Yahoo is bringing together two of its most interesting projects today, Yahoo BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service) and SearchMonkey, its semantic indexing and search result enhancement service. There were a number of different parts of the announcement - but the core of the story is simple.
Developers will now be able to build their own search engines using the Yahoo! index and search processing infrastructure via BOSS and include the semantic markup added to pages in both results parsing and the display of those results. There's considerable potential here for some really dazzling results.
A prototype email system being developed at Stanford University is designed to bring the power of semantic technology to our inbox. Called SEAmail, short for "semantic email addressing," the system will help its users route email to the correct person or persons without needing to know their names or email addresses and without the need for preexisting distribution groups.
Expert System is a perhaps little known "semantic intelligence" company; but it has 15 years of experience in the tech industry, 115+ employees and is bringing in a very solid $12 Million a year in revenues from over 100 corporate and government clients (at 40% growth over the past two years). The Italian company's core technology is the Cogito platform, a sophisticated system which searches, extracts and classifies unstructured information and makes it into structured data. Cogito (which translates to "I think" in Latin) is bringing semantic technologies to the mainstream commercial world, including online advertising.
The BBC Music Beta project is an ongoing effort by the BBC to build semantically linked and annotated web pages about artists and singers whose songs are played on BBC radio stations. Within these pages, collections of data are enhanced and interconnected with semantic metadata, letting music fans explore connections between artists that they may have not known existed.
Here at ReadWriteWeb, we find the Semantic Web fascinating. We write about it a lot. What is the semantic web? The way we explain it is that it's a paradigm advocating that the meaning of content on the web be made machine readable.
Why would you want to do that? Because once the "meaning" of text is automatically discernible, there's a whole new world of things we can do with content on the web. Far out things that full text search for the mere presence of keywords would never be able to accomplish. Who's working on the semantic web and how can you meet them? Read on.
Thomson Reuters is today launching the latest version of its Calais web service and open API, Calais 4.0. Calais is a toolkit of products that enables publishers to incorporate semantic functionality within their properties - enabling them to categorize content as people, places, companies, facts, events, and more. Calais 4.0 is perhaps the most significant version since the launch of Calais one year ago, because it enables publishers to connect to the Linked Data web standard that Sir Tim-Berners Lee and others in the Semantic Web community have been promoting over the past few years.
Noesis is a new semantic web search engine that helps scientists studying the environment access and retrieve the research data they need. Developed at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, the new engine has the potential to enable scientists and researchers everywhere to perform more productive and focused searches thanks to the semantic technology Noesis uses.
At the end of last year we presented our list of the top 10 Semantic Web Apps of 2008. ReadWriteWeb reader Zoltán Andrejkovics wrote in to us afterwards, suggesting that we do a post looking at what Semantic Web apps we'd like to see emerge in 2009. Zoltán gave us 5 apps he wants to see this year, and we also asked our Twitter friends for their views (you can follow ReadWriteWeb on Twitter here).
We at ReadWriteWeb are tracking the Semantic Web space closely - so far we've identified 20 products (see our first 10, then 10 more) that we're paying particular close attention to. But we know there is a lot of opportunity yet for commercializing the Semantic Web, so we encourage you to add your wish list in the comments.
In what appears to us to be a new addition to many Google search results pages, queries about birth dates, family connections and other information are now being responded to with explicitly semantic structured information. Who is Bill Clinton's wife? What's the capital city of Oregon? What is Britney Spears' mother's name? The answers to these and other factual questions are now displayed above natural search results in Google and the information is structured in the traditional subject-predicate-object format, or "triples," of semantic web parlance.
While the MD5 hack that puts e-commerce sites at risk by faking security certificates received most of the attention at the 25C3 conference in Berlin today, another interesting talk about using XMPP to ensure privacy and security on social networks by Jan Torben Heuer caught our eyes as well. Heuer demoed a social bookmarking service named Diki, which implements some of his ideas, though in the long run, the developers are planning to take this prototype and develop a full-blown social network with a focus on privacy and encryption around this.
