Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2009
2009 has seen a lot of Semantic Web and structured data activity. Much of it has been driven by Linked Data, a W3C project which gained momentum this year. According to Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, Linked Data is a sea change akin to the invention of the WWW itself. We've gone from a Web of documents to a Web of data.
The 10 products we've picked out for this end-of-year review are ones that have done interesting things with data. Connecting to other data, building new applications with data, sharing data, and more. These 10 products may not be the type of Semantic Web apps that the W3C envisaged in the 90s, but that no longer seems to matter. What's important is that the Web is becoming more meaningful - more semantic. See also our 2008 list.
Google Search Options and Rich Snippets
In May, Google announced two significant additions to its search product: Search Options and Rich Snippets. The two features notably extended Google's core search product and the 'rich snippets' part in particular was based around structured content.
Rich snippets extract and show useful information from web pages. Google is using structured data open standards such as microformats and RDFa to power the rich snippets feature. It is inviting publishers to mark up their HTML (webmasters can find more details here).
Feedly
Feedly describes itself as "magazine-like startpage." When it launched in August 2008, we labeled it just "an alternative interface for Google Reader." However with the launch of Feedly Mini, a mini bar that hovers at the bottom of the screen as you surf through blogs on the web, the service has become a much more inclusive blog reading companion.
Feedly Mini integrates Twitter, FriendFeed, Google Search, Mozilla's Ubiquity, and more. A number of our writers love this tool - Sarah Perez went so far as to call it "a must-have tool" for anyone who uses services like Twitter and FriendFeed.
Apture
Apture is a Javascript plug-in for publishers that adds contextual information to links, via pop-ups which display when users hover over or click on them.
In our February review, we came away impressed by Apture due to the amount of multimedia that can be packed into such a little pop-up. Also the end-user experience is sophisticated - readers on washingtonpost.com and other sites that use Apture can see rich, relevant, contextual content from the likes of Wikipedia, YouTube and Flickr without leaving the host site.
Zemanta
Zemanta is a real-time semantic analysis tool that plugs into your blogging software. As we explained in April, Zemanta offers bloggers relevant links, photos and other assets to include in their blog posts. Zemanta's API is also being used by startups. Over 2009, the company has continued to iterate and impress. For example in October Zemanta released a new engine and API.
Zemanta is open source and standards-based. It works well with the rest of the tech community and has some interesting tools for supporting non-profit organizations.
Note: We compared Zemanta to Apture in an August analysis post.
Open Calais 4.0
In January Thomson Reuters released their most significant update yet to the 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 went beyond metatagging and enabled publishers to integrate their content with Linked Data assets from Wikipedia, GeoNames, the Internet Movie Database (IMDB), Shopping.com and others. Calais 4.0 also let publishers share semantic metadata about their content with "content consumers" such as search engines, news aggregators, related stories recommendation services and more
Next page: Semantic Web apps 6-10
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AlchemyAPI is my fav. semantic tool. Best I've found that can do semantic processing on a variety of non-English content. The DBpedia / Freebase support is pretty awesome, too.
Lots of stuff for the semantic visualizations coming out of universities in the last year, too. The VUE project is a pretty cool app on that front
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I would also have mentioned iGlue on this list (http://www.iglue.com)
Current server beta is impressive, with a community editable database, and the client side annotation tool they call IceCube (there is a demo at the bottom of the front page.)
I contacted the company and was told that the community editable database and annotation tool (for text and images) will be released within the next two months to go along with the database beta now out.
Most of these do not appear to be Semantic Web products, i.e. they do not much if anything to do with the W3C Semantic Web project, its languages or protocols.
Semantic analysis -- i.e. entity extraction from text -- is not a Semantic Web application. Some of these things, e.g. Feedly, don't even appear to have that much claim to being "semantic", though I suppose, not having used it, there may be some RDF in there someplace, which I guess would qualify any app as "semantic" despite RDF's low level simplicity.
The word "semantic" by itself is pretty vapid and is almost meaningless unless used with some technical precision.
Final complaint with this article:
Open Calais is undoubtedly a fine service. I suppose you can say it's a Semantic Web product because it's semantic and it's on the web, though IMO its ability to generate RDF is really off to the side. But it's been the leading Semantic Web product for years now, without actually fulfilling any of the promise of the W3C project, or. I think, implementing anything Berners-Lee would really want from the Semantic Web.
So isn't it long past time for something else to take over that "leading semantic web" product mantle? It's a bit sad the project is over 10 years old and still has had so little impact on the Internet.
