Build SemTech 2011 and SemanticWeb.com in the Cloud with Linked Open Data

1. Build SemTech 2011 and SemanticWeb.com in the Cloud with Linked Open Data SemTech 2011 Conference Session: SICoP 2011: Transforming Government through Innovation with Semantic Technologies, 7:30-8:20 a.m. by Brand Niemann Director and Senior Data Scientist Semantic Community http://semanticommunity.info June 7, 2011

2. Introduction • While building the SemTech 2011 agenda database in Excel (like previous years), I found a session that really peaked my interest: • Communities of Practice 06:00 PM - 07:00 PM • Bridging Data Communities, Tony Shaw, Dataversity • Audience: Business / Non-Technical and Track: Enterprise Data Management • http://www.dataversity.net/ • While building the SemanticWeb.com database in Excel (first time), I found articles that really peaked my interest: • AOL’s Purchase of HuffPo Leaves Many Confused by Angela Guess on February 18, 2011; and • AOL Gets Some Semantics With Its Huffington Post Acquisition by Jennifer Zaino on February 8, 2011. • Since Mills Davis and I recently started the Semantic Community with its focus on Building Knowledge-Centric Systems using Semantically Linked Open Data Visualizations, we needed to collaborate with DataVersity! • Since I recently started work for the new AOL Government, I needed to know what to say about this and show our work with semantics using Spotfire and Semantic Insight’s Research Assistant (SIRA). • “Show Me the Data and What It Means in a Chart of the Day” and “Show Me Semantics Assisting My Research on AOL Government and Web Content”.

3. Introduction • This session continues discussions begun recently between various data-centric communities including those concerned with Linked data and semantic web, enterprise information management, and open government data. Additional participants include representatives of the W3C, Object Management Group, Federal Data Subcommittee, Personal Data Ecosystem and Data Management Association. The goal of these conversations is to develop better cooperation between the groups in order to reduce redundancy of effort, share expertise, and get a better transfer of ideas, standards and knowledge between the various communities who are working to make data more useful and interoperable. • Tony is the president and founder of Dataversity(http://www.Dataversity.net)and Wilshire Conferences (www.wilshireconferences.com). He is also the co-founder (with Dave McComb) of the Semantic Technology Conference and it's current program co-chair. In past lives he started a dotcom in the identity management space (which went the way of most dotcoms), and was the president of Technology Transfer Institute (TTI). He still facilitates TTI's strategic technology forum for CTOs, called TTI/Vanguard (http://www.ttivanguard.com ). http://semtech2011.semanticweb.com/agenda.cfm?confid=62&scheduleDay=06/06/11

4. Introduction http://www.dataversity.net/

5. Introduction • AOL’s Purchase of HuffPo Leaves Many Confused • By Angela Guess on February 18, 2011 6:30 PM • In the wake of AOL’s purchase of the Huffington Post, bystanders have reacted with confusion. Stephen Colbert, for example, teased the $315 million purchase by creating The Colbuffington Re-Post and offering his site up for $316 million. • A recent article comments, “In what current chatter has labeled a last and perhaps impotent attempt at salvation for AOL (see their marriage to Time Warner), it appears that this latest venture could yield some unexpected advantages.  HuffPo has been attracting record readership.” • The Huffington Post had a reported forty million site visitors in January: “Pair that with its growing roster of respected contributors and one can begin to understand the attraction for AOL.” Another source of attraction is undoubtedly HuffPo’s innovative use of semantic technologies, especially those gained in their purchase of Adaptive Semantics. • As the article puts it, “I remain curious if AOL’s dowry amounts to anything of value in the volatile media landscape.  The HuffPo, like its co-founder and namesake, seems uninterested in anything that cannot aid in propelling them to the top of the pile.  Can AOL hack it?  Time will tell.” • Image: Courtesy Flickr/ LanBui Source: SemanticWeb.com

6. Introduction • AOL Gets Some Semantics With Its Huffington Post Acquisition • By Jennifer Zaino on February 8, 2011 10:12 AM • What got a bit lost in the news about AOL’s purchase of the Huffington Post was that the deal also gets the Internet content provider some more semantic technology (the company’s past acquisitions include social/semantic matching Q-and-A platform Yedda, for example). In addition to The Huffington Post having been an early adopter of Thomson Reuters Open Calaissemantic web service to identify and extract entities, facts and events for localized content initiatives, the site last year acquired Adaptive Semantics and its JuLiA platform for helping publishers discover the leaders in their social graph. • That acquisition now could bear fruit for AOL in influencing community engagement across a whole lot more web sites. AOL properties include community-specific sites such as the Patch network of localized news and events information, the DailyFinance business and investment news site, Autoblog, and many more. • Huff bought the start-up after it had made a minority investment in Adaptive Semantics and was using its machine learning and NLP technology to review and analyze comments as part of its moderation workflow. With HuffPost comments hitting millions per month last year, it acquired Adaptive Semantics and began putting the technology to even greater use for its expert discovery possibilities. The technology has served as one mechanism to help analyze data around users’ content submissions to help Huff discover and reward readers. The HuffPost Badges give users different levels of recognition for commenting, for linking up with their Facebook or Twitter accounts, and for the wealth of connections they have with friends and followers.

