The Gilbane Advisor

Curated for content, computing, data, information, and digital experience professionals

Page 55 of 931

Gilbane Advisor 1-4-23 — Semantic file systems, agent models, blockchain apps

January 4, 2023 /

Wishing you all the best in the new year!

This week we feature articles by Kurt Cagle and Jacob Andreas.

Additional reading from Rand Fishkin, Vitalik Buterin, and Dan McCreary.

News comes from Acquia, Sinequa, Xpublisher, Drupal, and the European Broadcasting Union.

If you’ve missed any issues you can see them here.

👉 👉👉 You may have heard that Twitter is shutting down Revue, the product we have been using to send you this newsletter directly via email, on January 18. We have a new service ready to go, and you don’t need to do anything to keep receiving the Gilbane Advisor. Since we always publish our newsletter on https://gilbane.com you still have access to all previous and future issues there.

Opinion / Analysis

What is a Semantic File System?

The Semantic File System, or SFS, is a powerful potential application for knowledge graphs that moves beyond the base triple store space and instead points to what could be a truly distributed file system across any number of different kinds of servers.

Kurt Cagle makes an excellent case for transitioning to a semantic file system, eventually. He points to Inrupt’s Solid Project as an experimental implementation. Solid was announced two years ago with little news since (see recent activity at https://forum.solidproject.org). But read Cagle’s article first to stay ahead of your peers on this topic. (6 min).

https://thecaglereport.com/2022/11/28/what-is-a-semantic-file-system/

Language models as agent models

It is not easy to reconcile the actual limitations of machine learning with some of the impressive results of applications based on large language models, resulting in much debate about their ultimate utility.

Jacob Andreas argues that big language models can, at least in some very narrow situations, “model agency and communicative intent”, without being “in any general sense human-like”. His research and explanation make for a good case. The paper is clear, accessible, and an important read for anyone following language model debates. (28 min).

https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.01681

More Reading

All Gilbane Advisor issues

Content technology news

Acquia enhances customer data platform

Acquia CDP includes a unified data layer using Snowflake, direct SQL access, and integration with Acquia’s digital asset management system.
https://gilbane.com/2022/12/acquia-enhances-customer-data-platform/

Sinequa updates search cloud platform

Sinequa’s Neural Search benefits from four trained deep neural networks for improved relevance, ease of deployment, and tuning capabilities.
https://gilbane.com/2022/12/sinequa-updates-search-cloud-platform/

Drupal launches Drupal 10

Drupal 10 includes features for developers and content creators. A stronger developer and site builder and easier content authoring and editing.
https://gilbane.com/2022/12/drupal-launches-drupal-10-open-source-cms/

Xpublisher announces SaaS architecture

Beginning January 1, 2023, Xpublisher will be available in a high-security cloud environment and feature a new design, enhanced functionality.
https://gilbane.com/2022/12/xpublisher-announces-saas-architecture/

European Broadcasting Union announces EBUCorePlus

EBUCorePlus is specified using the ontology web language is strictly semantic. A free CorePlus Demonstrator Kit (CDK) helps with development skills.
https://gilbane.com/2022/12/european-broadcasting-union-announces-ebucoreplus/

All content technology news

The Gilbane Advisor is curated by Frank Gilbane for content technology, computing, and digital experience professionals. The focus is on strategic technologies. We publish recommended articles and content technology news weekly. We do not sell or share personal data.

Subscribe | View online | Editorial policy | Privacy policy | Contact

Progress to acquire MarkLogic

January 3, 2023 /

Progress, a provider of application development and infrastructure software, announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire MarkLogic, specialists in managing complex data and metadata, and a Vector Capital portfolio company. Upon closing of the planned transaction, MarkLogic is expected to enhance Progress’ ability to deliver products to develop, deploy and manage high-impact applications by providing a unified enterprise-grade semantic data platform that helps customers derive value from complex data.

MarkLogic offers a proprietary, multi-model NoSQL database, along with semantic metadata management and AI capabilities, complementing the larger Progress product portfolio. MarkLogic also aligns with Progress’ Total Growth Strategy, adhering to Progress’ acquisition criteria, offering scale, a strong recurring revenue model and products with high customer retention. The acquisition is also expected to provide an opportunity for Progress to leverage its operating model and infrastructure to maximize efficiency. When closed, the acquisition is expected to add more than $100 million in annual revenue and contribute strong cash flows. Subject to the satisfaction of the terms and conditions set forth in the definitive agreement, Progress is expected to acquire MarkLogic for $355 million. The acquisition is currently expected to close in early 2023.