@Richard: It is great to see semantics as being viewed as larger space than just the W3C's narrow definition of Semantic Web!
Also more and more of 'end user' services are on the list every year which seems to be a good sign.
@anonymous: Zemanta API also generates RDF data about text - returning links to RDF endpoints of MusicBrainz, IMDB, DBpedia, Semantic Crunchbase and others. Developers use Zemanta's API to get from plain text, to rich Semantic Web identifiers and data.
Zemanta also might be one of largest embedders of RDFa information into blogs since Zemanta's blogging product automatically tags terms with http://commontag.org which is RDFa based.
However as I started, I think Richard's general approach of looking at wider semantic web (non-capital letters) is the right one. It doesn't matter what Tim Berners-Lee wants from semantic web albeit his ideas are shaping sw in many ways. What matters is when and where it delivers value.
Andraz Tori, CTO at Zemanta
Anon, did you read the intro?
"These 10 products may not be the type of Semantic Web apps that the W3C envisaged in the 90s, but that no longer seems to matter. What's important is that the Web is becoming more meaningful - more semantic."
(emphasis added)
I have a feeling that the 2010 top 10 Semantic Products will be a lot more interesting.
The work done on the the listed projects & the platforms that power them will no doublt spur a new generation of the web, it's going to be exciting.
All in, I'm just glad things have progressed enough to provide a 10 top list of such quality :)
congrats to all,
nathan
Richard, just because it's in your intro doesn't mean it's right. If you want to talk about adding meaning to the web, don't talk about the Semantic Web. Invent your own catchphrase or use some other existing identifier which is more appropriate.
You wrote "The 10 products we've picked out for this end-of-year review are ones that have done interesting things with data."
The data level is of course below the semantic level in the old linguistic/AI knowledge hierarchy which bequeathed the word "semantic" on the world of computer science, so the association of the word with this category of app is more or less inherently incorrect. See, for example, http://www.systems-thinking.org/dikw/dikw.htm for a soft explanation of the hierarchy. The semantic level is equivalent to the knowledge level. Next above that is pragmatics.
But I quite agree that your category -- online apps dealing with data -- is an interesting category, very worthy of attention -- but it's worthy of an appropriate nomenclature too!
Anon, those are fair points - but what does it really matter?? Tim Berners-Lee and the W3C are pushing Linked Data in a big way, as part of the larger Semantic Web movement, and many of the apps listed here use Linked Data.
As for "If you want to talk about adding meaning to the web, don't talk about the Semantic Web. Invent your own catchphrase or use some other existing identifier which is more appropriate."
How about 'Web 3.0'? ;-)
Anon, The word "semantic" is a perfectly fine word, and as long as Richard pays it well, it renders him exactly the service he demands from it.
> How about 'Web 3.0'? ;-)
Richard, you got me there :) Let's go back to using "semantic" instead.
I got back from the Web 3.0 conference last year and was talking to some Forrester analysts to ask their opinions, and their first questions were "What is web 3.0?" I couldn't answer....
There is also Web 4.0 ;)
Ok, let's keep it human. The hierarchy is
1.0 Static Web
2.0 Dynamic Web
3.0 Semantic Web (RDF, SPARQL, Linked Data, ontologies, annotations)
4.0 Cognitive Web (NLP, IE, AI, Machine learning, automatic)
Here is Nova Spivack's nice overview http://www.vimeo.com/1062481
IMO the semantic enterprise is much more tangible with greater problems to solve and needs to be addressed and it will interleave with the semantic web.
There are no leading Semantic Enterprise Products yet but stay tuned ;)
A Low-risk Path to the Open World, Semantic Enterprise http://bit.ly/5Yk4VU
One application not using Linked Data is TipTop Search. It offers a semantic solution extracting the best web results from real-time information publishing and social network sharing at http://feeltiptop.com.
Thanks Richard for including Apture's multimedia plugin in your review! We're excited about all the other semantic web applications this year and those to come in 2010. We'll be making even greater contributions to the pool of semantic media technologies over the next year that bring informative context to the reader. Our goals are also to help publishers leverage semantic media technology to solve their business needs by keeping readers on the page.
Also, though Apture is licensed by big publishers like the Washington Post, NYTimes, and Reuters per Richard's description, Apture is also free for bloggers who use WordPress, MovableType, Drupal, TypePad etc.
Feel free to check out our plugin used by thousands of bloggers at www.apture.com !
I think it is a bit pointless arguing about what the naming for the ecosystem should be. That's an academic debate.
The question is does "semantic web" or "Semantic Web" bring new value to the table, to whom and how much.
