If you’re like most people these days, you simply don’t have a lot of time to scan entire articles to see if they actually have the information you’re looking for. WikiSeer wants to do the work for you.

“When you browse or search on the Net, you often come across so many different kinds of documents and you don’t know what they’re about,” says the co-founder of the new service, still in beta, Sameer Yami. “There’s so much information overload, and we want to reduce that so you can just read what you are interested in.”

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What’s your social capital? PeerIndex is a new semantically-enabled service that purports to tell you.

The idea behind this service is to provide a relative measure of an individual’s online authority, and to do it by analyzing the person’s public activities in Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and blogs. You can elect to share or not share Facebook and LinkedIn info, but the company says that the more data you share, the better your chances are to improve your scores and index ranking. It explains that it has algorithms that take into account semantic factors (presumably to understand the nature of the content you tend to discuss, retweet, etc. – and its relevance to the dozens of topics it currently tracks as it derives scores), and social network input and sharing features (which appear to be less about follower or friend counts than it is about sharing relevant activity with the audience you want to impact). The topics it covers range from Google Inc. to cloud computing to social media and Chinese biz & economy.

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SAP, which we’ve labeled one of the gorillas in the semantic web space, not surprisingly is involved in a lot of research work in Europe relating to this realm, including the Monnet (Multilingual Ontologies for Networked Knowledge) Project. One of the legs of that project has to do with cross-lingual business intelligence – using semantic technology to support search, query and information extraction of XBRL-based financial reports in a user’s native language, regardless of what language those reports are filed in.

News came this week about another effort that the software giant is coordinating in the semantic web-BI space. As part of a £4 million collaborative project for which SAP is the managing partner -- dubbed Combining and Uniting Business Intelligence With Semantic Technologies (CUBIST) -- the U.K.’s Sheffield Hallam University was awarded nearly £400,000 from the European Commission’s 7th Framework Programme to create new visual tools to help businesses make sense of tons of data.

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Courtesy Flickr/ John E. Robertson

Fortunata is a new tool that aims to help developers and graphic designers that aren’t well-versed in semantic web technologies create Internet applications that use and generate semantic data.

The idea behind the tool, which is the product of work by researchers from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid's Ontology Engineering Group, based at the Facultad de Informática, in partnership with the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid's Department of Informatics Engineering, is that compartmentalization of tasks eases processes.

So, it breaks development tasks into specific chunks – the web designer first creates semantic templates, capable of rendering semantic data (data presentation templates) or gathering data from the user (data capture templates) that will then be converted into semantic data. Then the developer, regardless of a lack of background in relevant programming languages or semantic web technologies, uses these templates to create the web applications. Think of it as fostering a modern-day assembly line for creating semantic web apps.

That sounds promising for boosting the development of interoperable applications that will help the web of data cycle forward. So, The Semantic Web Blog asked Oscar Corcho and Mariano Rico, of the UPM's Ontology Engineering Group at the Facultad de Informática, to provide us with more details about their project.

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Federated Media's ExecTweets pulls up sponsored resources next to leading business' leaders postings.

It’s been a little over a week since Facebook acquired semantic tech vendor Chai Labs for a reported $10 million. Founded by former Google AdSense executive Gokul Rajaram, the buy of the structured content extraction system and search platform was seen by some as giving Facebook an edge in delivering Google-like ads around improved editorial content – including opportunities to help companies that maintain pages on the social network dynamically deliver materials suitable to SEO queries.

Well, there’s more news that touches on the semantic advertising acquisition front today – Federated Media, which helps online publishers sell ads, has acquired a portion of startup TextDigger's technology. Founded by Tim Musgrove, who will now take on the role of chief scientist at Federated Media, the SaaS service pulls together themes across documents it searches, without those themes being pre-defined. It provides a way for publishers to get more value out of existing inventory, and ideally more pull with search engines, by dynamically pulling together content whose previous inter-relationships weren’t obvious into custom landing pages. Also, its semantic smarts can analyze content to determine what words to add to articles to boost search engine relevancy.

Customers include the San Jose Mercury News, which uses it to automate tagging stories and generating topic pages.

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Activision Blizzard's world of StarCraft II

Anyone with a serious video gamer in her life probably is well aware that that person not only is addicted to one or another gaming console, but also to posting online about the system and the games he’s playing on it – the good and the bad. Given the huge amount of online chatter that accompanies the debut of hot new titles like Activision Blizzard's StarCraft II -- as well as whatever else is taking up their screen time in this fast-changing and fast-paced market -- you could see where game developers, publishers, and retailers could potentially be a big market for text analytics vendors.

Overtone thinks so, and this week it introduced the first of a planned series of vertical-industry focused semantic analytics SaaS solutions. GameVoice Interactive is aimed at giving those involved in the video game creative, publishing and selling space log-in to this verticalized version of its OpenMic “listening” application access to customizable dashboards and analytics about what is being said – both positive and negative – about products in the social media space. “All companies are new to this,” says Neil Patil, Overtone’s Chief Marketing Officer, of business’ exploration of online expressions of sentiment. “Social media analysis is in its infancy – it’s evolving from buzz tracking to really figuring out what customers are saying so they can improve products or service.”

