Semantic Web Patterns: A Guide to Semantic Technologies
In this article, we'll analyze the trends and technologies that power the Semantic Web. We'll identify patterns that are beginning to emerge, classify the different trends, and peak into what the future holds.
In a recent interview Tim Berners-Lee pointed out that the infrastructure to power the Semantic Web is already here. ReadWriteWeb's founder, Richard MacManus, even picked it to be the number one trend in 2008. And rightly so. Not only are the bits of infrastructure now in place, but we are also seeing startups and larger corporations working hard to deliver end user value on top of this sophisticated set of technologies.
The Semantic Web means many things to different people, because there are a lot of pieces to it. To some, the Semantic Web is the web of data, where information is represented in RDF and OWL. Some people replace RDF with Microformats. Others think that the Semantic Web is about web services, while for many it is about artificial intelligence - computer programs solving complex optimization problems that are out of our reach. And business people always redefine the problem in terms of end user value, saying that whatever it is, it needs to have simple and tangible applications for consumers and enterprises.
The disagreement is not accidental, because the technology and concepts are broad. Much is possible and much is to be imagined.
1. Bottom-Up and Top-Down
We have written a lot about the different approaches to the Semantic Web -
the classic bottom-up approach and the new top-down one. The bottom-up approach
is focused on annotating information in pages, using RDF, so that
it is machine readable. The top-down approach is focused on leveraging information
in existing web pages, as-is, to derive meaning automatically. Both approaches are
making good progress.
A big win for the bottom-up approach was recent announcement from Yahoo! that their search engine is going to support RDF and microformats. This is a win-win-win for publishers, for Yahoo!, and for customers - publishers now have an incentive to annotate information because Yahoo! Search will be taking advantage of it, and users will then see better, more precise results.
Another recent win for the bottom-up approach was the announcement of the Semantify web service from Dapper (previous coverage). This offering will enable publishers to add semantic annotations to existing web pages. The more tools like Semantify that pop up, the easier it will be for publishers to annotate pages. Automatic annotation tools combined with the incentive to annotate the pages is going to make the bottom-up approach more compelling.
But even if the tools and incentive exists, to make the bottom-up approach widespread is difficult. Today, the magic of Google is that it can understand information as is, without asking people to fully comply with W3C standards of SEO optimization techniques. Similarly, top-down semantic tools are focused on dealing with imperfections in existing information. Among them are the natural language processing tools that do entity extraction - such as the Calais and TextWise APIs that recognize people, companies, places, etc. in documents; vertical search engines, like ZoomInfo and Spock, which mine the web for people; technologies like Dapper and BlueOrganizer, which recognize objects in web pages; and Yahoo! Shortcuts, Snap and SmartLinks, which recognize objects in text and links.
[Disclosure: Alex Iskold is founder and CEO of AdaptiveBlue, which makes BlueOrganizer and SmartLinks.]
Top-down technologies are racing forward despite imperfect information. And, of course, they benefit from the bottom-up annotations as well. The more annotations there are, the more precise top-down technologies will get - because they will be able to take advantage of structured information as well.
2. Annotation Technologies: RDF, Microformats, and Meta Headers
Within the bottom-up approach to annotation of data, there are several
choices for annotation. They are not equally powerful, and in fact each approach is a tradeoff
between simplicity and completeness. The most comprehensive approach is
RDF - a powerful, graph-based language for declaring things, and attributes
and relationships between things. In a simplistic way, one can think of RDF
as the language that allows expressing truths like: Alex IS human (type expression),
Alex HAS a brain (attribute expression), and Alex IS the father of Alice, Lilly, and Sofia (relationship expression).
RDF is powerful, but because it is highly recursive, precise, and mathematically sound, it is also complex.
At present, most use of RDF is for interoperability. For example, the medical community uses RDF to describe genomic databases. Because the information is normalized, the databases that were previously silos can now be queried together and correlated. In general, in addition to semantic soundness, the major benefit of RDF is interoperability and standardization, particularly for enterprises, as we will discuss below.
Microformats offer a simpler approach by adding semantics to existing HTML documents using specific CSS styles. The metadata is compact and is embedded inside the actual HTML. Popular microformats are hCard, which describes personal and company contact information, hReview, which adds meta information to review pages, and hCalendar, which is used to describe events.
