Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2008 - Page 2
TripIt
Tripit is an app that manages your travel planning. With TripIt, you forward incoming bookings to plans@tripit.com and the system manages the rest.
Over the past year TripIt has continued to iterate on its feature set - introducing LinkedIn integration, better mobile functionality, more social networking features, and other goodies. In short, it's user experience continues to rock!
BooRah
BooRah is a restaurant review site that we first reviewed earlier this year and has come on in leaps and bounds over 2008. BooRah uses semantic analysis and natural language processing to aggregate reviews from food blogs. Because of this, BooRah can recognize praise and criticism in these reviews and then rates restaurants accordingly. BooRah also gathers reviews from Citysearch, Tripadvisor and other large review sites.
BooRah also announced last month the availability of an API that will allow other web sites and businesses to offer online reviews and ratings from BooRah to their customers. The API will surface most of BooRah's data about a given restaurant, including ratings, menus, discounts, and coupons.
BlueOrganizer (AdaptiveBlue)
Disclosure: AdaptiveBlue's founder Alex Iskold is a feature writer at RWW.
AdaptiveBlue are makers of the Firefox plugin, BlueOrganizer. As we wrote in January this year, the basic idea behind BlueOrganizer is that it gives you added information about webpages you visit and offers useful links based on the subject matter.
Over the past year the company has been working on a new product, called Glue. Launched last month, Glue is a more social networking oriented version of BlueOrganizer - it connects you to your friends based around things like books, music, movies, stars, artists, stocks, wine, restaurants, and more. We think the company has diversified smartly in 2008, by integrating social networking and mobile functionality into its products.
Zemanta
Zemanta is a blogging tool which harnesses semantic technology to add relevant content to your posts. While it didn't make either of our 'Semantic Apps to Watch' lists in November, a number of commenters pointed it out as something they use. In September we covered a major upgrade to Zemanta's service, allowing users to specify the sources they want to see in the suggestions list that Zemanta provides. Users can now incorporate their own social networks, RSS feeds, and photos into their blog posts. As we noted, this makes Zemanta a lot more appealing to established bloggers who are in less need of suggestions and more in need of automation.
Zemanta's API is also being used by startups, including semantic bookmarking service Faviki - which we mentioned in our second Watch-list. So all up, we think Zemanta has done enough this year to be included in our top 10 list.
UpTake
Semantic search startup UpTake (formerly Kango) aims to make the process of booking travel online easier. In our review in May, we explained that UpTake is a vertical search engine that has assembled what it says is the largest database of US hotels and activities - over 400,000 of them - from more than 1,000 different travel sites. Using a top-down approach, UpTake looks at its database of over 20 million reviews, opinions, and descriptions of hotels and activities in the US and semantically extracts information about those destinations.
And now please let us know in the comments what you think of our selections. Do you think we've picked the best 10 Semantic Web products of 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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Apologies, forgot to reference in my previous comment that 5min is a client of my agency. Want to maintain full-disclosure.
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.
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
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
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
Richard - This is a great list of semantic web companies and we're thrilled to be on it.
Nagaraju Bandaru, BooRah
@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 :-)
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.
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?
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.
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
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,
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?
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
I have found an interesting review on
http://havemacwillblog.com/2008/12/03/what-is-a-semantic-search-capability-look-see/
Thank you Richard for your Post!
It's great!!!
看看
Dapper? Really? I think is a great initial idea, but turns into one of those ideas that is more work than without it.
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.
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?
This was very useful. I used zemanta for my blog and the results are good. (http://www.bestinvestments4u.blogspot.com/)
I hope we make it into next years list...
Mike Darnell
"I tweet @headup"
Creative Marketing - http://Headup.com
The Semantic Browser add-on
Hopefully next year NileGuide (http://www.nileguide.com) will make the list!