Tim Berners-Lee - ReadWriteWeb http://www.readwriteweb.com/feeds/tag/Tim Berners-Lee en Copyright 2009 Richard MacManus readwriteweb@gmail.com Sun, 22 Nov 2009 19:36:29 -0800 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/?v=4.23-en http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Tim Berners-Lee in Africa: Web Foundation Announces 2 New Projects Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the Web, has embarked on a trip through Africa on behalf of the non-profit Web Foundation - which today announced two new projects.

The Web Foundation exists to bridge the 'digital divide' in Internet usage. Only about 25% of the world population uses the Web today, however more than 70% of people have access to mobile or fixed communication devices capable of displaying Web content. According to the W3C, "the gap in Web usage is partly attributable to the lack of accessible or relatable content, and the lack of available training on how to use the Web to its full potential."

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]]> On his African trip, Berners-Lee will visit Kenya and Uganda. There he will meet with government leaders, development workers and educators to help support local Web initiatives - such as improving local health and education.

The Web Foundation was founded in 2008 by Tim Berners-Lee, with the aim of studying the Web and expanding access to the billions of people worldwide who aren't currently online. Today, the Web Foundation launched a fundraising campaign and announced two partnerships.

Farm land, Ghana, near Adwaso

On the former, Web Foundation CEO Steve Bratt hopes to raise $10-20 million per year, much of which will be put towards programs that train people to use the Web.

One of the partnerships is with the University Amsterdam in the Netherlands, which aims to expedite "re-greening" initiatives throughout the African continent. The other partnership is with the CDI (Center for Digital Inclusion), a social enterprise based in Brazil dedicated to educating disadvantaged youth about information technologies. The Web Foundation and CDI plan to develop training programs to teach young people how to create accessible Web content.

It's interesting to note that many of the Web Foundation initiatives have a big Mobile Web component. In the CDI partnership, Web-based applications are being created that will be "mobile ready." Accessibility is also a key aspect of these projects. The CDI web apps will integrate voice and graphical elements.

In a previous trip to Africa in September, Tim Berners-Lee visited Ghana to meet with officials and educators. He's currently at the 2009 Internet Governance Forum in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt - where he made today's announcements. Starting next week, Berners-Lee will travel to Kenya and Uganda.

Below is a video of Berners-Lee in Ghana, courtesy of BBC's Digital Revolution program, talking with a Ghanaian about why he values the Web. You can see more of these videos here.

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http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/tim_berners-lee_in_africa.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/tim_berners-lee_in_africa.php International Mon, 16 Nov 2009 01:48:24 -0800 Richard MacManus
Celebrate Unsung Heroes: Nominate an EFF Pioneer eff_pioneers_jul09.jpgThe Electronic Frontiers Foundation is calling for nominations for their EFF 2009 Pioneer Awards. Nominees are celebrated for their technical, social, economic, or cultural contribution to the "health, growth, accessibility, or freedom of computer-based communications." Past recipients of the award have included World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, Linux creator Linus Torvalds and Mozilla Foundation Chairman Mitchell Baker.

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]]> Berners-Lee, Torvalds and Baker's have redefined communication for millions and the three are obvious candidates to receive the EFF Pioneer Award; however, it's perhaps the unlikely heroes that make this award so interesting.

For example, former AT&T technician Mark Klein received an EFF Pioneer Award for blowing the whistle on the government's illegal phone wiretapping and surveillance program. Klein leaked news of AT&T employing splitters to send duplicates of fiber optic signals to a security-restricted company room controlled by the US National Security Agency at San Francisco's Folsom Street facilities. Klein's testimony is the proof that the phone company gave the US government access to private phone calls, emails and text messages. Despite the fact that those surveyed had never been connected to terrorist actions. The EFF continues to celebrate Klein's actions in it's work to end NSA domestic spy programs.

While the EFF has given its Pioneer Award to a number of CEOs and technologists, it's clear to see that Klein's testimony has had a major impact on the fate of the American people. If you'd like to nominate your own hero, check out the EFF's blog.