Microformats are gaining popularity because of their simplicity, but they are still quite limiting. There is no way to described type hierarchies, which the classic semantic community would say is critical. The other issue is that microformats are somewhat cryptic, because the focus is to keep the annotations to a minimum. This, in turn, brings up another question of whether embedding metadata into the view (HTML) is a good idea. The question is: what happens if the underlying data changes when someone makes a copy of the HTML document? Nevertheless, despite these issues, microformats are gaining popularity because they are simple. Microformats are currently used by Flickr, Eventful, and LinkedIn; and many other companies are looking to adopt microformats, particularly because of the recent Yahoo! announcement.
An even simpler approach is to put meta data into the meta headers. This approach has been around for a while and it is a shame that it has not been widely adopted. As an example, the New York Times recently launched extended annotations for its news pages. The benefit of this approach is that it works great for pages that are focused on a topic or a thing. For example, a news page can be described with a set of keywords, geo location, date, time, people, and categories. Another example would be for book pages. O'Reilly.com has been putting book information into the meta headers, describing the author, ISBN, and category of the book.
Despite the fact that all these approaches are different, they are also somewhat complimentary; and each of them is helpful. The more annotations there are in web pages, the more standards are implemented, and the more discoverable and powerful the information becomes.
3. Consumer and Enterprise
Yet another dimension of the conversation about the Semantic Web is the focus
on consumer and enterprise applications. In the consumer arena
we have been looking for a Killer App - something that delivers tangible and
simple consumer value. People simply do not care that a product is built on the
Semantic Web, all they are looking for is utility and usefulness.
Up until recently, the challenge has been that the Semantic Web is focused on rather academic issues - like annotating information to make it machine readable. The promise was that once the information is annotated and the web becomes one big giant RDF database, then exciting consumer applications will come. The skeptics, however, have been pointing out that first there needs to be a compelling use case.
Some consumer applications based on the Semantic Web: generic and vertical search, contextual shortcuts and previews, personal information management systems, semantic browsing tools. All of these applications are in their early days and have a long way to go before being truly compelling for the average web user. Still, even if these applications succeed, consumers will not be interested in knowing about the underlying technology - so there is really no marketing play for the Semantic Web in the consumer space.
Enterprises are a different story for a couple of reasons. First, enterprises are much more used to techno speak. To them utilizing semantic technologies translates into being intelligent and that, in turn, is good marketing. 'Our products are better and smarter because we use the Semantic Web' sounds like a good value proposition for the enterprise.
But even above the marketing speak, RDF solves a problem of data interoperability and standards. This "Tower of Babel" situation has been in existence since the early days of software. Forget semantics; just a standard protocol, a standard way to pass around information between two programs, is hugely valuable in the enterprise.
RDF offers a way to communicate using XML-based language, which on top of it has sound mathematical elements to enable semantics. This sounds great, and even the complexity of RDF is not going to stop enterprises from using it. However, there is another problem that might stop it - scalability. Unlike relational databases, which have been around for ages and have been optimized and tuned, XML-based databases are still not widespread. In general, the problem is in the scale and querying capabilities. Like object-oriented database technologies of the late nineties, XML-based databases hold a lot of promise, but we are yet to see them in action in a big way.
4. Semantic APIs
With the rise of Semantic Web applications, we are also seeing the rise
of Semantic APIs. In general, these web services take as an input unstructured information
and find entities and relationships. One way to think of these services is mini natural language
processing tools, which are only concerned with a subset of the language.
The first example is the Open Calais API from Reuters that we have covered in two articles here and here. This service accepts raw text and returns information about people, places, and companies found in the document. The output not only returns the list of found matches, but also specifies places in the document where the information is found. Behind Calais is a powerful natural language processing technology developed by Clear Forest (now owned by Reuters), which relies on algorithms and databases to extract entities out of text. According to Reuters, Calais is extensible, and it is just a matter of time before new entities will be added.
Another example is the SemanticHacker API from TextWise, which is offering a one million dollar prize for the best commercial semantic web application developed on top of it. This API classifies information in documents into categories called semantic signatures. Given a document, it outputs entities or topics that the document is about. It is kind of like Calais, but also delivers a topical hierarchy, where the actual objects are leafs.
