In 2008 we saw the Semantic Web gain traction, giving us plenty of choice when selecting the 10 best Semantic Web products of 2008.
This is the first in a series of posts we'll publish over December, listing our choices for the top web products of the year. Then at the end of December, we'll post a Top 100 list - which we'll be promoting over 2009 and opening up at some point for public voting. Without further ado, let's jump into the top 10 Semantic Web products of 2008.
Earlier this month we posted an update to 10 Semantic Web applications that we have been tracking for a year now. Some of those make this list, as well as some from our follow-up post 10 More Semantic Apps to Watch. We also have a couple of other products in this list, which for one reason or another didn't get mentioned in our watch-lists.
You may disagree with our selections, so do tell us in the comments what you think.
Note: the products listed below are in no particular order
In May this year Yahoo! launched an open developer platform for search called SearchMonkey. Yahoo hasn't had the happiest of years, but its willingness to innovate in search is to be commended. As we reported at the Web 2.0 Expo in April, SearchMonkey is a component of a major overhaul at Yahoo! across all of its properties to "rewire" for the social graph and data portability. SearchMonkey allows developers to build applications on top of Yahoo! search, including allowing site owners to share structured data with Yahoo!, using semantic markup (microformats, RDF), standardized XML feeds, APIs (OpenSearch or other web services), and page extraction.
We think this is the best use of Semantic Web by an Internet bigco this year. So for that reason SearchMonkey makes our top 10 list. Related: The Story of SearchMonkey.
Powerset (see our initial coverage here and here) is a natural language search engine. It's fair to say that Powerset has had a great 2008, having been acquired by Microsoft in July this year.
At the time of the acquisition, Powerset said that it needed a bigger partner to expand its product beyond its current state of only searching Wikipedia - something we had speculated about when the rumors of the acquisition first appeared. In its own statement, Microsoft stressed how useful Powerset's technology will be for improving Microsoft's own search products and to "take Search to the next level." In our analysis of the deal, we noted that it was a "bold play requiring exact execution" by Microsoft.
At the end of 2007, ClearForest had been recently acquired by Reuters and at that point it had a Web Service and a Firefox extension. What a change a year brings! ClearForest went on to release Calais, a toolkit of products that enable users to incorporate semantic functionality within their blog, content management system, website or application.
Since launching the Open Calais API early this year, over 6,000 developers have registered with it and the service is doing more than 1 million transactions a day. Version 3.0 was released earlier this month and version 4 is expected by January 09.
In November we wrote about the recent improvement in Dapper MashupAds, a product we first spotted over a year ago. The idea is that publishers can tell Dapper: this is the place on my web page where the title of a movie will appear, now serve up a banner ad that's related to whatever movie this page happens to be about. That could be movies, books, travel destinations - anything. We remarked that the UI for this has grown much more sophisticated in the past year.
The company believes that its new ad network will provide monetary incentive for publishers to have their websites marked up semantically. We think this has plenty of promise, so it makes our year-end list.
Hakia is a search engine focusing on natural
language processing methods to try and deliver 'meaningful' search results. Hakia attempts to
analyze the concept of a search query, in particular by doing sentence
analysis. Over the past year Hakia has been busy extending its reach - licensing its proprietary OntoSem technology to other companies in March and announcing a Semantic API in June. It was also one of the first companies to utilize Yahoo! BOSS, by integrating their semantic parsing with the Yahoo! search index.
We think Hakia has made good progress getting its technology into the hands of third parties and making use of Yahoo's broader index, so for that reason it's among our top 10 for the year.
Comments
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Good ongoing series - but is it not odd that Google does not seem to be well represented in this direction..... :-?
Wonder what strategies and directions they plan to take with this technology?
Posted by: AD Public Relations
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December 2, 2008 10:06 AM
Re: AD Public Relations
Google will just buy the one that pulls ahead.
But really I argue that the Semantic web is a enhancement not a feature. Meaning that it does not merit some whole startup hoopla to gain traction.
As an add-on it can just be integrated to already existing platforms and such more efficiently than numerous companies just jockeying to create small enhancements on already working models
Posted by: Neyma Jahansooz | December 2, 2008 10:23 AM
A nice set of companies and thanks for including UpTake. We've been big fans of the top-down approach as a way to get stuff going in Semantic Web and frankly we've stopped talking about our Semantic technology because people don't seem to care about it. But in fact it is a pretty important part of what we do--extracting meaning from over 20 mm opinions and reviews so we can rank hotels and other products in a way that makes them more searchable.