Personally I am a big fan of "smart assistants" and semantic web is their enabler, as is augmented reallity as a delivery vehicle.
Add machine learning and natural language processing and you can get done things like Zemanta which tries to be "Blogger's best friend".
bye
Andraz Tori, Zemanta
For a review to be meaningful, it should be mandatory for the writer to have reviewed all worthy products. Without a reference to TipTop as a top 10 semantic product of 2009, this article is not worth the screen space it is occupying.
Great article, interesting comments - captures the state of play of the semantic web in 2009 very nicely.
What about scientific search engines that explore the huge biomedical literature and are able to extract information with the latest semantics techniques? Have you ever heard of novoseek? (http://www.novoseek.com) It is able to analyze synonyms, homonyms and context to display only the relevant information to the user's query and offers a list of associated concepts organized by category. Check this example for breast cancer http://www.novoseek.com/SearchAction.action?corpus=MEDLINE&query=breast+cancer&baiji.search=Search
Great list, shows that semantic web and all good that comes with it is not dead
great tough to keep up with all the great tools and resources out there
These all web products are simply great. I have used most of them but i like Google search options and snippets,Apture,Freebase and Glue the most.I have fun using it.
None of these products allow the user to define their own point of view. They also don't permit context out of domain. www.alexlib.info permits the user to leverage past work on ontology and create of one's own point of view.
I think everyone has a valid point in above posts. Also, and I think this is comment is for Richard mainly, how come only the same apps are covered over and over again. I would like to see coverage of iGlue (mentioned it earlier.) Based on my due diligence of this application I think it beats any of the ones mentioned here. But I have not seen any meaningful blogging or editorials on it at all (Charles on Altsearchengines mentions it and was port of this 100 search engines in 100 minutes presentation but nothing else really.)
Why don't you guys cover it?
It takes time to understand the system, but it's worth it. And don't get me wrong. Don't want to be a cheerleader of this or anything but would like to see some coverage. Especially since Zemanta was founded in Slovenia and iGlue is in Hungary. Looks to me like there is some affinity for this kind of thinking there in the former soviet block. But I could be wrong.
http://www.iglue.com
great post, Apture can be taken as a good option when it comes to information richness of an article. Looking forward to using it in the future.
In robotics, Brooks' idea that “The world is its own best model” and that maintaining an internal model of the world is neither possible or necessary, has proven an extremely fertile approach.
Today I'm wondering if the same idea does not apply to the semantic WEB.
Let's apply this approach to TEA (term extraction analysis) for instance, a robot would be a web agent in charge of acting on a document (the world) which model would be all those external ontologies, reference corpus, and models we have representing language and domains.
Following on Brooks' idea, new web 2.0 applications are built today based on the sole analysis of the document without external sources. Red Panda contextual browser is one such example of software quickly analyzing web pages on-the-fly.
The question that comes to mind then seems to be the irreconcilable difference between the “heavy CPU”, “heavy Model” approach that tries to extract some abstract knowledge representation (and hopefully meaning) from within the document and the much more light-weight and apparently highly operational approach that consists in doing document self-contained analysis.
At the end, one would imagine that structuring web pages with semantic tags would make acting on those pages much easier. But a flurry of new applications shows us that in order to extract value from those documents you might not need to access this elusive meaning at all. For instance, it's of little help to name all the concepts in a web pages if the goal is to determine whether a given text is criticizing or promoting a given brand.
How could we help those two approaches to converge?
http://www.rdpnda.com
Well, if you like freebase, check out factual.com. It's like open data nirvana.
Can you guys make it so links open up in new windows, please? :)
Wondering why Twine didn't make the cut? I love that site - go here from there, actually :) http://Twine.com
What about Wolfram Alpha?
These all web products are simply great. I have used most of them but i like Google search options and snippets,Apture,Freebase and Glue the most.I have fun using it.
with beepl.com soon joining in.....
I am a huge fan of Zemanta, an avid user.
Data.gov is a big step in the right direction.
Great post!!!
Search Options and Rich Snippets notably extended Google's core search product and the 'rich snippets' part in particular was based around structured content. every Google change will decide other search engine development.
Apture is a Javascript plug-in for publishers that adds contextual information to links, via pop-ups which display when users hover over or click on them.
thank you numberone posted
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Current server beta is impressive, with a community editable database, and the client side annotation tool they call IceCube (there is a demo at the bottom of the front page.)
adds contextual information to links ? you
Current server beta is impressive, with a community editable database, and the client side annotation tool they call IceCube (there is a demo at the bottom of the front page.)