Another semantic API is offered by Dapper - a web service which facilitates the extraction of structure from unstructured HTML pages. Dapper works by enabling users to define attributes of an object based on the bits of the page. For example, a book publisher might define where the information about author, isbn and number of pages is on a typical book page and the Dapper application would then create a recognizer for any page on the publisher site and enable access to it via REST API.
While this seems backwards from an engineering point of view, Dapper's technology is remarkably useful in the real world. In a typical scenario, for web sites that do not have clean APIs to access their information, even non-technical people can build an API in minutes with Dapper. This is a powerful way of quickly turning web sites into web services.
5. Search Technologies
Perhaps the first significant blow to the Semantic Web has been the inability thus far to improve search.
The premise that semantical understanding of pages leads to vastly better search
has yet to be validated. The two main contenders, Hakia and PowerSet, have made some progress, but not enough.
The problem is that Google's algorithm, which is based on statistical analysis, deals just fine with
semantic entities like people, cities, and companies.
When asked What is the capital of France? Google returns a good enough answer.
There is a growing realization that marginal improvement in search might not be enough to beat Google, and to declare search the killer app for the Semantic Web. Likely, understanding semantics is helpful but not sufficient to build a better search engine. A combination of semantics, innovative presentation, and memory of who the user is, will be necessary to power the next generation search experience.
Alternative approaches also attempt to overlay semantics on top of the search results. Even Google ventures into verticals by partitioning the results into different categories. The consumer can then decide which type of answer they are interested in.
Yet search is a game that is far from won and a lot of semantic companies are really trying to raise the bar. There may be another twist to the whole search play - contextual technologies, as well as semantic databases, could lead to qualitatively better results. And so we turn to these next.
6. Contextual Technologies
We are seeing an increasing number of contextual tools entering the consumer market.
Contextual navigation does not just improve search, but rather shortcuts it.
Applications like Snap or Yahoo! Shortcuts or SmartLinks "understand"
the objects inside text and links and bring relevant information right into the user's context.
The result is that the user does not need to search at all.
Thinking about this more deeply, one realizes that contextual tools leverage semantics in a much more interesting way. Instead of trying to parse what a user types into the search box, contextual technologies rely on analyzing the content. So the meaning is derived in a much more precise way - or rather, there is less guessing. The contextual tools then offer the users relevant choices, each of which leads to a correct result. This is fundamentally different from trying to pull the right results from a myriad of possible choices resulting from a web search.
We are also seeing an increasing number of contextual technologies make their way into the browser. Top-down semantic technologies need to work without publishers doing anything; and so to infer context, contextual technologies integrate into the browser. Firefox's recommended extensions page features a number of contextual browsing solutions - Interclue, ThumbStrips, Cooliris, and BlueOrganizer (from my own company).
The common theme among these tools is the recognition of information and the creation of specific micro contexts for the users to interact with that information.
7. Semantic Databases
Semantic databases are another breed of semantic applications focused on annotating
web information to be more structured. Twine, a product of Radar Networks and currently in private beta,
focuses on building a personal knowledge base. Twine works by absorbing unstructured content in various
forms and building a personal database of people, companies, things, locations, etc. The content is sent to Twine
via bookmarklet or via email or manually. The technology needs to evolve more, but
one can see how such databases can be useful once the kinks are worked out. One of the very powerful applications
that could be built on top of Twine, for example, is personalized search - a way to filter the results of any search engine based
on a particular individual.
It is worth noting that Radar Networks has spent a lot of time getting the infrastructure right. The underlying representation is RDF and is ready to be consumed by other semantic web services. But a big chunk of the core algorithms, the ones that are dealing with entity extraction, are being commoditized by Semantic Web APIs. Reuters offers this as an API call, for example, and so moving forward, Twine won't need to be concerned with how to do that.
Another big player in the semantic databases space is a company called Metaweb, which created Freebase. In its present form, Freebase is just a fancier and more structured version of Wikipedia - with RDF inside and less information in total. The overall goal of Freebase, however, is to build a Wikipedia equivalent of the world's information. Such a database would be enormously powerful because it could be queried exactly - much like relational databases. So once again the promise is to build much better search.
But the problem is, how can Freebase keep up with the world? Google indexes the Internet daily and grows together with the web. Freebase currently allows editing of information by individuals and has bootstrapped by taking in parts of Wikipedia and other databases, but in order to scale this approach, it needs to perfect the art of continuously taking in unstructured information from the world, parsing it, and updating its database.