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http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/celebrate_unsung_heroes_nominate_an_eff_pioneer.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/celebrate_unsung_heroes_nominate_an_eff_pioneer.php Events Thu, 16 Jul 2009 02:00:00 -0800 Dana Oshiro
ReadWriteWeb Interview With Tim Berners-Lee, Part 2: Search Engines, User Interfaces for Data, Wolfram Alpha, And More... In part 2 of my one-on-one interview with Tim Berners-Lee, we explore a variety of topics relating to Linked Data and the Semantic Web. If you missed it, in Part 1 of the interview we covered the emergence of Linked Data and how it is being used now even by governments.

In Part 2 we discuss: how previously reticent search engines like Google and Yahoo have begun to participate in the Semantic Web in 2009, user interfaces for browsing and using data, what Tim Berners-Lee thinks of new computational engine Wolfram Alpha, how e-commerce vendors are moving into the Linked Data world, and finally how the Internet of Things intersects with the Semantic Web.

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]]> Semantic Web and Search Engines Like Google, Yahoo

RWW: You've been talking about the Semantic Web for many years now. Generally the view is that Semantic Web is great in theory, but we're still not seeing a large number of commercial web apps that use RDF (we've seen a number of scientific or academic ones). However we have begun to see some traction with RDFa (embedding RDF metadata into XHTML Web content), for example Google's Rich Snippets and Yahoo's SearchMonkey. Has the takeup of RDFa taken you by surprise?

TBL: Not really, but the takeup by the search engines is interesting. In a way I was happy to see that, it was a milestone for those things to come out of the search engines. The search engines had typically not been keen on the Semantic Web - maybe you could argue that their business is making order out of chaos, and they're actually happy with the chaos. And if you provide them with the order, they don't immediately see the use of it.

"The search engines have not been keen on the Semantic Web [...] their business is making order out of chaos, and they're actually happy with the chaos."

Also I think there was misunderstanding in the search engine industry that the Semantic Web meant metadata, and metadata meant keywords, and keywords don't work because people lie. Because traditionally in information retrieval systems, keywords haven't proven up to the task of finding stuff on the Web. One of the reasons is that people lie, the other is that they can't be bothered to enter keywords. So keywords have gotten a bad reputation, then metadata in general was tarred with this 'keywords don't work' brush. Because a lot of Semantic Web data included metadata, then people thought that with Semantic Web data -- again, that people will lie and won't have the time to produce it.


Google rich snippets example; image credit: Matt Cutts

Now I think there's a realization that when you're putting data online, that people are motivated NOT to lie. For example when your band is going to produce its next album, or when your band is going to play next downtown, you're motivated to put that information up there on the Semantic Web. There's an awful lot of cases when actually data is really important to people; and it's on the web anyway. So I think it's great that some of the search engine companies are starting to read RDFa.

Does this mean that they [search engines] will start to absorb the whole RDF data model? If they do, then they will be able to start pulling all of the linked data cloud in.

"The web of linked data and the web of documents actually connect in both directions, with links."

Will they know what to do with it? Because when it's data in a very organized form, I think some people have been misunderstanding the Semantic Web as being something that tries to make a better search engine - i.e. when you type something into a little box. But of course the great thing about the Semantic Web is that you can query it, you can ask a complicated query of the Semantic Web, like a SQL query (we call it a SPARQL query), and that's such a different thing to be able to do. It really doesn't compare to a search engine.

You've got search for text phrases on one side (which is a useful tool) and querying of the data on the other. I think that those things will connect together a lot.

So I think people will search using a search text engine, and find a webpage. On the front of the webpage they'll find a link to some data, then they'll browse with a data browser, then they'll find a pattern which is really interesting, then they'll make their data system go and find all the things which are like that pattern (which is actually doing a query, but they'll not realize it), then they'll be in data mode with tables and doing statistical analysis, and in that statistical analysis they'll find an interesting object which has a home page, and they'll click on that, and go to a homepage and be back on the Web again.

So the web of linked data and the web of documents actually connect in both directions, with links.

User Interfaces for Semantic Content

RWW: At the recent SemTech conference, Tom Tague of Thomson Reuters' Calais project suggested that user interfaces for semantic content are key in getting more take-up. With that in mind, I wonder if you've seen some great interfaces or designs for semantic applications in recent months - if so which ones and why did they impress you?

