I've been following a fascinating 3-part series of posts this week by Greg Boutin, founder of Growthroute Ventures. The series aimed to tie together 3 big trends, all based around structured data: 1) the still nascent "Web 3.0" concept, 2) the relatively new kid on the structured Web block, Linked Data, and 3) the long-running saga that is the Semantic Web. Greg's series is probably the best explanation I've read all year about the way these trends are converging. In this post I'll highlight some of Greg's thoughts and add some of my own.
One part people, one part machine. Is that a formula for more effective decision making? A number of high-profile entrepreneurs believe it is, and they are starting companies based on the idea.
In the following post we take a look at three of the most exciting startups entering this emerging market. The movement is a logical development now that millions of people are comfortable posting information online. The web's next step is to leverage machine learning. These are three companies to watch who are doing just that - combining user input with technology that improves its performance by gathering and processing data. In this case they are doing it in order to help people make better decisions, but these are just some of the first consumer technologies that will enter the cyborg-like space that combines people and machines in order to better serve people.
In the coming years, we will see a revolution in the ability of machines to access, process, and apply information. This revolution will emerge from three distinct areas of activity connected to the Semantic Web: the Web of Data, the Web of Services, and the Web of Identity providers. These webs aim to make semantic knowledge of data accessible, semantic services available and connectable, and semantic knowledge of individuals processable, respectively. In this post, we will look at the first of these Webs (of Data) and see how making information accessible to machines will transform how we find information.
What would you call a real-time semantic analysis tool that plugs in to your blogging software and leverages an API for a huge database of petitions, charities and volunteer opportunities to change the world which is powered by an extensible markup language that lets anyone load in more calls to action? Hot as hell - that's what we'd call it.
Zemanta, a fascinating service that offers bloggers relevant links, photos and other assets to include in their blog posts, announced a great new feature today - semantically related calls to action for social good, powered by a new API from the organization Social Actions.
By making available databases of human genomic data, US census records and other data of public interest, the Amazon Public Data Sets are an incredible resource. They're like a 21st century Public Library for robots to patronize. In this emerging era of flourishing data-centric applications, though, the state of the art never stands still.
Forty year old British technology platform Talis (background) announced this week that it now offers free, perpetual storage and keyless API access to semantically marked-up large data sets. The offering is called the Talis Connected Commons and it's the kind of thing that anyone with a geekish imagination can get excited about.
Link shortening services are so common you can't throw a stone online without hitting one, but TinyURL is the undisputed champ. It's one of the oldest, its name says what it does and despite repeated outages - its downtime is small enough that millions of people keep using it.
TinyURL has also allowed incomprehensible amounts of value, both in terms of technology and in terms of money, to sit on the table unclaimed. For years. Now a group of some of the web's hottest investors are betting a few million dollars that a smart TinyURL competitor called Bit.ly can take advantage of being the conduit through which millions of people visit sites of interest to them.
Nova Spivack's semantic web company Twine is developing a free service to write and host semantic ontologies; the classification trees that enable machines to put concepts in topical context. Ready to play Aristotle and create an ontology of cheese, model airplanes, global anti-hunger organizations or any other topic?
What blogging was to publishing, a simple tool that made far more people able to participate, Twine's new ontology writing and hosting service could be to the act of teaching machines about new topics.
Part Two of a Two-Part Series. Part one can be found here.
At this month's DEMO 09 conference, one of the most apparent trends was the emergence of several new intelligent web services. In this transitional period between Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 (or whatever it is that comes next), the tools of the future are just now being revealed. Although at first glance some of these services and applications may seem somewhat incomplete, in many cases they actually represent years' worth of work to have reached the point they're at now. These are no simple Web 2.0 applications; these are highly complex and intelligent tools of tomorrow's smarter web.
Part One of a Two-Part Series
We're moving beyond the days of a simple search box in which you type a query and get a list of results. Today, companies are trying to build a smarter web - one that understands what things are, how they relate, and perhaps most importantly, what things you're going to like. But has Web 3.0 arrived in its full semantic glory? No, not yet. But it's clear we are getting closer than ever before.
Google may be outperforming Yahoo Search in terms of market share, but with programs like Search Monkey and BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service), Yahoo is still trying to innovate in the search space. Today, Yahoo announced a new feature that integrates Yahoo Search with some of Facebook's core functions. Whenever you see a Facebook profile in your search results, you can now directly add somebody as a friend, send messages, see their friends, or poke them.
