Posts tagged Sets
E.U. Sets 2013 Deadline for Open Source Public Data Mining Portal
Sep 24th
Sticking with her original deadline announced last year, European Commission Vice President Neelie Kroes told a European interoperability standards forum yesterday that a public portal for access to government and public data from across the continent is on track to go online in Spring 2012. Following that, the next stage in Comm. Kroes’ agenda includes an ambitious project to launch a community-built, crowd-sourced public data platform for all of Europe.
Kroes told the OpenData Forum in Brussels she expects for a pan-European forum for public data mining to go live no later than 2013. “Will she really be able to pull off all that?” the commissioner asked rhetorically, referring to herself.
Sponsor
A Commission report last November (PDF available here) produced by a technical workshop convened in Luxembourg of data standards experts, including W3C, painted a very broad picture of the types of data the government is looking to federate. A new data portal would need to include a small group of very interesting datasets first, the report stated, to attract citizens’ interest early. But then these early datasets would need to be stitched together with bigger datasets, the ownership of which may be indeterminate. Goal #2, the report said, would be to “deeply integrate a small set of very high quality datasets demonstrating immediate value and, in time, capable of acting as a scaffold for the integration of many other datasets. Candidates in this second role are geospatial, transportation, statistical and financial datasets.
Yesterday, Comm. Kroes narrowed and focused the definition of these datasets somewhat: “Making good use of public data can make your life better. Whether it’s route planning using public geo-information or public transport data, a local community crowd-sourcing its maintenance priorities, decision-making built on statistics of all shapes and sizes, or data journalism that helps explain our world,” she told attendees.
“Research in genomics, pharmacology or the fight against cancer increasingly depends on the availability and sophisticated analysis of large data sets,” the commissioner continued. “Sharing such data means researchers can collaborate, compare, and creatively explore whole new realms. We cannot afford for access to scientific knowledge to become a luxury, and the results of publicly funded research in particular should be spread as widely as possible.”
But sharing such data may not be the intention of some member countries that may have had intentions to license that data commercially. For them, the commissioner implied, she would not be against imposing new rules compelling member countries to license their data at low or no rates: “In particular, we’ll be looking at the way data is disclosed – the formats and the way data licenses operate to make re-use straightforward in practice. We’ll also be looking at charging regimes because expensive data isn’t ‘open data.’ In short, getting out the data under reasonable conditions should be a routine part of the business of public administrations.”
Kroes envisions private citizens being able to develop their own applications around this publicly available data. When the Commission submitted a tender last April for freelance and open source programmers to build the data portal, initial reaction from developers – as told to CrowdSourcing.org – included statements implying that if governments were as open as Kroes envisioned, projects such as WikiLeaks would be rendered unnecessary.
“I think one of the biggest excitements is a really radical move to open up all spending and to be fair,” said Cambridge, U.K.-based Open Knowledge Foundation founder Rufus Pollock. “The U.K. Government isn’t too corrupt, but imagine places where corruption is a problem. Imagine that all over the world!”
The OKF is one of the leading organizations behind the Data Hub, an open effort to build a data portal around public data sets. The Data Hub’s initial store consists of 83 datasets provided by the W3C Linking Open Data Interest Group, including the Allen Mouse Brain Atlas – a record of gene expressions recorded from genome images of mouse brains; the CIA World Factbook; and the Freebase RDF Store which includes topics gleaned from Wikipedia. The challenge for developers now may be to demonstrate how mashups may be created to link all this data together in some meaningful fashion.
Meanwhile, the challenge for the E.C. will be to find an inexpensive way to open up more meaningful data.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Rock the Vote: A Petition to Bring Back Google Sets
Sep 22nd
Google has conducted some major triage on a number of its experimental Google Labs products in recent weeks. One cut in particular really pained me: “Google Sets, one of the first applications in Google Labs, allowed you to automatically create se…
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
Google Decides Fate Of More Than Half Of Labs Projects; Correlate Survives, Sets Doesn’t
Aug 30th
Another week, another round of updates from the slow phase-out of Google Labs. This week, good news for fans of one keyword-related tool, but bad news for fans of another. Google Correlate Added To Google Trends Google Correlate has survived the chopping block. Previously available at…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
The Sun Never Sets on the Wide, Wide World of Online Video
Aug 29th
Back in the 18th Century, George Macartney used the phrase “this vast empire on which the sun never sets” to describe the global reach of British imperial power. In the 21st Century, I’d use the phrase “the sun never sets o…
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
Convirture Sets Sights on Cloud Management
Aug 24th
Management, that’s where it’s at. That’s the theory behind Convirture’s product lines, continuing with the ConVirt Enterprise Cloud the company announced on August 23rd. ConVirt Enterprise Cloud is designed to let companies manage private clouds and virtualized infrastructure from a single console. If Convirture has its way, silos separating virtualized workloads and private clouds will be a thing of the past.
Sponsor
It took decades for operating systems to become a commodity. It took several years for hypervisors to become a commodity. Cloud stacks are already becoming a commodity. The value, says Convirture CEO and founder Arsalan Farooq, is in management tools for virtualized infrastructure and private clouds. The problem, says Farooq, is siloed infrastructure and having to juggle too many management tools. “When I look at cloud infrastructures, other vendors require a rip and replace or a standalone vertical I need to deploy. Yet another silo. Yet another management too.”
