You can download the Executive Summary here. We got a look at the whole report and it is packed full of great data, including the two top 10 lists of Semantic Web opportunities detailed below.

Also in this post we're giving away 3 free tickets to Defrag for the best suggestions in the comments for 'web 3.0' apps. See below for more details.

Top-10 List -- Enterprise
1 Information sharing
2 Semantic search, discovery, & navigation
3 Semantic mashups and composite applications
4 Semantic infrastructure / middleware SSOA, SBPM, SWS, virtualization, policy-based computing
5 Semantic business intelligence
6 Semantic ERP applications CRM, PLM, SCM, HRM
7 Semantic governance, compliance, & risk
8 Semantic web sites, wikis, collaboration, interest networking, & collective knowledge systems
9 Semantic advertising, marketing, personalization, & customization
10 Intelligent systems knowledge-based research, design, engineering, simulation, planning, scheduling, optimization, & decision support.

Win a Ticket to Defrag

Totally unrelated to Project10X's report, but we just happen to have 3 tickets to the Defrag conference in Denver Nov 3-4 to give away. To win one, simply leave a comment in this post detailing what kind of 'Web 3.0' app you wish to see developed. You can use the above top 10 lists as inspiration, or wing it ;-)

The best 3 as chosen by our editors will win a full ticket to Defrag.

UPDATE: Thanks everyone for the great comments. The 3 winners of the Defrag passes are:

Scott Brinker
Jesse Wilkins
Edward Benson

It's an important conversation and a good introduction to what the semantic web is. Also notable is the way that Berners-Lee sees Semantics and Data Portability as very related. Some highlights are excerpted below.

In the interview with Miller, however, Berners-Lee emphasized that it's not just about web pages. He told Miller that that the core pieces are in place today for developers to build robust Semantic Web applications;

“I think… we’ve got all the pieces to be able to go ahead and do pretty much everything… [Y]ou should be able to implement a huge amount of the dream, we should be able to get huge benefits from interoperability using what we’ve got. So, people are realizing it’s time to just go do it.”

On the topic of challenges still faced, Berners-Lee said:

“There’s an awful lot of data out there. And I think, one of the huge misunderstandings about the Semantic Web is, ‘oh, the Semantic Web is going to involve us all going to our HTML pages and marking them up to put semantics in them.’ Now, there’s an important thread there, but to my mind, it’s actually a very minor part of it. Because I’m not going to hold my breath while other people put semantics in by hand… So, where is the data going to come from? It’s already there. It’s in databases…”

Other topics of the interview include whether leading social networks are likely to implement semantic web technologies, how semweb engagement benefits companies and what users can do to move the technology forward.

We've cover the Semantic Web extensively here at RWW. See below for a list of posts on the topic.

Download MP3 [60 mins, 55Mb]

• Alex Iskold of AdaptiveBlue & ReadWriteWeb fame
• Greg Boutin
• Mills Davis of Project 10X
• Tom Heath of Talis
• Daniel Lewis of OpenLink
• Thomas Tague of Reuters

The Semantic Web is a trend we cover regularly on ReadWriteWeb and so we're very excited to be syndicating this on ReadWriteTalk. You can subscribe to ReadWriteTalk in iTunes here.

On this month’s episode, the group debates the readiness of the semantic web. For more details you can visit the show’s notes.

For participating in the discussion, Scott you've won a $30 Amazon voucher - courtesy of our competition sponsors AdaptiveBlue and their Netflix Queue Widget.

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.

When asked if the Semantic Web is just a way to automate things that a human would do, Sir Tim replied:

"This is more like giving you a program which can do all the things which your MIS department could write programs to do but doesnít have time to. But it is still a program. Just as the World Wide Web is still a document."
(emphasis mine)

That's an important point - just as Amazon can be said to be more a virtual agent than a website nowadays, the Semantic Web is a dynamic program not a static document. The generation of the Web we're in now is almost a living one - it's about movement and application of information. If not quite living, certainly information on the Web is much more social than it was 5 or 10 years ago. It's being used by people to connect with each other on a grander scale than even Ted Nelson ever dreamed.