Our blind spot is figuring out what bottom-up tools will get adoption and when and how that might help us in the travel space.
Anyway, I know that Semantic Web is no longer in the limelight but I also know that it will happen and we'll be one of many companies that will use it to solve problems. Thanks Richard and crew.
Elliott (@elliottng)
UpTake Networks Inc.
Posted by: Elliott Ng
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December 2, 2008 10:57 AM
Nice list of products, but according to me SearchMonkey does not deserve to be in top. That place should be either by Powerset or Open Calais.
Posted by: Veetrag | December 2, 2008 12:00 PM
Great list, great apps. One key to the semantic web is API management. I believe Mashery (disclosure: they are a client) is helping to drive both Calais and Zemanta, as well as a number of great apps that didn't crack the Top 10. It's a tech that often goes un-noticed, but is vital to the success of web apps.
Posted by: Mike | December 2, 2008 12:10 PM
All of these are ad hoc services that massage existing data in their own unique and proprietary way. The constantly reiterated mantra of the Semnatic Web cognoscenti has been data ubiquity and flexibility from a personal perspective, which none of these applications deliver upon.
Semantic Shmantic - never delivered.
Posted by: Alan Wilensky | December 2, 2008 12:35 PM
5min, the how-to video site launched its new semantic content syndication platform for how-to videos today. I believe this may be the first video play to truly embrace semantic technology to distribute relevent content to relevant publisher site text.
Posted by: Wilson Cleveland | December 2, 2008 1:28 PM
Apologies, forgot to reference in my previous comment that 5min is a client of my agency. Want to maintain full-disclosure.
Posted by: Wilson Cleveland | December 2, 2008 1:30 PM
Richard, thank you for mentioning Faviki. Zemanta API is amazing - I believe it is yet to be discovered by other semantic startups, particularly due to its ability to find related DBpedia concepts for a given piece of text.
Posted by: Vuk Milicic | December 2, 2008 3:35 PM
Richard,
Thanks very much for including SearchMonkey. Your list demonstrates how much progress has been made in this space in the past year - and I'm sure 2009 will be even bigger.
Graham Mudd
SearchMonkey Team
Posted by: graham mudd
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December 2, 2008 3:58 PM
StumbleGenius just Stumbling on thru, StumbleUpon big thumbs up to you, hope to see you on more stumble trips soon. Merry seasons greetings.
Read you later or tweet me on Twitter @StumbleGenius ... tweet you soon ???
ps I
Posted by: StumbleGenius | December 2, 2008 4:06 PM
Richard,
thank you for mentioning Zemanta and our API. We'll have some more news soon!
And we'll just work twice as hard in 2009 and try to provide as good semantic service as possible!
If you or anyone else here has any comments/ideas/critique about where and how Zemanta can improve, we are very open to feedback!
Andraz Tori, CTO at Zemanta
Posted by: Andraz Tori | December 2, 2008 4:23 PM
Richard - This is a great list of semantic web companies and we're thrilled to be on it.
Nagaraju Bandaru, BooRah
Posted by: Nagaraju | December 2, 2008 5:03 PM
@Veetrag, the list isn't in any particular order. I probably shouldn't have used numbering, but wanted to also make it clear it's a top 10 list :-)
Posted by: Richard MacManus
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December 2, 2008 7:31 PM
You don't hear too much about the Semantic web. I was thinking it was dying a slow death but this list of products makes me think there is life in it yet.
Posted by: Michael McGimpsey | December 2, 2008 11:39 PM
Wow, a slap in the fact to Twine/Radar Networks.
When I saw the headline in my reader, I thought: "Well, they must be including just about every semweb app that has any legs whatsoever." But then to discover that Twine and Freebase (which has to be one of the dumbest product names) were not included stunned me. In fact, some of the products/services selected are tiny little operations with just a handful of people, hardly the size of Radar Networks. (Although RN is still a tiny company, it's a giant among the semweb players.)
Also, I would argue that those selected -- for the most part -- haven't gone through a rigorous beta as has Twine.
So, Twine really should be among the top 10, even if the UX/UI needs a lot of work (or a total rework).