Convirture has been offering open source and proprietary tools for managing KVM and Xen infrastructure for some time. ConVirt Enterprise Cloud builds on that by offering tools to create private clouds out of KVM and Xen virtualized infrastructures. ConVirt Enterprise Cloud can also integrate Amazon EC2 deployments into its console, and works with existing third-party private cloud technologies like OpenStack and Eucalyptus.
Farooq is very clear that ConVirt is all about management tools. “We’re not announcing another cloud platform, not announcing a new cloud broker… we’re trying to take a bite out of fragmentation by bringing everything into one management system.
What does ConVirt Enterprise Cloud offer? It pulls in all the virtualization management features of ConVirt Enterprise, and adds cloud management. ConVirt offers a easy to use Web-based management console for wrangling virtualized infrastructure and cloud services. This includes hybrid cloud support for managing private clouds and Amazon EC2, creating virtual data centers, setting resource quotas, and network management for cloud clients. Companies can set up templates (similar to Amazon EC2′s instance types), and create high-level policies for resource usage.
Pricing for the ConVirt Enterprise Cloud is yet to be announced. The company plans to announce pricing in September. Farooq says that the pricing will follow a “similar model” to ConVirt Enterprise, which starts at $2,495 for a perpetual license for three concurrent hosts and unlimited virtual machines. Support for ConVirt Enterprise is 20% of the license fee annually.
It does seem that Convirture has identified one of the key problems facing enterprise IT departments right now. Juggling management tools for legacy workloads, virtualized infrastructure and cloud services can be a headache.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
New Web Service Analyzes Thousands of Data Sets For Any Community
Jul 7th
Geographic data giant ESRI today released to the public its new web service called Community Analyst, which offers fast search and mapping of up to five simultaneous data sets among thousands of options. Community Analyst has been in beta testing for several months, can be used for for two weeks for free and then begins at just under one thousand dollars per user per year.
ESRI has been widely criticized by a new generation of geo-geeks as old, unwieldy and unduly influential (it’s much used, if not much loved, by people in government), but the company appears determined to offer continually improved web-based means of analyzing large amounts of data with regard to spaces and places. The demos of Community Analyst look quite nice. All kinds of reports can be generated about one or multiple places, including sets of adresses uploaded from a spreadsheet.
Sponsor
A user could search by saying, for example: show me blocks in my city where median income is between $10,000 and $30,000, where there are at least 5 children living on the block, where access to medical care is unusually low, neighborhood nutrition is poor and public transportation substandard. That’s where you want to put the medical clinic, right?
As a growing number of web services emerge and compete against each other to offer the most and best data, with the easiest interface and the best forms of added value to people located around the world – those users should benefit greatly from more, better and faster options.
This public launch received almost no discussion at all among geolocation geeks online today, but Community Analyst will presumably be widely discussed at next week’s giant ESRI User Conference in San Diego.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Sun Officially Sets on AlltheWeb Search
Apr 4th
Today marks the end of search on AlltheWeb.com. All searches are now being redirected to Yahoo search, which is powered by Bing.
Click to read the rest of this post…
View full post on Search Engine Watch Blog
Foursquare Sets Super Record During Big Game
Feb 10th
Twitter wasn’t the only social media platform that recorded super levels of activity associated with the big game last weekend. Local check-in player Foursquare says it saw 200,000 check-ins, making this year’s Super Bowl the most checked-into venue ever for the company. Green Bay…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Twitter Sets a Price For Tweets
Feb 9th
Last week at Strata, Gnip released a new set of features for its social-stream processing platform. Called Power Track, the new layer allows customers to set up complex search queries and receive a stream of all the Twitter messages that match the criteria. Unlike existing ways of filtering the firehose, there are no limits on how many keywords or results you can receive. However, the part of the offering with the most long-term significance is the pricing.
On top of the standard $2,000 a month to rent a Gnip collector, founder Jud Valeski told me it will cost 10 cents for every thousand Twitter messages delivered. Though the split of the revenue between the two companies wasn’t disclosed, he told me Twitter intends to standardize this price for any similar offerings in the future from other sellers of their data. This sounds like a big step in Twitter’s journey to find a sustainable business model.
Sponsor
Valeski told me that there were already 24 customers using the private beta version, some with monthly bills “in six figures,” so this is obviously an interesting revenue source. With tens of millions of tweets being delivered every day, there’s obviously some happy users too. I talked to Greg Greenstreet of CollectiveIntellect about why he was using the service and he told me:
The reason Power Track is so essential for us is that for clients that want *every* Tweet for a keyword, it supplies a comprehensive solution for us, rather than trying to work around the traditional Twitter search APIs that have restrictions on volume and content. We use Gnip for many other forms of data collection that power our semantic analytics engine, and they have been a solid provider for us for many years
Though it seems unlikely that marketing-data revenue will be enough on its own to sustain the business, it’s significant that Twitter has been able to set a value for every message on the service. At the very least, it gives them an income that increases as usage grows, providing a solid foundation as it tunes broader-based revenue models like advertising or sponsored trends.
Photo by Gisella Giardino
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Ajax Union Brooklyn Marketing Sets the Standard for Modernized SEO – PR Urgent
Jan 25th
 PR Urgent |
Ajax Union Brooklyn Marketing Sets the Standard for Modernized SEO
PR Urgent Following the evaluation, Ajax Union began enhancing its WordPress blogs with SEO plugins and widgets to provide search-engine-friendly meta titles, … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