Sir Tim goes on to say:

"Bit by bit, link by link, the data becomes connected, interwoven. The exciting thing is serendipitous reuse of data: one person puts data up there for one thing, and another person uses it another way."

Again, it's the usage of information that is key to Sir Tim's vision of the Semantic Web.

The next bit that caught my eye is something that will make Marc Canter fall off his chair with joy. Sir Tim mentioned FOAF as an example of a Semantic Web application:

"If you want to play with the Semantic Web, you can make a friend-of-a-friend file. In a FOAF file [the data component of a personal home page, formatted in a standardized way], you can publish stuff about yourself, your organization, your publication, places, or photographs."

Sir Tim says that FOAF "shows the power of the reuse of information".

And to wrap up, take this quote:

"The Semantic Web is just the application of weblike design to data; it will be many more decades before we will be able to say we have really implemented the Web idea in the full, if ever we can."
(emphasis mine)

That's something my friends in the Web Design community will appreciate. Nowadays it's not just about designing a beautiful website, it's about designing for re-use of information. In a way, that's what people are already doing with RSS - designing with data.

For a news story, for example, SemanticProxy will identify politicians, cities, countries, etc. that are mentioned in the article. Once parsed, the service returns the semantic metadata of the page in three possible formats: RDF, MicroFormats, or standard HTML.

As the name implies, SemanticProxy acts as a proxy and aggressively caches all its data, which should make it easy for a developer to scale a project that relies on this service.

Catalyst

SemanticProxy is part of Reuters' attempt to jump-start the semantic web. As Tom Tague, the leader of the Calais initiative at Reuters, points out, SemanticProxy can hopefully act as a catalyst and get more developers to look at semantic data, which, in return, will give more developers a reason to publish this data themselves.

Disclosure: Calais is a RWW sponsor

"Kingsley, help, they are making our poor semanticshamntic web complicated again.

There should be a license required to write about the two big topics in semantic technologies:

1) The technology behind it - generally recognized as the greatest blunder the W3C has ever made; OWL and RDFS.

2) The effects and resulting applications that will emerge from these technologies, and the competing technologies that leap over the OWL/RDFS abortion. (Computational Linguistics, Machine learning).

If the author is a computer scientist actually working in the field, please accept my apologies, I'm nit here to tear down, but really, all of the tech that has been so promised is great for diddling, but we haven'st seen productivity delivered.

And, I have been installing semantic browsers, add-ons, etc., since 2004.

Personally, I believe that the delivery of functions of the semantic whatever, will have to be delivered as fully integrated tools and services.

The man on the street, including some savvy small business folks, are just getting up on web apps as a service, giving up the local server in favor of services, and just getting wrapped around blogs and such as a marketing channel.

Enough on Semantic Punditry - unless you would like to order my report on the semantic web for an introductory price of $895.00, you will need the semantic browser extension to read it, and will then be able to surf contextual links that are related to your email thread and porn chats."

Is this true? We sought a response from both Hakia and Microsoft-owned Powerset on this semantically charged question.

Hakia CEO Riza C. Berkan responded in the comments to the original article that "hakia is deploying Ontological Semantics (OntoSem)", which he described as "a network of concepts reflecting ontology." He went on to say that hakia covers "over [a] million words in English".

However Berkan noted that the size of a Semantic Map does not necessarily matter: "the sheer size of the collection of words or concepts does not represent, by any means, the capability of the system." Hakia's position is that "there is no silver bullet for a semantic solution that will succeed", as long as the system developed is scalable and imposes "minimum reliance on 'words'".

