After months of hard work and cooperation by higher education students and experts, the Spanish version of DBpedia, also known as the Spanish Semantic Wikipedia, has finally come into being. The Spanish DBpedia contains 70 million data items that account for 80% of the information in the Spanish Wikipedia and now rivals other languages like English or French. Thanks to this community effort, it is now possible enter a query on the Spanish DBpedia page, such as ' How many Spanish bullfighters are (or have been) married to singers of traditional Spanish music (copla)?' and receive the following response: Ortega Cano with Rocío Jurado, Curro Romero with Concha Márquez Piquer, and Francisco Ribera with Isabel Pantoja. This semantic version of the Wikipedia DBpedia is a project for extracting Wikipedia data and building a semantic version of this Internet encyclopaedia. It is a community effort for extracting structured information from the Wikipedia and making it accessible on the Web. This information is generated by executing mapping documents that specify how data are mapped to the Semantic Web language (RDF) according to vocabularies commonly used by a large number of organizations. The RDF language is a World Wide Web consortium standard for data representation on the Web and is the groundwork of the Data Web (for more information, listen to Oscar Corcho explaining the initiative during a panel discussion on Spanish National Radio ).

WHEN IBM’S computer Watson created artificial intelligence (AI) history by beating two human players last year at the US game show Jeopardy! a research team in IBM’s Dublin campus had a little celebration themselves. A core language-analysis technology that enabled Watson to understand the game show’s questions, search through millions of documents and other resources contained in its memory, and outdo the humans in producing the correct answer, came from the Irish lab. And surprisingly, the LanguageWare technology that has been honed for more than a decade by the Mulhuddart research group and is at the very cutting edge of AI, began life as a lowly spellchecker. “It’s been a long road,” says DJ McCloskey, the head of the LanguageWare group at IBM Ireland. “That piece of technology was actually developed here in February 2001.” McCloskey, who has a background in physics and mathematics and gradually developed an interest in the mathematics of information and textual analysis, says Watson’s linguistic pyrotechnics displayed on Jeopardy! developed out of the spellchecker from Lotus Notes.

Royal Philips Electronics announced it is selling its Speech Processing business to Invest Unternehmensbeteiligungs Aktiengesellschaft, a private equity fund of the Raiffeisen Banking Group Upper Austria. Financial details of the proposed transaction were not disclosed. The transaction is expected to be completed in the second quarter of 2012. Speech Processing is part of the Lifestyle Entertainment business within the Philips Consumer Lifestyle sector. The proposed sale supports the repositioning of the sector. Speech Processing, with headquarters in Vienna and established in 1954, is a leading company in professional dictation systems. The business employs approximately 170 people worldwide.

The University of Luxembourg announced that it will cooperate with the University of Liège to expand the open access offer of ORBi. Following the heated debate surrounding open access which put publisher Elsevier at the center, sentiment increasingly shifts in favor of making research freely available. Only recently, Harvard Library sent out a memo to its researchers urging them to avoid publishing in for-profit journals. Full press statement by University of Luxembourg The University has announced its intent to actively participate in the Open Access initiative, a worldwide movement aiming to make scholarly publications freely and openly available to anyone via the Internet. As defined in the Budapest (2002), Bethesda (2003) and Berlin (2003) declarations on Open Access, OA is the immediate, online, free availability of research outputs without any restrictions on use commonly imposed by publisher copyright agreements. Through the signature of a collaboration agreement with the University of Liège (ULg), the University of Luxembourg hopes to inspire its researchers to publish in Open Access in order to attain the success that the ULg has achieved with ORBi , its digital repository: in less than 6 years, researchers at ULg have entered over 78,700 references, 60% with full-text.

Neodata Group, a leader in ad-serving and online publisher solutions, today announced the acquisition of Newscurve, a company focused on providing web analytics to power editorial decision making. With this acquisition, Neodata Group will leverage Newscurve's technology to strengthen its cutting-edge editorial suite and move forward with the company's international expansion. Neodata Group's editorial suite for online publishers utilizes text-mining, semantic analysis and real-time web metrics to provide actionable recommendations to editors, helping them to better engage their readers by matching individuals with the content that will best suit them. While many companies solve individual elements of the optimization and recommendation problem for publishers, Neodata Group has the technology and expertise to marry optimizations for both editorial and advertising needs with its ad.agio ad-server.

Have cash? Looking for tech talent? Go to Europe. So says Konstantin Geurike, co-founder of LinkedIn and newly minted venture partner in Berlin’s EarlyBird Ventures. EarlyBird recently raised $100 million for its forth fund, focusing on European, and in particular German startups. “I think given the amount of money available, the shortage in Silicon Valley is in technical talent,” says Geurike, “I have no doubt that some European startups with strong talent and the right startup know-how will be able to out-execute Silicon Valley companies.” One of Geurike’s new tasks at EarlyBird will be to help European companies break into the U.S. market. Geurike, who is German but studied engineering at Stanford and is based in Palo Alto, wants to support other European founders who could make a global impact.”My goal is to help portfolio companies to become a success on a global scale,” he explains.”I will probably end up working most closely with one or two founders who decide their best opportunities for global impact come from leading their business from Silicon Valley, while keeping most of the staff in Germany, where it is easier to attract and retain technical talent.”

SDL , a leading provider of Global Information Management solutions, has opened a research and development facility in Europe to expand the company's focus on machine translation. The new facility and team will be led by Bill Byrne, a leading research scientist in natural language processing and Reader in Information Engineering in the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge. SDL has been committed to machine translation for over a decade and the acquisition of Language Weaver in 2010 enabled the company to empower more enterprise customers and translators to leverage machine translation for their evolving business needs. Building on its commitment, this research team expansion will strategically accelerate the company's advances and continued leadership in statistical machine translation and machine learning to make it applicable within a broader ecosystem.

Sygehus Lillebaelt, rated the best hospital in Denmark for the past five years, is getting doctors out from behind desks and ensuring it has enough auxiliary staff, such as porters. The hospital has 700 beds and 4,500 full-time staff, and the main priority, according to Kenneth Seerup Joergensen, the hospital's chief information officer, is to make sure that when patients are admitted, they are scheduled in for all the procedures they need and can move around the hospital quickly and smoothly. Hence the need for porters, as much as doctors. The hospital uses IT in many different forms to support this aim of moving patients around as smoothly as possible, including the use of speech recognition by all its doctors so that information about patients can be input as quickly as possible into electronic patient records. This was not immediately popular, acknowledges Joergensen. "A lot of the doctors didn't want to use speech recognition. It was very tough. But the clinicians at Lillebaelt are supposed to be treating patients, not focusing on correct registration or work documentation," he said. "We don't want doctors sitting behind a desk and we use IT to help."