7. Introduction • AOL Gets Some Semantics With Its Huffington Post Acquisition • By Jennifer Zaino on February 8, 2011 10:12 AM (continued) • In a release announcing the deal, which is expected to close in the spring, the firms said that combining AOL’s infrastructure and scale “with the Huffington Post’s pioneering approach to news and innovative community-building among a broad and sophisticated audience will mark a seminal moment in the evolution of digital journalism and online engagement.” • Jeff Revesz, one of Adaptive Semantics’ co-founders who took on the title of director of social news at the Huffington Post, told us in an email that right now he can’t say yet what plans AOL has for JuLiA, as the news was still being absorbed by most of the company’s employees. • AOL notes on its site that “developing a global content platform that will empower production of world-class differentiated content to consumers at scale” is one of its goals, and certainly semantic technology easily has a role to play there, as it does in mining those consumers’ opinions and thoughts about such content, and making their input count. • Stay tuned.

8. Introduction http://semanticommunity.info/#Data_Science_Products

9. Introduction http://semanticommunity.info/AOL_Government

10. Results • Construct an Information architecture (site map) of the SemTech 2011 Web Site in Excel. • Screen-scrape the SemTech 2011 agenda and SemanticWeb.com articles into Excel. • Import Excel into Spotfire and create the interoperability interface and visualizations: • Click 1: See the data. • Click 2: Sort/filter/search the data. • Click 3: Download the data. • Click 4: Share the data (Web Player and iPad App). • Add new articles to Excel and Update Data in Spotfireperiodically (automate this even more in the future).

11. Results http://semanticommunity.info/@api/deki/files/1181/=STC2010.xls

12. Results http://semanticommunity.info/@api/deki/files/1181/=STC2010.xls

13. Results See Comment on Next Slide. http://semanticweb.com/put-your-desktop-in-the-cloud-to-support-the-open-government-directive-and-data-gov-semantic_b15540

14. Results • I am schooled as a scientist and statistician in the basic scientific method and the Data Quality Objectives (DQO) process, which is the formal mechanism for implementing the scientific method and identifying important information that needs to be known in order to make decisions based on the outcome of the data collection itself - e.g. was the data collected and handled in such a way to produce the information you need to make a decision and, in this case, were multiple data sets, collected by multiple processes, not all of which you control, done in such a way to make linking (mashups) meaningful for decision making - a tall order. My approach - feeling my way forward - has been to start with say all the high-quality environmental data EPA controls and has had peer-reviewed and metadata created for (the Report on the Environment), use statistical visualization tools (e.g. S-PLUS for Spotfire) to do those controlled mashups for our Statistics Users Group to look at (e.g. slides - my presentation was very well received and will be presented at our national meeting next month) and see how they suggest we proceed. I think this needs the support and input from the statistics community of experts to ultimately succeed with decision makers or it will be dismissed as just (but really neat) a semantic technology thing. http://disqus.com/guest/0820c700259389fc3a328f3e45a5ff5c/

15. Results PC Spotfire on Desktop

16. Results Web Player

17. Results http://semanticommunity.info/Semantic_Technology_Conferences

18. Conclusions • B2B Media Expert Paul Conley: • I’m actively working on two projects for two different clients right now. In one, I’m tracking editorial performance using a handful of analytics packages — with an eye to changing procedures, personnel and tactics. In another, I’m helping craft a content-marketing strategy for a global bank. In addition, as always, I’m doing some recruiting for clients. And I’m negotiating a deal to purchase an established B2B brand. • I’d argue that Reuters’ Open Calais is the most important contribution that B2B publishers have made to the Semantic Web. And given that Reuters is a brand recognized by everyone in B2B, it’s likely that Open Calais is how many B2B publishers will first venture into the Semantic Web. • Drupal represents an opportunity for dozens and dozens of B2B publishers to undo the mistake that they made again and again on the Web — paying extraordinary amounts of money to build proprietary content-management systems or paying extraordinary amounts of money to buy or lease someone else’s CMS — only to find that you have to pay even more for every tweak, add-on or enhancement known to man. • I recommend the MindTouch Technical Communication Suite and Spotfire Business Intelligence and Analytics as even better! • See http://semanticommunity.info • All you need to do is connect the buyer and seller in real time, in context. That initial connection may happen on a mobile phone. The venue for that connection may be an online webinar, a one-to-one meeting online or a face-to-face event. That may result in a transaction, a subscription or a qualified lead. At all steps in that conversion you can be making money. http://semanticweb.com/b2b-media-innovators-interview-paul-conley_b566 http://semanticweb.com/wave-hits-b2b-media-part-3-semantic-future_b554