Last month Facebook announced a new standardized way to mark up web pages concerning things like books, movies, music and more. It was called the Open Graph Protocol and was ostensibly intended to make the web comprehensible to computers building a profile of your interests across many different websites.
Unfortunately, it wasn't implemented very well, according to GetGlue CEO Alex Iskold. Iskold, a long-time contributor to this site, penned the most extensive guide to understanding Facebook's Open Graph and a critique of how it was constructed, implemented by launch partners and by Facebook itself. Yelp, IMDB and Pandora for example were all launch partners but have implemented the system incompletely or not at all, even several weeks after launch. Now Iskold has taken his own company's competing semantic markup of pages around the web and used it to build a replacement for a large part of the Facebook code in the wild - using Facebook's own format. Developers interested in understanding the content across 300 major websites, in Facebook's own terms, can now find a robust source of data at GetGlue.
Two weeks ago, Facebook has announced a major new initiative called Facebook Open Graph. This is an attempt to not only re-imagine Facebook, but in a lot of ways, an attempt to re-define how the Web works. We wrote in details about the implications of this move for all interested parties.
A big part of the announcement is Facebook's vision of a consumer Semantic Web. In this new world, publishers have an incentive to annotate pages by marking up activities, events, people, movies, books, music and more. The proper markup, would in turn, lead to a much more interconnected Web - people would be connected with each other across websites and around the things they are interested in.
In a recent post, I outlined a kind of layman's test for the Semantic Web. I wrote that the tipping point for the Semantic Web may be when anyone can query a set of data about a historical figure and get a long list of structured results in return. I called this 'The Modigliani Test,' after my favorite artist Amedeo Modigliani. To pass this test, you must deliver - using Linked Data - a comprehensive list of locations of original Modigliani art works around the world.
A developer named Atanas Kiryakov gave the test a good crack. In doing so, he illustrated the core issues facing the Semantic Web currently.
Facebook just shook the tech world by announcing several major initiatives that collectively constitute an aggressive move to weave the social net on top of the existing Web.The rumors were that the leading social network would launch a "Like" button for the entire Web. Instead, Zuckerberg & Co. unveiled a bold and visionary new platform that cannot be ignored.
The bits of this platform bring together the visions of a social, personalized and semantic Web that have been discussed since del.icio.us pioneered Web 2.0 back in 2004. Facebook's vision is both minimalistic and encompassing - but its ambition is to kill off its competition and use 500 million users to take over entire Web.
In our recent posts about Structured Data, we've emphasized that most of the current initiatives have been around uploading new data to the Web - whatever the format. The U.S. and U.K. governments have led the way with their 'open data' websites, but much of that data isn't 'linked' yet. In other words, it's online - but siloed. So how do we get to the next stage of the Semantic Web, linking disparate data sets together so that people can begin to use that data?
The tipping point for the long-awaited Semantic Web may be when you can query a set of data about someone not too famous, and get a long list of structured results in return. I've decided to term this 'The Modigliani Test.'
At the end of last week, we posted an open thread asking what application you'd build (or would like someone else to build) using linked data or open data. The thread was inspired by Georgi Kobilarov. In this post, we list 10 of the best ideas we received.
A number of the suggested apps were for social good, for example apps for improving sustainability and finding missing persons. Other apps were more lifestyle-oriented, for example for cooking and genealogy. A few were business focused, such as a brand marketing app and a point-of-sale system. Of course a couple were just plain ol' geeky, which we love too! You can find all 10 ideas below.
Yesterday we summarized some of the main developments in the Linked Data world over the past year. Linked Data is a W3C-backed movement that is all about connecting data sets across the Web. It can be viewed as a subset of the wider Semantic Web movement, which is about adding meaning to the Web. However, there is some confusion in the Semantic Web community about the crossover. To add to the confusion, there is a term called 'Open Data' that is being bandied around too. This commonly describes data that has been uploaded to the Web and is accessible to all, but isn't necessarily "linked" to other data sets.
So what's the beef with all of these terms? In this post we seek clarity!
In May last year we wrote about the state of Linked Data, an official W3C project that aims to connect separate data sets on the Web. Linked Data is a subset of the wider Semantic Web movement, in which data on the Web is encoded with meaning using technologies such as RDF and OWL. The ultimate vision is that the Web will become much more structured, which opens up many possibilities for "smarter" Web applications.
At this stage last year, we noted that Linked Data was ramping up fast - evidenced by the increasing number of data sets on the Web as at March 2009. Fast forward a year and the Linked Data "cloud" has continued to expand. In this post we look at some of the developments in Linked Data over the past year.
One of the first web design books I bought was Creating Killer Web Sites, a 90s classic by David Siegel. That book was known for pushing visual style over HTML standards. It also encouraged the use of HTML hacks, for example using tables to create layouts. Siegel's techniques were basically workarounds, but they just worked in an era when building web pages was painful due to browser incompatibilities.
In Siegel's latest book, Pull, he tackles the Semantic Web. Once again, Siegel plays loosely with existing web standards.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, and prominent researcher Nigel Shadbolt will lead a new British Institute for Web Science with $45 million in government backing. The announcement was not without its critics, but the Institute could have a world-wide impact.
The two men collaborated in helping build the excellent data.gov.uk and will now expand upon that work. Prime Minister Gordon Brown said of the move: "We are determined to go further in breaking down the walled garden of Government...This Institute will help place the UK at the cutting edge of research on the Semantic Web and other emerging web and internet technologies."