The problem of keeping up with the world is common to all database approaches, which are effectively silos. In the case of Twine, there needs to be continuous influx of user data, and in the case of Freebase there needs to be influx of data from the web. These problems are far from trivial and need to be solved successfully in order for the databases to be useful.
Conclusion
With any new technology it is important to define and classify things. The Semantic Web is offering an exciting promise: improved information discoverability, automation of complex searches, and innovative web browsing. Yet the Semantic Web means different things to different people. Indeed, its definition in the enterprise and consumer spaces is different, and there are different means to a common end - top-down vs. bottom up and microformats vs. RDF. In addition to these patterns, we are observing the rise of semantic APIs and contextual browsing tools. All of these are in their early days, but hold a big promise to fundamentally change the way we interact with information on the web.
What do you think about Semantic Web Patterns? What trends are you seeing and which applications are you waiting for? And if you work with semantic technologies in the enterprise, please share your experiences with us in the comments below.
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Thanks. This is one of the most thorough semantic web posts I've seen...really appreciate the effort that must have gone into this.
This was a great post, Alex. I'll keep this one in my back pocket for awhile -- definitely a great overview. I learned a lot about the Semantic Web space (as I usually do from your posts on this topic).
"Microformats offer a simpler approach by adding semantics to existing HTML documents using specific CSS styles."
This is false; microformats do not use CSS styles. They use the class attribute (among other HTML semantics), which - as the name implies - provides classification for information. Visual presentation is only one of many applications of such classification, and is not at all related to the applications of microformats.
No discussion of Semantic technologies is complete without at least mentioning Openlink Software and its monster CEO, Kingsley Idehen. Enough said. He has assembled an international team of really talented engineers, and they have delivered a fully integrated solution that can only called, 'an ISP to carrier class Semantic Server architecture.
I can't do it justice, and seemingly, even Openlink is having a hard time getting the message out. I worked very briefly with them, and was astounded on so many levels. I am flabbergasted that they have not as yet been snapped up by the likes of Oracle or SAP. http://openlinksw.com
Im not a big fan of OWL / RDF, but then again, I'm not a tools vendor - for only tools which sufficiently abstract out the complexity of the triple store mess will get us to where we want to be.
It's a bandied about term, this ole Semantic thing - see what Kingsley and company have done with it, and you will get a glimpse of what kind of systems are needed to get the revolution underway.
Fantastic post Alex, thanks for putting such thorough entries. My organization has been slow in adopting web services which, in retrospect, is a good thing since now RDF will be a requirement. A 3 step guide to making your API RDF compliant would be oh so welcome ;)
What a well-written and thorough article. I've long been interested in the advances in the semantic web, and agree with McManus on in being the top trend in the web at the present time.
What I'm most interested in is seeing the tools that become available for web authors. Adoption will really take off once it becomes easier to publish compliant content, and it's this area that I'll be following the most.
Thanks for such an in-depth review of the current "State of the Semantic Union". A great read that I've passed on to my friends.
Great summary of current Semantic Technologies. I think we'll see a lot of powerful stuff come out of the juxtaposition of Contextual Tech. and Semantic DBs.
Another tool to add to the list is Orchestr8's AlchemyGrid ( grid.orch8.net ) -- it offers a web-based facility to "scrape" structured data from any webpage, and other unstructured content sources as well. The entire process is visual, top-down, and zero-code.
AlchemyGrid lets you provision your own REST/RSS/ATOM/JSON/etc APIs, get email/SMS/twitter/AOL IM alerts when websites update their content, and "enrich" scraped content with information gleaned from 3rd-party DBs and web services.
"Scrapes" can be shared, tagged, commented-on, turned into RSS feeds, and so on. Several thousand APIs have already been created for all sorts of sites on the web, giving a great "initial push" to those wanting top-down access to structured data already out there "in the wild".
Interesting Post. I get confused by a lot of these technologies but Microformats are really useful.
I have recently released a WordPress plugin that looks for hReview Microformats when a site is pinged so that better information is available on the opinion of the reviewing author.
I am hoping that this kind of use will increase in future for better connectedness between blogs.
Hey you have briefly explained and analyzed the trends and technologies that power the Semantic Web.nice information.....