https://www.progress.com ■ https://www.marklogic.com

Acquia enhances customer data platform 

December 22, 2022 /

Acquia introduced enhancements to its customer data platform (CDP) to deepen support for enterprise marketing teams. The new capabilities expand the ways marketers and data scientists can work with information managed by Acquia CDP and strengthen the product’s central role in composable customer data strategies. Acquia CDP now includes: 

  • Unified data layer: Powered by Snowflake, Acquia’s unified data layer allows for centralized storage of customer data. Acquia CDP and other martech products no longer need to pass data back and forth to keep information such as customers lists in sync. This lowers costs associated with the system, helps ensure better data quality, and can increase system performance.
  • Direct SQL access: Data scientists can directly access analytics, insights, and data in Acquia CDP. This capability allows data scientists to run data models directly on Acquia CDP without requiring users to download data and move it to other systems.
  • Integration with Acquia DAM: Acquia CDP can integrate with every product information management system, including Acquia PIM. Now it also integrates with the company’s digital asset management (DAM) system, allowing customers to seamlessly use existing marketing content, product information, and marketing strategies across both platforms.

https://www.acquia.com/products/marketing-cloud/acquia-cdp

European Broadcasting Union announces EBUCorePlus

December 19, 2022 /

The EBU (European Broadcasting Union) announced EBUCorePlus, a new media metadata standard ontology for media enterprises. It is defined by EBU Members for the media community. It follows up on two long-standing EBU ontologies: EBUCore and CCDM (Class Conceptual Data Model). The two were merged and revised. The result is EBUCorePlus, the new standard that can fully replace its predecessors. It inherits both the reliability of EBUCore and the end-to-end coverage of the media value chain of CCDM. EBUCorePlus is specified using the ontology web language and therefore strictly semantic.

EBUCorePlus serves as a plug and play framework. It can be used out of the box, either in its entirety or just a subset of its elements. But it may also be adapted and extended to enterprise-specific needs. Especially for system integration tasks and defining requirements, projects benefit from EBUCorePlus as a business – not technology – oriented language.

The EBU’s free CorePlus Demonstrator Kit (CDK) can help with extending development skills from entity-relationship models to ontologies, from tables to triples, and from SQL to SPARQL, and is available in cloud, hybrid and on- prem versions. It contains a graph database, populated with the EBUCorePlus ontology and sample data.

https://tech.ebu.ch/news/2022/12/from-data-to-knowledge-with-ebucoreplus

Xpublisher announces SaaS architecture

December 15, 2022 /

Xpublisher GmbH announced their editing system will feature a cloud-based SaaS architecture, making their multichannel publishing system accessible and ready to use from anywhere. The Xpublisher Multichannel Publishing system is part of Fabasoft’s PROCECO business process ecosystem.

Expanding and enhancing business logic is possible at any time with no need for custom programming, as well as increasing the number of users, the amount of storage space, and the scope of services. The graphical BPMN editor lets users design their own workflows that will help to digitalize complex work processes and boost collaboration. With a personalized worklist, everyone has an instant overview of all pending tasks.

Integrated digital asset management keeps all the content organized in one place, and by adding metadata, it gives users drag-and-drop control over their data. They can edit these assets from their desktop applications, including Adobe Photoshop and InDesign as well as Microsoft PowerPoint. Xpublisher Digital Asset Management can be licensed either as part of Xpublisher Multichannel Publishing or separately.

The new Xpublisher guides users throughout the content production process. Xpublisher specializes in output for digital channels as well as fully or partially automated processes for producing magazines, books, technical documentation, legal documents, and financial reports.

https://www.xpublisher.com/en

Drupal launches Drupal 10

December 14, 2022 /

Drupal, the open source content management system for everyone from the small non-profit to the enterprise, is launching the latest upgrade to its software. With Drupal 10, users will find more tools to help build the versatile, structured content that dynamic web experiences require. This latest version brings a modernized backend look, a future-proof platform upgrade, new features, and an enhanced user experience. The new features target the next generation of the web and include the Claro administration theme, the Olivero front-end theme, CKEditor 5, and more. Drupal 10 is built on the latest Symfony 6.2 version. It also streamlines the core system with the least used components removed, focusing more on its foundational strengths.

