Extractiv has quietly launched a service that crawls the Web for text on a specific topic, then transforms it into "structured semantic data." It's a direct competitor to Thomson Reuters' Calais product, which has been doing this for a couple of years now. This type of service is potentially valuable to media companies, search services and monitoring applications - because it turns messy, unorganized HTML content into data that is organized into categories and given other semantic 'meaning.'
I sat down with Extractiv CEO Shion Deysarkar at the recent Semantic Technology conference in San Francisco, to find out how Extractiv intends to compete with the more well-known and big media backed Calais.
When semantic recommendations service Evri launched two years ago, the product (backed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen) was seen by many as a type of search engine. Nowadays, Evri models itself as a topic-based news service; in particular, tapping into the real-time streams of mixed media coming from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other sources.
At the recent Semantic Technology conference, I sat down with Evri CEO Will Hunsinger. He called Evri the "topical equivalent of a Facebook stream."
This week we've been exploring the emergence of the Semantic Web among companies like Best Buy and Google. It's all thanks to RDFa, code that is inserted into the HTML of web pages to add extra meaning. The increasing usage of RDFa was one of the main themes at the recent Semantic Technology conference in San Francisco.
There is perhaps no better example than Facebook's use of RDFa. We chatted to Facebook open standards evangelist David Recordon to find out more.
Yesterday we wrote about the increasing usage of Semantic Web technologies by large commercial companies like Facebook, Google and Best Buy. The Semantic Web is a Web of added meaning, which ultimately enables smarter and more personalized web apps to be built. In this post we explore how a leading U.S. retailer, Best Buy, is using a Semantic Web markup language called RDFa to add semantics to its webpages.
This is not just an academic exercise for Best Buy. As we will see, semantic technology has already led to increased traffic and better service to its customers. We spoke to Jay Myers, Lead Web Development Engineer at BestBuy.com, to find out how.
At the Semantic Technology conference in San Francisco last week, I met up with two W3C representatives to discuss the current state of the Semantic Web - a Web of added meaning and structured data. W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium, is the official standards organization of the Web and is led by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. I spoke with W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead Ivan Herman and W3C eGovernment Interest Group leader Sandro Hawke.
The main takeaway from the conversation was the rapid adoption of RDFa, by big commercial companies such as Facebook and Best Buy. It's come as a "very pleasant surprise" to Ivan Herman.
At the Semantic Technology conference in San Francisco today, Google gave an update of its rich snippets initiative - which adds extra information to Google search results. For example, showing restaurant review ratings. It's an experimental Semantic Web feature, but today's update shows that usage is increasing and Google wants to ramp it up significantly.
Rich snippets was announced in May last year and began to be seen in results around October. At the SemTech panel today, Google's Pravir Gupta noted that rich snippets impressions have grown four-fold globally since October 2009, with a two-fold increase on the US/English Web. Rich snippets is available in more than 40 languages.
Tomorrow at the 2010 Semantic Technology Conference, Primal will launch a new publishing platform. It's grandly described as a "semantic synthesis platform," but simply put it's a publishing platform that automates the production of content. What's more, the resulting web pages include no original content. It's all aggregated from other sources.
So in many ways this is reducing Web publishing to its most basic form, devoid of new content. Is this "automated content manufacturing," as founder Paul Sweeney described it to me today, useful to people?
Almost one year ago we started a post series that presented three different webs that are all made for machines. Now it is time to connect those webs and look at examples of how they can be used. To recap, first we looked at the Web of Data, which contains open, structured data sets consisting of factual knowledge that are linked.
Second was the Web of Identities, which is like the Web of Data, but for people data. Its ability protect one's privacy and to cope with data volatility differentiates it from the Web of Data. In the Web of Identities, it's people's social graphs that link one identity to another.
This month, the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project released a study on the semantic Web. The Web will get smarter. It will become more useful. But will the "semantic Web" become the reality that many envision?
Lee Rainie of Pew and Janna Quitney Anderson of Elon University's Imagining the Internet project asked 895 experts to "predict the likely progress toward achieving the goals of the semantic web by the year 2020."
The holy grail in web search technology is to be able to ask a simple question, in natural language, and get a simple answer. With Google's announcement today of Google Squared coming to its search results, the search engine has moved one step closer to that grail.
According to the company's blog from one year ago today, when Google Squared first launched, "unlike a normal search engine, Google Squared doesn't find webpages about your topic -- instead, it automatically fetches and organizes facts from across the Internet."