TBL: I think that whole area is very exciting at the moment. The only piece of hacking I've done over the past few years has been on a thing called the Tabulator [a data browser and editor], which is addressing exactly that. Partly because I wanted to be able to look at this data. And now there are lots of different ways that people need to be able to look at data. You need to be able to browse through it piece by piece, exploring the world of data. You need to be able to look for patterns of particular things that have happened. Because this is data, we need to be able to use all of the power that traditionally we've used for data. When I've pulled in my chosen data set, using a query, I want to be able to do [things like] maps, graphs, analysis, and statistical stuff.


W3C Tabulator, a data browser/editor; Image credit: wiwiss.fu-berlin.de

So when you talk about user interfaces for this, it's really very very broad. Yes I think it's important. There's also the distinction we can make between the generic interfaces and the specific interfaces.

There will always be specific interfaces; for example if you're looking at calendar data, there's nothing else like a calendar that understands weeks, months and years. If you're looking at a genome, it's good to have a genetics-specific user interface.

"I want to be able to do maps, graphs, analysis, and statistical stuff."

However you also need to be able to connect that data, through generic interfaces. So if my genome data was taken during an experiment which happened over a particular period, I need to be able to look at that in the calendar - so I can connect the genetics to the calendar.

So one of the things I hope to see is domain-specific things for various different domains, and the generic user interfaces. And hopefully the generic interfaces will be able to tie together all of the domains.

Next Page: Wolfram Alpha; e-Commerce and Linked Data

Wolfram Alpha and Natural Language Interfaces

RWW: An interesting new product was launched this year called Wolfram|Alpha, described as a 'computational knowledge engine.' It's kind of a mix between Google (search) and Wikipedia (knowledge), and its key attribute is that enables you to compute something. The founders think that 'computing' things on the fly is something we're going to see a lot of in future. What's your take on Wolfram|Alpha?

TBL: There are two parts to that sort of technology. One of them is a sort of stilted natural language interface. We've seen those sort of natural language queries for years. Boris Katz [from W3C] created a system called START [a software system designed to answer questions that are posed to it in natural language]. I think with the Semantic Web out there, those sorts of interfaces are going to become important, very valuable, because people will be able to ask more complicated things. The search engine has traditionally been limited to just a phrase, but some of the search engines are now starting to realize that if they put data behind them and have computation engines, then you can ask things like 'what's this many pounds in dollars?' and so on. So yes, those interfaces will become important.

"Those sorts of interfaces will become important [...] people will be able to ask more complicated things."

Conversational interfaces have always been a really interesting avenue. We've had voice browser work in W3C, that has been an interesting alternative avenue. It's possible that as compute power goes up, we'll see a prolifieration of machines capable of doing voice. It'll move from the mainframe to being able to run on a laptop or your phone. As that happens, we'll get actual voice recognition and pattern natural language at the front end. That will perhaps be an important part of the Semantic Web.

We talked before about what a great challenge the Semantic Web is going to be from a user interface point of view. Conversational interfaces are going to be part of [solving] that. Of course it's also going to be really valuable to have compositional interfaces - for the visually impaired and so on.

Wolfram|Alpha is also a large curated database of data sets. Obviously I'm interested in the big data set which is out there, which is Linked Data. This everybody can connect to. I don't really know a lot about the internals of Wolfram|Alpha's data set. I don't know whether they're likely to put any of it out on the web as Linked Data - that might be an interesting addition. I imagine that quite a lot of it may have come from the web of Linked Data.

e-Commerce and Linked Data

RWW: There have been reports recently that both Google and Yahoo will be supporting the Good Relations ontology and linked data for e-commerce. Companies such as Best Buy are already putting out product information in RDFa. What would be your advice to e-commerce vendors right now, to help them transition to this world of structured data on the Web. The same question could be asked across many verticals, but e-commerce seems like one area which has some momentum right now. Would you advise them just to put out their data as Linked Data?

TBL: Yup! Certainly this year is the year to do it. I've been advising governments to do it and when you look at an enterprise, you find that a lot of the issues are the same. But when you put your data from government or enterprise out there, make sure you don't disturb existing ecosystems. Don't threaten those systems, because you've spent years building them up.

