10 More Semantic Apps to Watch
In November 2007, we listed 10 Semantic apps to watch and yesterday we published an update on what each had achieved over the past year. All of them are still alive and well - a couple are thriving, some are experimenting and a few are still finding their way.
Now we're going to list 10 more Semantic apps to watch. These are all apps that have gotten onto our radar over 2008. We've reviewed all but one of them, so click through to the individual reviews for more detail. It should go without saying, but this is by no means an exhaustive list - so if we haven't mentioned your favorite, please add it in the comments.
BooRah
BooRah is a restaurant review site that we first reviewed earlier this year. One of BooRah's most interesting aspects is that it uses semantic analysis and natural language processing to aggregate reviews from food blogs. Because of this, BooRah can recognize praise and criticism in these reviews and then rates restaurants accordingly. BooRah also gathers reviews from Citysearch, Tripadvisor and other large review sites.
BooRah also announced last month the availability of an API that will allow other web sites and businesses to offer online reviews and ratings from BooRah to their customers. The API will surface most of BooRah's data about a given restaurant, including ratings, menus, discounts, and coupons.
Swotti
Swotti is a semantic search engine that aggregates opinions about products to help you make purchasing decisions. We reviewed the product back in March. Swotti aggregates opinions about products from product review sites, forums and discussion boards, web sites and blogs, and then categorizes those reviews as to what feature or aspect of the product is being reviewed, tagging it accordingly, and then rating the review on as positive or negative.
Dapper MashupAds
Earlier this month we wrote about the recent improvement in Dapper MashupAds, a product we first spotted over a year ago. The idea is that publishers can tell Dapper: this is the place on my web page where the title of a movie will appear, now serve up a banner ad that's related to whatever movie this page happens to be about. That could be movies, books, travel destinations - anything. We remarked that the UI for this has grown much more sophisticated in the past year.
How this works: in the back end, Dapper will be analyzing the fields that publishers identify and will apply a layer of semantic classification on top of them. The company believes that its new ad network will provide monetary incentive for publishers to have their websites marked up semantically. Dapper also has a product called Semantify, for SEO - see our review of that.
For more on Semantic advertising, see our write-up of a panel on this topic from the Web 3.0 Conference.
Inform.com
Inform.com analyzes content from online publishers and inserts links from a publisher's own content archives, affiliated sites, or the web at large, to augment content being published. We reviewed it in January, when at the time the company had more than 100 clients - including CNN.com, WashingtonPost.com and the Economist.
Inform says its technology determines the semantic meaning of key words in millions of news stories around the web every day in order to recommend related content. The theory is that by automating the process of relevant link discovery and inclusion, Inform can easily add substantial value to a publisher's content. Inform also builds out automatic topic pages, something you can see around WashingtonPost and CNN.com.
Siri
We have met our share of secretive startups over the years, but few have been as secretive about their plans as Siri, which was founded in December 2007 and did not even have an official name until October this year. Siri was spun out of SRI International and its core technology is based on the highly ambitious CALO artificial intelligence project.
In our October post on Siri, we discovered that Siri is working on a "personalized assistant that learns." We expect Siri to have a strong information management aspect, combined with some novel interface ideas. Based on our discussion with founders Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer in October, we think that there will be a strong mobile aspect to Siri's product and at least some emphasis on location awareness. Siri plans to launch in the first half of 2009.
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When did ReadWriteWeb start using multi-page posts? That is so disappointing.
Posted by: Rob Diana
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November 20, 2008 10:19 AM
Hi Richard,
Thank you for including Imindi in the watching list. I am sorry that the last comment was not complete due to some reasons I am not sure. I was in hurry to a meeting before posting the comment.
Imindi is certainly a unique one. To me, Imindi points out a better and probably more natural path how the Web may gradually approach the Semantic Web from Web 2.0.
"Semantics", the term itself represents certain subjective judgment by individuals. Many of the mainstream Semantic Web approaches try to avoid this issue since it is too hard for machines to handle. By contrast, Imindi believes that this issue is inevitable. At the same time, Imindi also agrees that by the current technology machines truly cannot solve the problem well. Therefore, Imindi suggests much more human intervention into the construction of Semantic Web than many other Semantic Web researchers have suggested. From the research point of view, it is less machine-automated. From the practice point of view, however, we believe it is m
Rob, why is it disappointing? It makes total sense to put long articles over 2 or more pages. Jeez, give us a break. Sometimes I get tired of whining from people about little things like that. It seems to be cool to dislike pagination, like the Friendfeed crowd gets brownie points for saying "ohhh, pagination is evil". But if you think about it logically, pagination splits up long content so that it becomes more readible. So you have to make an extra click, so what?!
