Amiad Solomon, CEO of Peer39, kicked off the Web 3.0 Conference & Expo in Santa Clara, CA on Thursday with a keynote discussing the Semantic Web and how it relates to advertising. He told the audience that this is one of the key business opportunities in the Web 3.0 era. "I believe the simplest definition of Web 3.0 is the monetization and commercialization of Web 2.0," he said.
To fully appreciate how Web 3.0 can offer better advertising solutions, Solomon suggested that we start by analyzing the Web's transformations since Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau wrote the official proposal for the World Wide Web in 1990.
Project10X has just published a "Web 3.0 Manifesto". It's a kind of sequel to their Semantic Wave 2008 report released in January this year. Mills Davis, Managing Director of Project10X, told us via email that the new manifesto "reveals how semantic technologies will drive product and service opportunities in the next stage of the internet."
You can download the Executive Summary here. We got a look at the whole report and it is packed full of great data, including the two top 10 lists of Semantic Web opportunities detailed below.
Also in this post we're giving away 3 free tickets to Defrag for the best suggestions in the comments for 'web 3.0' apps. See below for more details.
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 today. Siri was spun out of SRI International and its core technology is based on the highly ambitious CALO artificial intelligence project. Today, Siri announced that it has raised an $8.5 million Series A financing round, led by Menlo Ventures and Morgenthaler Ventures.
What do you say to an old friend who's over extending themselves yet again? This morning 3rd tier search engine Ask.com proudly tooted its horn one more time - "It's Here! The New Ask.com!"
Ask.com is a decent search engine, it does a lot of things well enough to check out once and appreciate before moving on. (Maps, for example.) I use its Blogsearch all day long. I like Ask and many of the innovative things it does, but not enough to use many of its tools with any regularity. Today the search engine relaunched, saying it now leverages Semantic Technologies. Upon performing some searches though - I can't tell what's different. I just wish they'd stop.
Semantic Web entrepreneur David Provost has published a report about the state of business in the Semantic Web and it's a good read for anyone interested in the sector. It's titled On the Cusp: A Global Review of the Semantic Web Industry. We also mentioned it in our post Where Are All The RDF-based Semantic Web Apps?.
The Semantic Web is a collection of technologies that makes the meaning of content online understandable by machines. After surveying 17 Semantic Web companies, Provost concludes that Semantic science is being productized, differentiated, invested in by mainstream players and increasingly sought after in the business world.
RDF is the cornerstone of The Semantic Web, yet there still very few commercial RDF apps.
In the latest issue of Nodalities, a magazine about the Semantic Web by UK company Talis, there is an article by Talis CTO Ian Davis about the state of Semantic Web applications. Davis says that we're still in "Generation Zero" of the Semantic Web, because there are relatively few compelling apps. Specifically he notes that "there are still only a handful of applications that incorporate RDF at their heart and none of these are using the full potential of the Semantic Web." RDF is the Semantic Web's equivalent of the Web's HTML - its chief characteristic is the ability to ascribe meaning to data.
While it has great potential, the Semantic Web has failed to live up to its promises so far. Part of the problem, as Thomson Reuters sees it, is that developers will not add a lot of semantic features to their products until publishers start publishing more semantic data. Reuters' OpenCalais represents one way around this problem. But starting today, Reuters' newest project SemanticProxy will give developers an easier way to extract semantic data from any web site.
This week we reported that Cognition had announced "the largest commercially available Semantic Map of the English language." In our interview with Cognition CEO Scott Janus, we asked him to compare Cognition's technologies to those of other semantic search companies Hakia and Powerset. Janus pointed to their large Semantic Map as the main differentiator. Indeed he told us that semantic search companies "must include a comprehensive semantic map" to be successful.
Is this true? We sought a response from both Hakia and Microsoft-owned Powerset on this semantically charged question.
SemantiFind is a newly launched semantic search tool which made its debut at the recent DEMO conference. Unlike other semantic search engines such as Hakia and the recently acquired Powerset, SemantiFind isn't looking to create a whole new search engine from scratch. Instead, they decided to improve upon the one engine we already use: Google.
Cognition Technologies, a Semantic Web company that specialises in Natural Language Processing (NLP) search, is today announcing the release of what it claims is "the largest commercially available Semantic Map of the English language." We interviewed Cognition CEO Scott Janus to find out what this means.
We also discovered that Cognition, which currently licenses its technology to other organizations, is planning to build a general consumer search engine - which will compete with Google and others.
