In part 2 of my one-on-one interview with Tim Berners-Lee, we explore a variety of topics relating to Linked Data and the Semantic Web. If you missed it, in Part 1 of the interview we covered the emergence of Linked Data and how it is being used now even by governments.
In Part 2 we discuss: how previously reticent search engines like Google and Yahoo have begun to participate in the Semantic Web in 2009, user interfaces for browsing and using data, what Tim Berners-Lee thinks of new computational engine Wolfram Alpha, how e-commerce vendors are moving into the Linked Data world, and finally how the Internet of Things intersects with the Semantic Web.
During my recent trip to Boston, I had the opportunity to visit MIT. At the end of a long day of meetings with various MIT tech masterminds, I made my way to the funny shaped building (see photo right-below) where the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and its director Tim Berners-Lee work. Berners-Lee is of course the man who invented the World Wide Web 20 years ago.
This was my first meeting with the Web's creator, whose work and philosophy was a direct inspiration for me when I launched ReadWriteWeb back in 2003.1
When we first looked at Faviki, a social bookmarking application which made its debut last year, we were intrigued by their idea of "semantic tagging." What makes Faviki different from its competitors, services like del.icio.us, Diigo, and the now-defunct Ma.gnolia, is the way the service suggests tags to its users. The suggestions don't come from the community of Faviki users and their tagging history - they come from structured info extracted from the Wikipedia database.
Today, Faviki is releasing an upgrade to their service which will give you even better control over the tagging process, making bookmarking even easier than before. They're also announcing support for OpenID.
It's been more than ten years since Tim Berners-Lee first spoke about the semantic web and computers indexing all web-based data. He said, "The day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The 'intelligent agents' people have touted for ages will finally materialize." Since then a handful of companies have attempted to tackle the issue of machine-based indexing and language interpretation. None of them are perfect. Below are 6 unique approaches to semantic data collection.
Today, at the Semantic Technology Conference, Rob Larson and Evan Sandhaus of the New York Times announced together that the Times will soon be publishing its copious index as Linked Data.
The Times' data will join content from Project Gutenberg, a vast online library of text from public domain books, data from the U.S. census, and information from many other formative and vital entities in the semantic web space. Larson and his team intend to make available hundreds of thousands of tags for content dating back to 1851. This will providing give developers an invaluable, automatically navigable roadmap for the publication's vast directory of knowledge and will link that data to existing pages, people, and content around the web.
Glue, a browser-based social network that appears on sites such as Amazon, Last.fm, Netflix, Yahoo! Finance, Wine.com, and Citysearch, today announced their public API for third-party developers.
Glue joins a family of available semantic APIs with a mix of unique semantic and social API features. The API is currently demoed in three apps: Glue Stream, Glue Quilt, and Glue Spider.
Tom Tague from Thomson Reuters' OpenCalais team did a keynote speech today at SemTech in San Jose. His presentation was a wonderful wrapup of current semantic technology trends, and what we can expect over the next few years.
To open, he said that where we are now in the evolution of the Web is content rich, but information poor - plus "experientially deficient". He suggested that 'web 3.0' is about cleaning up the mess of web 2.0 and improving interfaces. In terms of semantic technology, he explained that over the past 5 years it has evolved from invention of standards to a period of commercial innovation on top of those inventions. While standards are still being worked on, now "we are at an inflection point where innovation is exploding."
Let's suppose you uploaded some pictures of a trip to New York City to an online account. Do you tag them "New York City," "NYC," "newyork," or all of the above? How do you know your content will be correctly identified and related to other content on the web? And if you come across the tag "Tesla," how do you know whether it refers to the scientist, the car company, or the band?
Common Tag is a new tagging format that creates references to concretely defined concepts with their own metadata and URLs. With Common Tag, site owners can simply topic hubs, cross-promote content, and enrich pages with data, images, and widgets.
The latest implementation of OpenCalais, the Semantic API by media company Thomson Reuters, has just been announced. It's with 'new media' stalwart CNET, which has signed up to use OpenCalais for semantic analysis of its tech product reviews, news, and blog posts. CNET has also joined Thomson Reuters as one of the first commercial media companies to publish its data to the Linked Data community on the Internet. This basically means that external companies can use that data for their own purposes. While CNET won't be releasing all of its commercial data, it will expose certain sets of product and editorial data.
At Where 2.0 today, Yahoo announced a new product in its already impressive lineup of geo technologies: Placemaker. Placemaker is a new open API from Yahoo that helps developers to make their applications and data sets location-aware. Developers can feed Placemaker any kind of structured and unstructured data, including feeds and web pages, and the app will analyze the text and extract location data from it. This, could, for example, allow news organizations to easily tag their content with location data and create hyper-local products based on this data.