The upgrade tools and processes are the same as the previous major release, with almost all code changes automated and three times as many contributed extensions available at launch time as with the last major update. The Drupal community is focused on keeping Drupal on the leading edge of content management. From a secure automatic updates mechanism to a project browser for easily installing Drupal extensions.

https://www.drupal.org/about/in-the-news/blog/drupal-launches-drupal-10-the-latest-version-of-the-open-source-digital-experience-platform

Sinequa updates search cloud platform

December 6, 2022 /

Sinequa announced the 11.9 release of its Search Cloud Platform. The new update improves on Sinequa’s Neural Search by expanding integration options with new pre-built connectors, and enhancing its tools for delivering intelligent search applications. New features and enhancements include:

  • Better relevance: Enhanced document splitting and automatic content management for higher-quality passages and augmented answer extraction capabilities
  • Better experience: UI/UX enhancements, including built-in components for Top Passages and Answers
  • More languages: Initially available in English, Neural Search now supports French, German, and Spanish as well
  • PTC Windchill connector for PLM content integration has been upgraded to support v12, including all object types and all security protocols.
  • Office 365 OneNote. The addition of OneNote means Sinequa now has off-the-shelf connectors for the full suite of Office 365 applications.
  • Audit Log: A built-in connector replaces the previous one with more capabilities like event filtering.
  • Azure Blob Storage for full indexing of Azure content and simplified role management.
  • Sinequa Themes. A modernized UI with modular themes that can be easily added, removed, and customized.
  • Search Starter App Builder now includes additional components, options, and a more intuitive UI for instantly delivering a best-in-class search experience.

https://www.sinequa.com

Gilbane Advisor 11-30-22 — DIY knowledge graph, KM modeling, fediverse

November 30, 2022 /

This week we feature articles by Tony Seale, Dan McCreary, and Jon Udell.

Additional reading from Sayash Kapoor & Arvind Narayanan, Tim Bray, Steven Levy, and Anastasia Prokhorova.

News comes from Squirro & Semantic Web Company, Datadobi, Acquia, and Drupal.

If you’ve missed any of the past 65 issues you can see them here; those, as well as all earlier issues can be found here.

👉 We don’t usually publish in December. Though for some reason we made an exception last year and published three issues, so who knows?

Opinion / Analysis

Building your own schema.org

Data integration is rarely easy for any organization, but is a functional requirement that grows in complexity and cost as data and data applications ineluctably increase. Tony Seale explains how you can manage both these problems by inverting the data integration problem within your organization with a model inspired by schema.org. Seale, who has been building decentralized knowledge graphs for years and is currently doing so at UBS, packs a lot into this post at (8 min).

https://medium.com/@Tonyseale/building-your-own-schema-org-7600a90e690a

Systems thinking for knowledge management

We have recommended a number of articles by Dan McCreary on enterprise knowledge graphs. In this post McCreary looks at

… how we can use Systems Thinking to understand the dynamics of building your organization’s collective intelligence. We will review the key Causal Loop Diagrams (CLDs) as models we use to understand organizational knowledge capture and retention. Then we describe how we can use these models… (12 min).

https://towardsdatascience.com/systems-thinking-for-knowledge-management-dff03829cf5c

Autonomy, packet size, friction, fanout, and velocity

Interesting framing on the fediverse from Jon Udell (<2 min).

Nostalgia is a dangerous drug and it’s always risky to wallow in it. So those of us who fondly remember the early blogosphere, and now want to draw parallels to the fediverse, should do so carefully. But we do want to learn from history. Here’s one way to compare five generations of social software along the five dimensions named in the title of this post. 

https://blog.jonudell.net/2022/11/28/autonomy-packet-size-friction-fanout-and-velocity/

More Reading

All Gilbane Advisor issues

Content technology news

Squirro partners with the Semantic Web Company

Joint proposition combines NLP and ML with knowledge graphs to intelligently augment enterprise decision-making.
https://gilbane.com/2022/11/squirro-partners-with-the-semantic-web-company/

Acquia readies support for Drupal 10

Acquia has contributed all updates required to make Acquia CMS compatible with Drupal 10 back to the Drupal community.
https://gilbane.com/2022/11/acquia-readies-support-for-drupal-10/

Datadobi introduces StorageMAP 6.3

Enables companies to archive, pipeline, and replicate unstructured data to object storage on-premises or in the cloud without lock-in.
https://gilbane.com/2022/11/datadobi-introduces-storagemap-6-3/

All content technology news

The Gilbane Advisor is curated by Frank Gilbane for content technology, computing, and digital experience professionals. The focus is on strategic technologies. We publish recommended articles and content technology news weekly. We do not sell or share personal data.

Subscribe | Feed | View online | Editorial policy | Privacy policy | Contact

« Older posts Newer posts »

Policies

Contact

twitter   rss   Mastadon   Bluesky   Medium

Contact • customerservice@gilbane.com

© 2025 Bluebill Advisors (except for contributed posts which are licensed under creative commons)

Banner photos: Fort Point Channel, Summer St bridge, and Northern Ave bridge, Boston

Bluebill Advisors Inc logo

© 2025 The Gilbane Advisor

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