in familiar serial and monograph formats. At ingentaconnect Compilations may be purchased and subscribed to in the same way as other publications. Crucially the publisher has control over the Compilation, it is available to amend and augment whenever they please."

Also for people looking for the benefit of semantic web applications in the STM publishing community:


"One may well ask what immediate benefit does semantic technology bring, beyond exciting programmers and web luminaries? The first benefit we'll see on ingentaconnect is tighter integration, both inside the site and with the wider web. RDF enables us to make assertions about resources (like articles, authors and references) without imposing constraints on the assertions made, or how they will be used. Crucially we can use the assertions to draw conclusions, or inferences, to fill in gaps, and really 'understand' the data. All of this is achieved with little redundancy or repetition. The factors combine to produce a store on which services to cater for varying requirements and perspectives can readily be built. "

The future of research

An insighful talk by Carole Goble who is a professor in the the School of Computer Science in the University of Manchester

She touches to some very important key topics like: growth of scientific data and datasets, linking from full-text journals to database and multi-media content, increasing collaboration in research, open science, services, APIs and science mashups (including a Scopus example)

The Future of Research (Science and Technology)

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: library research)

Evri introduces recommendation widget

Evri content recommendation widget is a good example of how to implement linking out cleverly. They need some improvements but the concept is a winner! (and should be implemented in STM world)

Thomson Reuters takes OpenCalais one step forward

OpenCalais moves into a new model with SemanticProxy via Paul Miller

It's also good to see "opening up" examples coming from a mega retailer.

Big Data

Nature has a special issue on "Big Data" which is a must read if you are developing your product road map or looking for technologies companies to invest in.

And for all the skeptics in STM publishing industry who think that semantic web is a fade, it appears that Semantic Web made the top 10 list of technologies that will change our life by 2018 as Google did in the last 10 years.

RSS Week in Review

While developing products people are after simplicity but is simplicity overrated?

JOVE reaches a milestone by being indexed by PUBMED and MedLine. Congratulations to JOVE team and our own Tyge Burgess for creating short video abstracts in YouTube for Journal of Number Theory.

Opening-up is good for science and product development. Here is how friendfeed science community is responding Connotea's call of figuring out a freemium service and how Yahoo Search is integrated in iphone . Searching images made easy by Yale Image Finder

Anthony Williams who was with ACD/Labs and we did some work together for ChemVillage, continues improving his ChemSpider platform.

Nature publishing launches another experiment by attaching a wiki to a journal article and Max Max Planck Society covers publication fees for PLoS journals.

Today's links

If you are figuring out the collaboration space for scientist; Parallax brings something refreshing into search using freebase; and give credit where the credit is due: Thomson Reuters opening up with forums

Freebase Parallax: A new way to browse and explore data from David Huynh on Vimeo.s

Oil & Gas Industry getting into Semantic Web

"The Oil & Gas (O&G) industry produces a staggering amount of new data every day from a variety of activities such as drilling, exploration and production, reservoir management, major capital projects, facility and downstream operations. The problem of information explosion and overload presents an ever increasing challenge in finding and analyzing information quickly and precisely in order to get the most value for the business. This problem is not unique to the O&G industry; much the same can be said, for example, about the Health Care and Life Science (HCLS) industry, which has embraced Semantic Web technology in order to unite many forms of biological and medical information across diverse industries and institutions through the encoding of meaning into the data and their interpretations. The fundamental question is how Semantic Web technologies might play a similar role in the further development of energy resources."

via W3C

Evri connects the information and enables better discoverability

A very good attempt (and so far the easiest) by Evri to bring "information to life"

Microsoft supporting scholarly communication lifecycle

At the ninth annual Microsoft Research Faculty Summit, Microsoft announced the following services which were developed by partnering with Academia:

• Add-ins. The Article Authoring Add-in for Word 2007 enables metadata to be captured at the authoring stage to preserve document structure and semantic information throughout the publishing process, which is essential for enabling search, discovery and analysis in subsequent stages of the life cycle. The Creative Commons Add-in for Office 2007 allows authors to embed Creative Commons licenses directly into an Office document (Word, Excel or PowerPoint) by linking to the Creative Commons site via a Web service.

• The Microsoft e-Journal Service. This offering provides a hosted, full-service solution that facilitates easy self-publishing of online-only journals to facilitate the availability of conference proceedings and small and medium-sized journals.

• Research Output Repository Platform. This platform helps capture and leverage semantic relationships among academic objects — such as papers, lectures, presentations and video — to greatly facilitate access to these items in exciting new ways.

• The Research Information Centre. In close partnership with the British Library, this collaborative workspace will be hosted via Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and will allow researchers to collaborate throughout the entire research project workflow, from seeking research funding to searching and collecting information, as well as managing data, papers and other research objects throughout the research process. via Microsoft PressPass