Juice screwed up my browser, I think.
Richard, please don't get me wrong, I love ReadWriteWeb. I have always disliked multi-page articles because it breaks the flow of reading. Nothing more than that. I just like reading on one page. It won't matter to me long term because I will continue to read it regardless. Just personal preference really.
Posted by: Rob Diana
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November 20, 2008 11:12 AM
Bring back anchor tags! :P
Posted by: Aram Zucker-Scharff
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November 20, 2008 11:14 AM
Congratulation to all companies that were mentioned in this post. I am happy to see that the space is so active. In particular I am a big fan of dapper and I wish the dapper guys all the best.
At the same time, I was disappointing to see that our startup, SemantiNet did not make the list. I strongly believe that our product (www.headup.com) should be considered as a promising semantic web application. I guess that the proof is in the pudding, and only time will tell.
In the meantime, I'd like to offer those that might want to give our product a try to use the invite code TALCODE.
Tal Keinan
The "Semantic Web" seems like all hype. It's just a geeky buzzword that the mainstream will never care about. As the saying goes, "Technology of the future and always will be".
Nice post, but where I would add Zemanta (http://www.zemanta.com) to the list. To me they look like a promising startup with a great product.
I agree: this is a great post. If I may, I'd also like to add the company I'm consulting with, Daylife. As a partisan, I've spent a lot of time comparing Daylife against many of the companies on this list and find they're at least as good or better in every instance. Moreover, they've also managed to get at something others have a tougher time with: their output is visually compelling, organized in an intuitive fashion and invites a virtually endless click-stream (publishers who integrate Daylife and some of the other services on this list love this last benefit a lot).
I'd also like to put my vote in for Zemanta, which I use on my personal blog and which has been (for me) a lovely complement to the Daylife service. It's a terrific tool.
Great List,as before,I also create another screenshot or snapshots list for these websites you mentioned in post,have a look here:
http://www.sitegif.com/gif/10-more-semantic-apps-from-readwriteweb/
Hi,
yeah, I'd like to see Zemanta on the list also. But Richard probably knows there is no way to make everybody happy. :)
However, we are at least partly present through Faviki which is using Zemanta API for one part of their service - recommendation of semantic tags.
Faviki are great guys BTW and I expect a lot from them in the future, I am glad Richard knows about them!
bye
Andraz Tori, Zemanta
Richard,
Thank you for including Imindi in the your list for this year. This in an honor that our hole team will work hard to live up to.
As you mentioned we got - shall we say - some tough love when we appeared as finalists at TC50 this year.
The feedback we got at that event was very importantant in that it helped us to focus on some fundamental issues relating to the product and the business and for the past 10 weeks we have been busy in development incorporating these changes.
I would agree with you that Imindi could be viewed as a mind mapping application - but only superficially. That is - the mind map is the visual interface between our database and engine and the individual user.
The power of Imindi is not the mind mapping interface - frankly we could and might use other types of interfaces. It is the fact that once you start to collect your thoughts with Imindi it wil help you to expand your mind by recommending and helping you to discover the thoughts of like minded thinkers.
Again thank you for your support.
-Adam
Richard,
As is the case with SemantiNet and Zemanta, I would also like to mention our company ThoughtExpress. We use our own forms of expression for semantics/knowledge that are deeper than the currently available structures to actually run enterprises (even some large insurance ones). ThoughtExpress is probably worlds first semantic enterprise management platform.
We are soon going to launch Semantic Human Interface in deep social graph where people and enterprise will be able to express their own semantics and actually exist in this space to conduct business, sharing of knowledge, etc. They will no longer need their systems or IT personel. Processes are actually going to be constructed from semantics expressed in human terms.
Regards
Pawel Lubczonok
However, we are at least partly present through Faviki which is using Zemanta API for one part of their service - recommendation of semantic tags.
Thanks for useful information.
But I've noticed that you've included only single apps from 10 different semantic application categories. So article seems to be incomplete somehow. For instance, you may part it into serveral articles: semantic advertising or targeting apps, semantic search engines, and so on. And more applications and semantic technologies will be listed and available to readers' view.