In September 2009, the W3C elevated the Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER) artifacts to a Recommendation.  POWDER is a great bonus to the Semantic Web and to the larger Internet in general.  But what is the specification all about?  And why don’t we seem to hear more about it along with RDF and OWL?  This article will get you up-to-speed with what you need to know about POWDER.

Tony Shaw: Hi Olly, so to get us started, could you give me a high-level overview of what Atigeo does?

Olly Downs: Absolutely. Atigeo’s platform, xPatterns, enables enterprises to derive insights from large, disparate sources of unstructured data. In doing so, we’ve taken two approaches toward how our platform is productized. The first approach is around aspects of our core technology, which allows us to build simple ontologies for domains of unstructured data and then act upon the understanding of the data – in response to queries or profiles of entities, for example. The second aspect of our product enables enterprises to provide customers the ability to access and manage their profile or persona.

Major search engines have one main type of result – a list of links to matching Web sources. There are many enhancements on top of it, but the core premise remains the same:  a search result consists of a set of individual pages. The user is expected to drill down into individual sources. An alternative type of result is suggested: an essay compiled of a number of relevant and ordered sentences. The search engine in this case parses Web sources, understands their semantics, and creates an overall summary of the topic. The idea is to save the user time by providing a quick overview of the topic. A Web sentiment analysis application based on semantic analysis is introduced.

Recently Franz Inc., the leading supplier of Graph Database technology for the Semantic Web, and IO Informatics, the leader in Semantic data integration and knowledge management for life sciences and healthcare, announced a strategic partnership that includes the integration of Franz’s AllegroGraph RDFStore with the IO Informatics’ Sentient software suite. The combination of these technologies creates a Semantic application framework that can be used to quickly develop highly specialized, large-scale applications that leverage the unmatched flexibility only possible with semantic data integration.

Scott Koegler talks with Krista Thomas of Thomson Reuters about Open Calais, and how semantics is being leveraged to bring advantages to publishers of all types.

Scott Prevost talks with Scott Koegler about the use of semantics in Bing, and how the technology is being used to improve search results and enhance the user experience.

A new modular and tailorable approach for the semantic modeling of static and dynamic knowledge has been elaborated under the name “AXIS Conceptual Reference Model” (AXIS-CRM). AXIS organizes that modeling as networks of Autonomous Semantic Objects (ASO). In turn, each ASO is expressed as a network of Elementary Semantic Entities (ESE). The ASO wraps the instances and their models to become ‘autonomous’. AXIS-CRM has been implemented, experimented and validated by the creation of native ASO and by migrating ‘Flat’ records to ASO, by interchanging them and by constructing persistent archives. The AXIS-CRM and an associated Tool-kit will be soon released on the UNESCO Open Source Repository of the Memory of the World program.

Extractiv.com talks with Scott Koegler about the capabilities of their semantic crawl and render application.

Scott Koegler talks with Peter Sweeney of Primal Fusion about the future of manufactured content. Primal Fusion uses semantic processes to create content for publishers, using diverse sets of articles automatically and on demand.

Peer39: Interview with Amiad Solomon

Founded in 2006 by an innovative group of scientists and engineers, Peer39 was voted by MIT’s Technology Review as one of the Top Ten Web Startups to Watch in 2008.  Semantic Universe editor Tony Shaw recently spoke with Founder and CEO Amiad Solomon about the company’s innovations, the FTC and what we may expect in the future.

 Semantic SOA Governance is a methodology ensuring that business missions are mapped accurately to the Services Oriented Infrastructure and that the services developed are reusable, thus reducing the time and cost of building new applications. Additionally, it facilitates deep analysis of the IT infrastructure in terms of the business operations and enterprise architecture. Two technologies, Semantics and Business Process Management (BPM), when combined with collaboration capabilities produce a dramatic new information management platform incorporating Operational Governance capabilities.