ISWC Presentation for Inform Technologies

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More Meaning. Better Results.
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Building the Inform Semantic Publishing Ecosystem:
from Author to Audience
Marc Hadfield
VP, Research & Development
marc@inform.com

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Marc Hadfield
• Semantic Technology, Computer Science
• Inform Technologies (Head of R&D)
‣ Semantic Technologies applied to Content Analysis & Distribution
• Alitora Systems (Co-Founder / CTO)
‣ Life Science Semantic Technology, Research, Big Data Analytics, Semantic HPC
‣ Life Science Natural Language Processing
• Columbia Genome Center
‣ NLP applied to Life Science Research Articles
• LCconnect (CTO)
‣ Letter-of-Credit Exchange
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Semantics in Publishing…
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• Ongoing Theme at ISWC 2010…
‣ NY Times
‣ Facebook (OpenGraph)
‣ Elsevier
‣ BBC

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What is Inform?
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• Inform is a content enrichment solution designed to increase consumer
engagement, page views and revenue.
• We provide a hosted Semantic Web Service for content publishers that:
1. Reads your article before you publish it
2. Turns main topics and entities (people, places, companies, organizations) into links
3. Provides feeds of related web content when you publish it
• New Direction: Optimizing Content Distribution via Direct Channels
• Web users moving away from destination web sites, but still want the destination web
site content.
• Companies utilizing Inform include:

5. Connecting your content
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Audio, Video & Blogs
from the Web
Articles from
the Web
Content from Inform
Your Affiliates’ Content
Your Content
Affiliated
Content
Your
Content
Licensed
Content
Google Street View Topic 0.90
Google Company 1.00
Ireland Place 0.70
Norway Place 0.70
South Africa Place 0.70
Sweden Place 0.70
Brian McClendon Person 0.80
Mountain View, California Place 0.60
Wi-Fi Topic 0.50

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Related Content Widgets
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Inform Topic Pages, Micro Sites
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My Job: Building the Semantic Platform…
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• “Silo”-ed Semantic Technology  Semantic Web
‣ Aligned with Wikipedia, Leverage Linked Data for Mash-Ups
‣ RDFa, SKOS, Semantic SEO
• Semantic / NLP Engine
‣ Improve Features, Quality
• Semantic Data Infrastructure
‣ Scalable Infrastructure
• Semantic Data Analysis
‣ Algorithms (Topology of Graphs), Inference
‣ “PageRank” on semantic data
• Personalization, Usage Analysis
• Micro Sites
‣ Clusters of Topics, Generating Rich Content Experience
• Distributing to Social Platforms
‣ i.e. Facebook

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Inform: Author to Audience
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Leverage Inform Taxonomy
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Author 
‣ Content Creation Services
‣ Semantic Data Repository
‣ Semantic Data Analysis
‣ Content Selection Algorithms
‣ Webservices
‣ Content Distribution Services
 Audience
Inside the
Semantic
System
Architecture

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Content Creation
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• Article Creation Tool (ACT)
‣ Author Tools
‣ Embed in CMS, Tumblr / Wordpress Plugin
• Publisher Portal
‣ Editorial Tool
‣ Content Feeds
• Web Crawl
• Summarizer
‣ Create smart “blurbs” to advertise article
• LinkedData
‣ Freebase, Wikipedia, DBPedia, et cetera.

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ACT Tool
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ACT Tool
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ACT Tool, Tumblr, Wordpress
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Publisher Portal
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Summarizer
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Semantic Data Repository
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• Data Master / Data Node
‣ Federated Semantic Data Managers
‣ SPARQL Triplestore (scalable cluster)
‣ Semantic Search
‣ Search Indexes (Semi-Structured and Full-Text Search)
‣ Lucene/Siren (Sindice)
‣ Facets, Frequency Counts
‣ Cache (In-Memory)
‣ Blob Store (Voldemort)
‣ Listener to Activity (Flume)
‣ User Activity (clicks)
‣ Content Activity (content updates)
‣ Near Real-Time Trends, Analysis
‣ Compute Algorithms (Stored Procedures in Groovy)
‣ Long Term Content Archive (offline)

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Semantic Data Analysis
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• Natural Language Processing
‣ Rules & Machine Learning, Training
‣ 500K articles per day, 4,000 unique sites
‣ Text Extraction, Section/Sentence Extraction
‣ Tokenization, Part-of-Speech, Noun/Verb Phrases
‣ Entity Extraction, Entity Normalization
‣ Topic Extraction, Summarization, Clustering
• User Activity
‣ User Model (Personalization)
• Semantic Inference
‣ F-Logic, Multi-Domain
‣ Linked Data Mash-Ups
• Semantic Graph Topology
‣ Entity / Property Importance Metrics, Ranking, “PageRank”
‣ Which triples in LinkedData are interesting?

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Content Selection Algorithms
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• Model of User, Personalization
‣ Social Networks provide Context
• Semantic Analysis of Content
• Algorithms
‣ Maximize Relevancy / Relatedness (Meets Editorial Criteria)
‣ Maximize Click-Through
‣ Cute Kitten vs. Engagement Issue
‣ Maximize Monetization
Goal: Content Exchange

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Webservices
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• REST
‣ Outputs RDF / JSON Data
• Natural Language Processing
‣ Article to Semantic MetaData
• Related Content
‣ Inputs: Content, Personalization, Algorithm
‣ Articles
‣ Semantic Mash-Ups
‣ Topics
‣ Entities
• Semantic Query, Site Search
• Storage, Content Repository

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Content Distribution Services
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• Customer Destinations (Traditional Business)
‣ Deep Integration
• Publisher Widgets
‣ Levels of Lightweight Integration
‣ Example: Related-Content-Widget in JavaScript
• Inform.com
‣ Topic Pages
• Micro Sites
‣ Several Thousand Owned-and-Operated Domains/Sites, Topic Driven
• Social Networks
‣ Facebook
Tools:
• Semantic SEO
‣ RDFa, SKOS

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Semantic MetaData, RDFa
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http://inspector.sindice.com

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Facebook App
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Using Facebook OpenGraph
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Relevancy Algorithm:
Combine:
•Trending / Popular Topics
•Trending / Popular Articles
•Personalization “Liked” Topics
•Personalization “Liked” Articles
•User Profiles (“Users like you…”)

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Facebook “Liked” Topics
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Facebook Article Stream
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Inform: Author to Audience via Semantics
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Thanks for your attention!
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Questions?
Contact Information:
Marc Hadfield
marc@inform.com