Great post.
One of the questions I find most fascinating is how marketing will evolve to take advantage of the semantic web, whether it's in consumer or B2B plays. I think this is more than a linear extension of how marketers have been optimizing the web today, but something qualitatively different. I suggest that SEO + Semantic Web = SEO++ (after all, it is sort of an object-oriented paradigm shift).
Here are 7 possible missions for "semantic marketing":
1. Marketing becomes the champion of generating the underlying data.
2. Marketing views categorization, metadata, RDF graphs, relevant microformats, etc., as a new kind of market positioning and placement -- "semantic branding", if you will.
3. Marketing takes a much broader view of distribution and promotion of its semantic web data in search engines and vertical networks (SEO++), including the sponsorship or creation of new niche semantic networks.
4. Marketing comes up with new ways to incentivize the conversion of semantic web interactions in real business objectives.
5. Marketing will have a real challenge with tracking and attributing distributed data in the semantic web to measure its impact -- from multi-touch marketing to micro-touch marketing. Hard problem but entrepreneurial ingenuity will prevail.
6. Marketing will want to leverage other people's data in their own value-add mash-ups (interesting "joint venture" semantic data partnerships), as well as for internal-only apps focused on market research and competitive intelligence.
7. Marketing will need to be concerned with brand protection in the semantic web: quality control to watch for bad data, conflicting data, competitive misuse, etc.
If you're interested, http://www.chiefmartec.com/2008/03/marketing-in-th.html is the full post. Would love feedback from other marketers and semantic web afficionados.
Great post, RRW is definitely the cutting edge blog when it comes to semanticweb. Thanks for that.
Alex, thanks a lot for the post. This kind of posts keep me reading RWW every day (well, ok, and night also due to the time difference:)
The trends I'm seeing right now from the user's perspective are not that bright. I'm a bit tired of tagging the same info all the time in delicious, then in twine, bloglines, etc... On the one hand, yeah - helping to make better web, on the other - why can't the systems scan headers and offer some tags and ease my life? Why RSS feeds are not already bundled with microformats? Why powerset sucks at answering natural-language quires?
It seems that semantic web is just a colorful painless _future_ for an _end user_. Right now only context semantic applications work fine (btw Alex, are you going to offer non-firefox browser support? ).
For right now keep believing in semantic web and tag, and tag, and tag... for the best of everybody.
There is no such thing as "Guitar Hero" for the Semantic Web, there never will be. Reading the tone of this post and some of the comments makes me wonder if some of the ( super smart ) people who are the leaders in this space need to go be "rock stars" somewhere else.
Making the world's data more easily shared is a noble pursuit but far too geeky to ever yield any kind of "killer app" that will make someone famous.
Interested in what caused the idea that Microformats have anything to do with CSS? Until recently you couldn't even style rel=tag or XFN or rel=nofollow in IE, and XOXO is basically a formulation of how to use lists in (X)HTML...
Hi Alex,
Our approach at Imindi (An application built by a team of Phd computer and neuro scientists) is to take a "mind" approach to helping people to construct their own "mind maps" of connected thoughts and information on any subject. These Mind Maps are little semantic webs that work "As we think" and the "Thought Engine" (Semantic Graph) at the core of Imindi enable Like Minded people (Social Graph) to connect and combine the Thoughts, Information and even Create Knowledge. At the core, all the semantic linkages from every body`s public mind maps collape on themselves to form essentially one global mind map.
We agree with you that the named entity analysis functionality is going to be a commodity and indeed Imindi will be providing this functionality to our uses via an integration with an existing semantic repository.
However, the closest vision to what we have built was not that of the Semantic Web, but that of the Memex by Vanevver Bush - but as we build a layer of thought and meaning over the information on the web...I would suggest that we are also very much a Semantic App worth watching.
http://www.imindi.com/journeys/382-semantic-web/maps/3195155-semantic-web
I started to disagree with the suggestion in paragraph two of this post that the semantic web is the number one trend for 2008 – because I think tackling information overload is. But then it occurred to me that the two need not be in competition.
Perhaps semantic web technologies should look to the problem of information overload as they search for that so far elusive killer application. Don’t ask me how though, but perhaps a good place to start would be to filter and de-duplicate the information we consume and to do so better than any of the tools out there today. Imagine a feature in Google Reader that filters my feeds based on the semantics of items that I have starred and also removes or hides any duplicates.