Maybe there's an analogy with when the Web first started and the first bookshops went online. They were more or less a flyer, saying 'hey we have a great bookshop at 23 Main St, come on down!'. Let's say that a person named Joe owned one of these early online bookshops. If somebody had suggested to Joe that he should put his catalog online, Joe would've felt that that was very proprietary data. And he'd be worried that other bookshops would see where he was weak, so they'd be able to advertise themselves as filling that niche he's weak in.

"When you put your data out there, make sure you don't disturb existing ecosystems."

But when his competitors Fred and Albert put their catalogs online, then Joe can check which books people are browsing at Fred and Albert's websites. So Joe would [finally] be pursuaded to put his book catalog up online. But he doesn't put up the prices... until Albert and/or Fred does. And even if catalog and pricing is up there, nobody puts their stock levels online. And there was a period of time when nobody [i.e. online booksellers] had their stock levels up. But people got fed up with ordering stuff that wasn't in stock. So the first book shop to actually tell you about stock levels suddenly was then unbelievably attractive to its customers.

So there's this syndrome of progressive competitive disclosure. This happens when people realize that if you're going to do business with somebody, if you're going to have your partners up and down the supply chain, really it's useful to check the data web - and life goes much more quickly and open.

Best Buy may be what starts the ball rolling [among e-commerce vendors]. Now if I want to look out for what [products are] available, I can write a program to see what there is. If somebody wants to compete with Best Buy, to my program they'll be invisible unless they can get their data up in RDF. Doesn't matter whether they use RDFa or RDF XML, as long as it maps in a standard fashion to the RDF model, then they will be visible.

Next Page: Internet of Things; Conclusion

The Internet of Things

RWW: I'm fascinated by how the Internet is becoming more and more integrated into the real world. For example the Internet of Things, where everyday objects become Internet connected via sensors. Have you been following this trend closely too, and if so what impact do you think this will have on the Web in say 5 years time?

TBL: It connects very much with Semantic Web [and] with linked data. With Linked Data you've got the ability to give a thing a URI. So I can give a URI to my phone, and I can say that's my phone in Linked Data. And also the company that made it can give a URI to the model of the phone. They can also put online all the specs of the phone, and then I can make a link to say that my phone is an example of that product. So now any system which is dealing with me and has access to that data will be able to figure out the sorts of things I can do with my phone, which actually is really valuable. Especially if the phone breaks.

"The Semantic Web is a web of things, conceptually. Tying an actual thing down to a part of the web is the last mile."

The Semantic Web has already given URIs to things, and to types of things. When the things themselves have an RFID chip in them, then I think it's a very exciting world. One can take that RFID chip, go to the Internet and find out the data about the thing. Whether we'll be able to do that, whether the manufacturers will be open enough to allow me to turn data about the identifier of the thing into data about the thing, is yet to be seen. But it's a very exciting idea.


Pachube, an example of the Internet of Things (see ReadWriteWeb profile)

Similarly, I'd like to be able to scan a barcode and get back nutritional information about what's in - for example - a can of food. But we don't have that yet. To get that sort of thing, which is very powerful, we need to build look-up systems, which allow you to translate an RFID code or a barcode into an HTTP address.

The Semantic Web is a web of things, conceptually. Tying an actual thing down to a part of the web is the last link - the last mile. Give the thing a notion of its own identity in the web.

Conclusion

RWW: The over-riding message in both Part 1 and 2 of our interview with Tim Berners-Lee, is for companies and organizations to make their data available online. Preferably as Linked Data, which uses a subset of Semantic Web technologies. But Berners-Lee noted, in Part 1 of our interview, that he'd even be happy with the data in CSV (comma separated values) format.

It's clear that we've seen a lot of progress in linked data already in 2009. In upcoming posts on ReadWriteWeb, we'll continue to track this trend and explain how organizations can contribute their data.

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http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/readwriteweb_interview_with_tim_berners-lee_part_2.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/readwriteweb_interview_with_tim_berners-lee_part_2.php Interviews Thu, 09 Jul 2009 06:00:00 -0800 Richard MacManus
ReadWriteWeb Interview With Tim Berners-Lee, Part 1: Linked Data During my recent trip to Boston, I had the opportunity to visit MIT. At the end of a long day of meetings with various MIT tech masterminds, I made my way to the funny shaped building (see photo right-below) where the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and its director Tim Berners-Lee work. Berners-Lee is of course the man who invented the World Wide Web 20 years ago.

