ReadWriteWeb

Wikipedia is an incredible monument to human creativity and collaboration, but as one era of innovation passes into another - semantic web advocates want to augment the huge human input into the web with machine learning. The semantically enriched common database Freebase announced today that it will soon reach the milestone of 4 million topics added to its collection. That's 60% more than English Wikipedia's 2,445,041 articles and almost half the size of Wikipedia's full 10 million articles in 250 different languages.

What is Freebase? It's a database of information that's organized by people and machines and is particularly well suited for machine reading. You're not a machine - so why should you care? Read on.

Zemanta is a an interesting European startup that is applying semantic technologies to blogging. Sarah Perez covered the company's launch in March. One can think of Zemanta as an auto-complete function for blogging. As you are typing up a new post, Zemanta's browser plugin fetches related content - images, articles, videos, links - and provides a simple and friendly UI for inserting the related content into your blog. We caught up with Andraz Tori, CTO and co-founder of Zemanta, at the SemTech conference at San Jose last week for an interview.

Freebase, the first product of semantic web company Metaweb, is an open, semantically marked up database of information that we called one of the "10 semantic apps to watch" last year. With $57.4 million in funding, a smart team, and a tech legend in Danny Hillis at the helm, Metaweb is considered to be one of the most serious players in the Semantic Web space. Yet the company's efforts to date have been met with skepticism. Particularly, people have asked how is Freebase different to Wikipedia? Jamie Taylor, the Minister of Information at Metaweb, spoke at the SemTech 2008 Conference that took place in San Jose last week in an effort to dispel some of that skepticism.

Faviki is a new social bookmarking tool that offers something that services like Ma.gnolia, del.icio.us, and Diigo do not - semantic tagging capabilities. What this means is that instead of having users haphazardly entering in tags to describe the links they save, Faviki will suggest tags to be used instead. However, unlike other services, Faviki's suggestions don't just come from a community of users and their tagging history, but from structured information extracted straight out of the Wikipedia database.

What sort of funding opportunities exist in the budding Semantic Web space? What are VCs looking for and how much are they will to invest? That was the topic of a panel at the SemTech 2008 Conference that just concluded in San Jose. The panel featured Stephen Hall from Vulcan Capital, Eghosa Omoigui from Intel Capital and Amanda Reed from Palomar Ventures. This post is based on notes from that panel.

How will the Semantic Web make the jump to the mainstream? That was the topic of a panel at the SemTech 2008 Conference that is going on right now in San Jose. The panel was moderated by Carla Thomson from Guidewire Group and featured Josh Dilworth from Porter Novelli, Tom Tague, who heads the Calais initiative at Reuters, and Mark Johnson, who is a product manager at Powerset. This post is based on notes from that panel.

Thomson Reuters' Calais, a semantic markup API that we first reviewed in February, has reached its 2.0 release. The latest version aims to fix one of the main issues with Calais -- that it was too focused on business. Because Calais has roots as Clearforest, the rules it applies while parsing text are biased toward the language of business, which meant that its utility was limited. Version 2.0 has added new semantic entity types in an effort to rectify that.

Tony Sukiennik believes the power of the people trumps the power of the algorithm when it comes to the development of semantic technology. His company, infoGenome, a startup that has been in stealth mode for about four and half years, wants to harness that power by making semantics easy via its innovative drag-and-drop functionality. The i360 software he's developed is essentially the "Mahalo of semantic apps," relying on human knowledge to add meaningful layers of metadata to the information we work with every day. With i360, you can add semantics to everything.

This month's Semantic Web Gang podcast, syndicated on ReadWriteTalk and featuring RWW's Alex Iskold, is up now. The main topic is Bret Taylor’s idea of a Wikipedia for Data, which RWW covered here. The gang (which btw is like a quieter and more polite version of the Gillmor Gang!) looks at the role that semantic technologies should play in connecting diverse pieces of data together within and between organisations. The discussion also explores the possibility of a disconnect between academic and commercial Semantic Web.

BooRah is a semantic and natural language processing aggregator of restaurant reviews. The service pulls in reviews from numerous review sites and a substantial list of restaurant review blogs, then analyzes the emotional tone of the reviews it finds. Good reviews ("Rahs") and bad reviews ("Boohs") are collected concerning food, service and ambience.

It's a small but interesting site and the basic premise here is something that could be expanded beyond restaurants alone, something the company says it intends to do. I like it a lot.