At any rate, it is vital for the adoption and success of semantic technologies that they help ease the problem of information overload rather than compound it.
Incredible post, on a topic that really needed to be cleared out. Thanks R/WW.
Surely Google will settle the top-down vs. bottom-up debate for us. There's no way it's ignoring semantic/web3.0 - it's the information kingpin of the web. But there's no way, either, it's going to favour bottom-up, for three reasons (see here: http://tinyurl.com/2rvyhh)
Mainly, a bottom-up web would threaten Google's search monopoly, by making it easier for rivals to get into the semantic search game. Nobody is better placed to tackle the bigger tech challenge of giving webspiders and their search engines semantic abilities, than Google, hence top-down web allows it to cement its market position.
Google will settle this debate for us (http://tinyurl.com/2rvyhh), just you wait!
Alex,
You should have a pingback/trackback from a post I penned earlier today.
The Semantic Web is a Web endowed with Linked Data URIs (Object IDs or Entity IDs).
If I can reference your data from my data space via URIs, we end up with a Web that offers transparent access to the data behind the information in web pages.
It isn't really a complex value proposition. We are simply moving to a Web where perspectives aren't fixed. We all have the ability to contribute or consume analysis etc..
Discourse discovery and participation becomes a cost-effective endeavor.
Databases provide Views and Lookup capability over structured data.
The Semantic Web provides exactly the same without any database platform lock-in.
Unfortunately this lack of lock-in is often misunderstood as being incongruent with business models (vehicles for providing value to customers).
If you can just get your person entity a URI, it will all become a little clear re. value proposition. I say this because Widgets that don't expose URIs are simply Silos in another guise.
Silos can not deal with the imminent onslaught of "Information Overload" amongst others things like the warped "Attention Economy".
Kingsley Idehen
Though various movements such as Semantic Web may not be a panacea, they are stepping stones in bringing forth a more logical and meaningful groupings of information, which can have many benefits including improvement of Search.
Thanks Alex, for this thorough and informative article.
I'd say despite of being a great, revolutionary and highly useful concept, where Semantic web lacks is into posing immediate benefits to its implementors. The major factor into wide adaptability of Web 2.0 (or Social-Web) is it's "right-now" benefits to adapters.
But as you mentioned, now Yahoo! search is going to appreciate semantic so we are getting some incentives in place. Hopefully, we see such more incentives coming up along the way soon :)
Alex, a very interesting article that highlights some of the technologies available. It would be also interesting to learn how they plan to make revenue. Further it is interesting to understand the future of linking semantic content to an object of interest. Assuming you create the RDF graphs of a single web page which is embedded but what about the relation to the new information that arises from other web pages that have been semantically annotated? How to keep up with the dynamic part and link always new content to an existing one?
Hope to see also soon some progress in Europe for the new semantic technologies.
Hi Alex,
This is a very nice article, an exciting overview of what has been done and what can be done in the area. However, it is pity that you did not write much about latest NLP technologies that are often in the core of a semantic web services/apps. E.g. in Ontos we are developing a powerful NLP, which has already been implemented as a web service. Look at our Ontos Business portal, where the data coming from news articles is processed by an NLP and appears on the portal in a structured form.
I've also written a post in our Ontos blog about your article. Really nice information, thank you!
@Daniel
Yes, you're right to highlight the importance of links in the Semantic Web - something which is frequently overlooked but for which RDF is explicitly designed. You may be interested to have a look at the Linking Open Data project (link below) which is making great progress in this area.
http://esw.w3.org/topic/SweoIG/TaskForces/CommunityProjects/LinkingOpenData/
As for progress in Europe, it's all around you! European institutes are powerhouses of research and development in semantic technologies and the Semantic Web, and there are plenty of European companies (old and new) using these technologies already :)
Hi Alex,
thanks for the nice overview! It's a pity that you didn't write much about NLP, it seems to be often in the core of semantic-web apps/services. Not only ClearForest and Calais are developing NLP web-services, look e.g. at Ontos Business portal which is also based on a powerful NLP extracting named entities (persons, companies, etc.) and relations between them (employ, mention, found, etc.). There is also a 'try' mode where you can process your own text with our NLP. I'll be happy to get any feedback if you are interested.