Semantopoly: Advance token to nearest Semantic Context

At this point we were still confused. Cognition uses the term "semantic map" and said it was necessary to have. One of the commenters on the original post agreed with that assumption. Yet Hakia's Riza Berkan didn't use the term "semantic map". So we asked Hakia in a follow-up email, does it or does it not have a semantic map? Dr. Christian Hempelmann, Hakia's Chief Scientific Officer, responded:

"The term sometimes comes up in the context of data integration, but "Semantic map" is not a term used in linguistics. I can only speculate that it is what is commonly called an ontology. To the degree that they let us on about it in the documentation on their website, Cognition operates with only 2 main relations, much like WordNet: hyperonymy/hyponymy (e.g. cat is-a feline is-a mammal; their "taxonomy") and synonymy (e.g., "buy" means almost the same as "purchase"; their "thesaurus"). Furthermore, this map is not independent of English, cannot grow into other languages. hakia, on the other hand, has an ontology with many more relations, effectively raising our "semantic map" to the size of a higher power, and can and is already growing into other languages."

We also tried to get a comment from Powerset, but as of writing we haven't received it.

So, are we all clearer now on what is a Semantic Map, is it needed, and does size matter? Er, it depends. If you think you know the answers, tell us in the comments please!

A free 27-page summary of Project10X’s Semantic Wave 2008 Report has been made available to ReadWriteWeb readers.

The report defines Web 3.0 as "about representing meanings, connecting knowledge, and putting these to work in ways that make our experience of internet more relevant, useful, and enjoyable." In other words, it's the Semantic Web. I'm not a big fan of the Web 3.0 moniker, but I do agree that we've entered an era where Semantic technologies will enhance and extend the current Social Web era. We've written a lot about this on ReadWriteWeb - check out Alex Iskold's Semantic Web: What Is The Killer App? for a recent example.

The report also defines a "Web 4.0", as follows: "Web 4.0 will come later. It is about connecting intelligences in a ubiquitous Web where both people and things reason and communicate together." The following diagram is a good overview of the concepts tying these Web versions together:

Note: I think the number in the top left is supposed to be a 3.

The report correctly points out that the new era of Semantic Apps isn't restricted to traditional W3C technologies. It states that "as a platform, Web 3.0 will embrace all semantic technologies and open standards that can be applied on top of the current Web. It is not restricted just to current Semantic Web standards."

There's some useful discussion on the type of products we can expect in this Semantic Web. For example, on web browsers: "Web 3.0 browsers will understand semantics of data, will broker information, and automatically interpret metadata." We've discussed before on this blog how Firefox 3 will act as an information broker, through the use of microformats and other technologies.

The report also outlines some intriguing future trends, for example on identity: "The trend is towards semantic avatars that enable individuals to manage and control their personal information, where ever it is across the net."

Another interesting trend is "collective knowledge systems", where users "collaborate to add content, semantics, models, and behaviors, and where systems learn and get better with use." Twine and Freebase are two apps that spring to mind here. See ReadWriteWeb's 10 Semantic Apps to Watch for more on this.

Check out the summary report for more, it's an excellent primer on these topics. Thanks to Mills Davis, founder and managing director of Project10X, for forwarding it to us. The full report features 150 case studies in 14 industry sectors, so this is a comprehensive study of the emerging Semantic Web.

If you'd like to check out Quintura's private beta, click here. Read on for some background on the semantic technology powering Quintura...

Theoretically this means that search results are based on context, rather than on how many people linked to it - as Google's PageRank essentially is. There is a lot of search innovation happening outside of Google, but semantic search is seen as The Holy Grail solution in some quarters. I still find Google's super-fast search to be more than adequate for my daily search needs, but as we move into this new Web era of Semantic Apps and open data, it's good to see new types of search emerging.

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.

Based on those lists, and reader suggestions in comments of other companies that should be watched, we present to you a list of 50+ Twitter users who work at Semantic Web companies. If you find this sector as interesting as we do, you might want to add some of these people to your microblogging community. You can click through the arrows in the iframe below to scroll through all the accounts and add the people listed. RSS readers who'd like to see the list should click through to the full post.

A handful of these are company accounts, but most are accounts from individual employees. Want to suggest anyone we missed? (We know there are lots we've missed!) Let us know in comments. You can also meet the RWW crew on Twitter.

If this iFrame is driving you batty, see also this old list of links to all the accounts displayed below.