Final point: It could even be argued that Twine has pretty much the same semweb power as Powerset, but that Powerset created a better UI/UX. However, THE CORE TECH OF A SEMWEB COMPANY IS SEMANTIC WEB TECHNOLOGY, NOT THE INTERFACE. This should be kept in mind when evaluating emerging technologies, i.e., a pretty face is far less important than a beefy, muscular body when an emerging technology is first coming to market.
Well, I wonder how RN and Metaweb are going to spin this?
Posted by: David Scott Lewis (Zytech Solar, a Going Green 100 Winner) | December 2, 2008 11:44 PM
Richard et. al.,
Thanks so much for including Calais in your list. We really appreciate your interest and hope to continue to earn it with a number of innovations in the works for 2009.
Thanks again from everyone on the Calais / ClearForest team.
Posted by: KDT
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December 2, 2008 11:53 PM
The list is great...But I think that there are some Open Source Semantic Standards, and I do not think that any of the Companies mentioned as well as Twine or Freebase use these "Standards"
I think that most of these companies see the Semantic Web as a chance land grab to push their Proprietary closed methods to become a semantic "Standard".
We will be launching an open source semantic products in the coming days. We believe that Semantic Systems should use the current and available Open Source standards. This will allow for an even playing field for users/content creators and vendors
Posted by: william | December 3, 2008 2:11 AM
Richard:
Thanks so much for including Calais in this list - it's great to be part of a group of such interesting and innovative tools.
The amount of learning we've experienced over the 10 months that Calais has been out has been amazing. I think that I and the whole Calais team ingested about four years of information in that period. We're taking what we've learned and the invaluable feedback of the whole Calais community to set our roadmap for 2009 - which will include some very cool stuff.
Regards,
Posted by: Tom Tague | December 3, 2008 6:43 AM
I am a bit surprised that Kosmix (www.kosmix.com) was not included in this list. The product besides organizing the web also semantically understands your query and shows related topics to it. For e.g. in the section "Related in the Kosmos" on the page http://www.kosmix.com/topic/George_Clooney, one can see that they semantically found out the list of movies George Clooney did. Isn't that semantic?
Posted by: abhishek | December 3, 2008 8:33 AM
Step by step and still a long way to go... Yes, it's a long process, but semantic web is already started even if it's not really in target with the purist vision of it. In fact, research regarding multiple tools and technologies involved in the Semantic Web have started long time before the vision of the semantic web was stated.
Again that list is a good representation of the actual world with maybe too much focus on the web app world. I understand that this is the RWW mandate, but not considering the B2B world regarding the semantic web could leads to misinformation as far as I'm concerned. For example, take a look at Nstein Technologies (cie I work for :-) but also to related text mining/analytics companies out there and you will see a vast range of mature products.
All
Posted by: All | December 3, 2008 10:01 AM
I have found an interesting review on
http://havemacwillblog.com/2008/12/03/what-is-a-semantic-search-capability-look-see/
Posted by: Yakov | December 3, 2008 10:07 AM
Thank you Richard for your Post!
It's great!!!
Posted by: Carlos Lagemann | December 3, 2008 10:15 AM
看看
Posted by: xia jianfeng
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December 13, 2008 2:36 AM
Dapper? Really? I think is a great initial idea, but turns into one of those ideas that is more work than without it.
Posted by: Rob | December 16, 2008 2:37 PM
I'd add BackType as a great semantic addition on the social media side and possibly a couple of Google products – Reader's Web Clips feature, which is the undiscovered semantic gem of Google Reader, and Friend Connect, although I've so far been rather underwhelmed by the latter.
Posted by: brainpicker | December 19, 2008 3:29 AM
How could you not include MyWikiBiz in this list?
That site is obviously on the rise, and it's bringing semantic web tags to "the common people" unlike any other site. Just look at how they're redefining how the Wikipedia Category could be executed.
Take a look at just the pages tagged with the California state code.
Over 800 users have contributed to their directory, but it's not Top 10?
Posted by: Gregory Kohs | December 19, 2008 11:34 PM
This was very useful. I used zemanta for my blog and the results are good. (http://www.bestinvestments4u.blogspot.com/)
Posted by: Ruchika | December 20, 2008 9:25 AM
I hope we make it into next years list...
Mike Darnell
"I tweet @headup"
Creative Marketing - http://Headup.com
The Semantic Browser add-on
Posted by: Mike Darnell | December 28, 2008 10:38 PM
Hopefully next year NileGuide (http://www.nileguide.com) will make the list!
Posted by: Josh Steinitz | December 30, 2008 9:38 AM