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What a yo-yo act the last few days have been for Google and its Android platform. The downs -- the ’Net aflutter with accusations that Google colluded with or at least kowtowed to Verizon on net neutrality for the sake of its mobile OS, and Oracle launching a lawsuit against the search engine giant for Java patent infringement in the mobile OS – collided with the ups. That included research firm Gartner pointing to a 50 percent second-quarter rise in sales for Android-based phones to move Google’s OS ahead of Apple’s IOS-based iPhone, iPad and iPod touch, and Digitimes Research's statement that it expects Android smartphone shipments to hit the 55 million unit worldwide mark this year.

Well, put another tick in the up column: AdaptiveBlue has made its GetGlue semantic app available for the Android platform, following up its iPhone debut. It hadn’t been the next OS on AdaptiveBlue’s agenda to get the mobilized version of the service, which lets users check in to share books or movies or other media they consume, see what their friends are watching or listening to, and get on-the-go suggestions of the same. But vp of business development Fraser Kelton says the Android crowd couldn’t wait.

“We were getting email to the tune of ten or more per day saying you need to support this – bold, all caps, exclamation point emails,” he says. “That level of intense anticipation wasn’t something we thought that the community had.” He suspects part of the appeal is that, as with the iPhone, Android devices are beckoning primarily to tech-friendly consumer users who get excited about social apps.

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Swingly stepped up to the plate this morning. The new service, which we first mentioned here, takes text on the web – from tweets to NY Times’ articles to large structured web databases – and builds up what it says is the world’s first web-scale answer engine, with north of 100 billion Q&A pairs so far. Its focus in its launch is on answering factual questions, using NLP to extract and index factual information from documents and semantic inference techniques to recognize links between questions and their answers, building a page rank style graph to quickly identify authoritative content. The company sees its work not only – and perhaps not even mostly – as a standalone answer engine, but as a complement to existing social Q&A services, among other outlets.

With its roots in the NLP work done by government contractor Language Computer Corp., the privately-funded Swingly spin-off tries to understand the user’s query intent, according to founder and managing partner Andy Hickl. “Then we take that plus what we understand about the query and the words or names mentioned in it, and we try to find the answers that are most authoritative to satisfy the user’s needs,” he says.

What sets its ability to do this apart from others with similar goals, he says, is “the amount of semantics we can bring in from the text,” adding up to annotating about 10,000 different types, from tv shows to business execs, and making those annotations available to its search model. “So if you have that level of semantics you can piece things together to get fine-grained relationships, like that between a baseball player and his manager.”

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Did you know the French business, professional and individual phone directory had been semantified? The site,11800, is presented by an Internet marketing and technology company called SecondWeb with the help of the CubicWeb semantic web framework from France-based Logilab.

That’s probably the biggest public web site that’s build using the framework. But about 70 percent of Logilab’s business now is around using the framework it originally developed for internal use to build for its customers applications that rely on its object-oriented design model of using reusable data model and view components – or ‘cubes’ – that are their own entire applications providing data models, which then can be piled together in ‘constructions’ that integrate multiple types of sources and publish semantic data. The semantic views already integrated into the framework for publishing data include SIOC, OWL, FOAF, and DOAP ontologies.

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Courtesy: Flickr/jurvetson

BrandAura is a just-launched social media analysis tool package that’s planning to be an affordable choice for marketers and branding analysts to provide clients with insight into what’s being said across the web about their clients’ products or services or trends around them. It’s the brainchild of Dr. Andrew Starkey of the University of Aberdeen and its spin-out company, BlueFlow Ltd. http://www.brand-aura.com/.

So, how does this fit into the world of sentiment analysis solutions? “Sentiment analytics is essentially a list of words and you compare the scores of how these lists of words do. That’s the antithesis of us,” Starkey contends. “We work out the context first, what is said about particular topics by a community. You solve that first and apply a sentiment analytics layer after and then you get a better picture of what is being said and a more accurate picture.” The core, he says, is about language independence and about what people are saying in context.

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Photo from Flick, from Leon Botha

We started this series 6 months ago with this post. It is also worth reading this post about the scale of change, what we are calling the 7 Factor Perfect Storm.

Since then we have covered 11 markets:

You can see the Index to all the posts here.

This is the final post where we summarize what we have learned.

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Photo credit:Yes Virginia/CBS

Last week we took a look at a new way to do some research in the jobs space thanks to TrueKnowledge culling jobs data from the deep web.

Alas, the sad truth seems to be that while you can leverage semantic web technologies to help you research the jobs space, that doesn’t mean it’s going to get any easier any time soon to find a job – at least in most sectors.

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