Evri

Evri is a Paul Allen (of Microsoft fame) backed semantic search engine that launched into a limited beta in June. Evri is a search engine, though it adds a very sophisticated semantic layer on top of its results that emphasizes the relationships between different search terms. It especially prides itself for having developed a system that can distinguish between grammatical objects such subjects, verbs, and objects to create these connections. You can check out a tour of Evri here.

UpTake

Semantic search startup UpTake (formerly Kango) aims to make the process of booking travel online easier. In our review in May, we explained that UpTake is a vertical search engine that has assembled what it says is the largest database of US hotels and activities - over 400,000 of them - from more than 1,000 different travel sites. Using a top-down approach, UpTake looks at its database of over 20 million reviews, opinions, and descriptions of hotels and activities in the US and semantically extracts information about those destinations.

Imindi

Imindi is essentially a mind mapping tool, although it markets itself as a "Thought Engine". Imindi was recommended to us in the comments to our previous post by Yihong Ding, who called it "an untraditional Semantic Web service". Yihong said that traditionally Semantic Web services employ machines to understand humans, however Imindi's approach is to encourage humans to better understand each other via machines.

Imindi has met with a fair amount of skepticism so far - and indeed it appears to be reaching big with its AI associations. However we think it's worth watching, if for no other reason than to see if it can live up to the description on its About page: "By capturing the free form associations of user's logic and intuition, IMINDI is building a global mind index which is an entirely new resource for building collective intelligence and leveraging human creativity and subjectivity on the web."

See also: Thinkbase: Mapping the World's Brain

Juice

We've all been there. You started reading something on the Web, saw something interesting in the article, searched for it, wound up somewhere else, and after about 12 hops you've forgotten exactly what it was you were looking for. If only there were some way to select that topic midstream and have the information automagically appear for you, without disrupting your workflow or sending you traipsing off into the wilds of the Web.

If that sounds familiar, you may need a shot of Juice, a new Firefox 3 add-in currently in public beta from Linkool Labs, that makes researching Web content as easy as click-and-drag. In our review of Juice, we concluded that it avoids some of the more traditional stumbling blocks of Semantic apps by taking a very top-down approach focused on a distinct data set.

Faviki

Faviki is a new social bookmarking tool which we reviewed back in May. It offers something that services like Ma.gnolia, del.icio.us and Diigo do not - semantic tagging capabilities. What this means is that instead of having users haphazardly entering in tags to describe the links they save, Faviki will suggest tags to be used instead. However, unlike other services, Faviki's suggestions don't just come from a community of users and their tagging history, but from structured information extracted straight out of the Wikipedia database.

Because Faviki uses structured tagging, there is more that can be learned about a particular tag, its properties, and its connections to other tags. The system will automatically know what tags belong together and how they relate to others.

Conclusion

The Semantic Web continues to inch closer to reality, by being used in products such as BooRah, Inform.com and Juice. Let us know your thoughts on the above 10 products, and of course any that we missed this time round.