i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

In a recent section we were discussing the limitations of putting useful data in content of links.  I came across an interesting interview with David Huynh an interaction designer with FreeBase where he describes ways of utilizing the semantic web for links. Basically it's still a challenge since there are not many frontend interfaces that allow users to attach sematic data to hyperlinks - but David's projects point to a hopeful future.

 I was looking up Reommind, one of the companies at the career fair from yesterday, and low and behold they have a software platform offering automatic categorization of enterprise documents based on context as their stored.  hmmm this sounds an awful lot like semantic classification to me. 

Check it out: http://www.recommind.com/technology/core

Hakia is a company that uses semantic search, taking into account word context and a hiearchy of categories that a search term might fall into.  Supposedly Microsoft's Bing's category designations are based on Hakia.  The company also recently (about a month ago) came out with a commercial ontology product called Contexa to help advertisers better connect with relavent web content.

This NYTimes article discusses the popularity of the programming language "R" that has become the darling of data analysts in private and public institutions all over the world. It's open-source code makes it easy to customize to fit specific projects ranging from mining environmental data to understanding trends in ad pricing. bit.ly/O1Mc