Thank you again! I've posted a short review on your article in our NLP Ontos blog.
@Tom
Thanks Tom for the link which is interesting and of course your content on your web page. I have come across only a few companies so far using RDF/OWL or semantic technologies in real commercial situations. Do you know any examples in Switzerland?
One of the things I don't see associated with the Semantic web is a move to catalog and index everything. This would include all data, documents, photos, film, audio, video, etc. - including small business/enterprise and individual/personal data - wherever and whenever it originated (IP & privacy rights respected, of course).
Before I became aware of the Semantic Web, I jotted down a few notes about where I believed the Internet was (or could be) headed:
http://www.squidoo.com/unstructuredinformation
I have since added a few links related to the industry and emerging technologies.
Here’s my observation: except for commercial archives, in many ways the Internet is a reflection of data collected from the 1990's to present. In other words, perform a search for non-historical figures, small companies (that no longer do business) or local events from more than 15 or 20 years ago, and there’s not much information to be found. It seems to me that whatever the Semantic Web is or could be, it will be much richer and much more relevant when it captures everything that went before.
... what is totally missing here are semantic web services (not semantic databases' APIs, but a way of storing meta information about web services and accessing web services); have a look onto what the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) is doing
you have briefly explained technologies that power the Semantic Web. greatinformation.....
I have been following Alex Iskold for some time, and have recently come to know and respect Scott Brinker (comment #10) within the Semantic Marketing Google Group.
If we look back to an earlier post from Alex - "Top-Down: A New Approach to the Semantic Web". He says, "Here is what we are really looking forward to with the semantic web:
* Spend less time searching
* Spend less time looking at things that do not matter
* Spend less time explaining what we want to computers
A consumer focus and clear benefit for businesses needs to be there in order for the semantic web vision to be embraced by the marketplace."
So, by extension, another way to look at the mission for Semantic Marketing is to help people:
* Spend less time searching for products and services that are relevant!
* Spend less time looking at products or services that don't interest them, and more with those that do!
* Spend less time explaining what they want to websites that market products or services!
We had been unknowingly working toward that mission for more than a decade. It was borne out of the observation that relevance increases conversion. Within the last two years, we began experimenting with the detection of combinations of visitor attributes - that range from geographic location to language preference to operating system to search engine keywords to targeted websites visited. We now call those combinations "Semantic Personas". They represent specific target segments within your market. Last year, we received patent pending for our Semantic Marketing business method (called Semanticator). The results from our oldest implementation are stunning - a 41% increase in time on site, a corresponding 30% decrease in bounce rate and a 26% increase in conversion. All from making visitor experiences more meaningful.
So, if you buy into Alex's vision of the Semantic Web, and my extension of his concept to Semantic Marketing - we aren't waiting for it to happen - it has arrived! See for yourself!
Great article - I added added some notes and semantic markup to this article using our a.nnotate.com tool for discussing documents / web pages online. The idea is to start with plain text documents, let people highlight phrases using the browser, and attach sticky notes / tags, and invite other people to discuss the same copy of the page. The annotations/links are stored independently from the page (an idea which has been around since the start of the web, but not often implemented in practice). Collaborative annotation / discussion of documents offers an immediate benefit to people, and could be a way to get people hooked adding semantic markup without having to know that's what they're doing. There's a white paper describing some extensions of the interface for adding rdf-style connnections too.
With regards to contextual technologies, OpenURL is similar in concept to Yahoo Shortcuts and SmartLinks, only it is interoperable, distributable, and open source, as opposed to proprietary. It was created in the late 1990s.
"The OpenURL standard is designed to support mediated linking from information resources (sources) to library services (targets). A "link resolver", or "link-server", parses the elements of an OpenURL and provides links to appropriate services as identified by a library. A source is generally a bibliographic citation or bibliographic record used to generate an OpenURL. A target is a resource or service that helps satisfy user's information needs. Examples include full-text repositories; abstracting, indexing, and citation databases; online library catalogs; and other Web resources and services." [Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenURL]
In other words, contextual linking based on a user's location to allow them access to information.
See also:
OCLC: http://www.oclc.org/research/projects/openurl/default.htm
ExLibris (commercial version): http://www.exlibrisgroup.com/category/sfxopenurl