This was my first meeting with the Web's creator, whose work and philosophy was a direct inspiration for me when I launched ReadWriteWeb back in 2003.1

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]]> After shaking hands, I told Tim Berners-Lee that this blog's name was in part inspired by the first browser, which he developed, called "WorldWideWeb". That was a read/write browser; meaning you could not only browse and read content, but create and edit content too. It was a shame then when Mosaic, a read-only browser, became the first mainstream web browser in the mid-90s. It wasn't until the rise of Web 2.0 that the read/write philosophy gained widespread acceptance.2 On that note, we launched into the interview...

Note: the interview will be published in two parts, with Part 1 today on the topic of Linked Data. Part 2 will explore other topics and will run tomorrow.

UPDATE: Part 2 of this interview is now available.

How Linked Data Relates to The Semantic Web

RWW: Earlier this year you gave an inspiring talk at TED about Linked Data. You described Linked Data as a sea change akin to the invention of the WWW itself - i.e. we've gone from a Web of documents to a Web of data. Can you please explain though how Linked Data relates to the Semantic Web, is it a subset of it?

TBL: They fit in completely, in that the linked data actually uses a small slice of all the various technologies that people have put together and standardized for the Semantic Web.

Linked Data uses a small slice of the technologies that make up the Semantic Web.

We started off with the Semantic Web roadmap, which had lots of languages that we wanted to create. [However] the community as a whole got a bit distracted from the idea that actually the most important piece is the interoperability of the data. The fact that things are identified with URIs is the key thing.

The Semantic Web and Linked Data connect because when we've got this web of linked data, there are already lots of technologies which exist to do fancy things with it. But it's time now to concentrate on getting the web of linked data out there.


Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee and ReadWriteWeb founder Richard MacManus

How Linked Data Has Evolved via Grassroots

RWW: Linked Data has had a lot of grassroots support, which you mentioned in your TED speech. This is something Semantic Web technologies, such as RDF, have struggled to get over the years. Has the W3C been pushing the more bottom-up Linked Data world, because of the frustration over lack of take-up of top-down Semantic Web?

TBL: A lot of the initial RDF and OWL projects came out of the academic world; and some of them were projects to show what you could do in a closed world. And the files were zipped up and left on a disc. While they were interesting projects, and while the systems were useful systems, the semantic web community maybe missed the point of the 'web' bit and focused too much on the 'semantic'. However the work that's been done in the Semantic Web, the standards, was really valuable. It's relatively recently for example that SPARQL [an RDF query language] has been developed.

"It's time now to concentrate on getting the web of linked data out there."

Somebody drew an analogy the other day: can you imagine trying to promote a world of databases without SQL? Even though it's not an interoperable protocol, it's just a query language. So similarly, all that's been put into RDF, rdfs and OWL is very valuable to the linked data community.

The Linked Data community tend to use a subset of that [Semantic Web technologies], of OWL for example. But they certainly use SPARQL. So you could argue that really it wasn't ready to be deployed widely.

Linked Data started as a very informal Design Issues note that I put in; it was a grassroots movement from very early on. So yes W3C has been emphasizing the importance of Linked Data. It's been the Semantic Web Interest Group of course, and various [other Semantic Web] activities, which has been pushing it. But also Linked Data has been seized on - a group of people for example put together DBpedia.3 That wasn't commissioned, that was that they just thought it would be a really cool idea.


Graph of Linked Data sets on the Web, as at March 2009

Linked Data and Governments

RWW: In a recent Design Issues note, you urge governments to put their data online as Linked Data (although you'd also be happy for governments to just make available the raw data - presumably so that others can then structure it). What do you realistically expect, for example, the U.S. or U.K. governments to do over the next year? And in the near future, do you foresee different governments interconnecting their Linked Data sets?

TBL: One can't generalize, governments are (like most big organizations) fascinatingly diverse inside them. So you'll find that there are places inside governments where you get a champion who gets linked data and who's just written a script and produced some linked data. So in the UK government for example, you'll find there's RDFa [in the code of its website] for civil service jobs. So if somebody wants to make a database of all the jobs, they can do that very easily.

"The first step of actually putting the data out there is the one that nobody else can do."

There are other cases where the easiest thing for somebody to do is to just put data up in whatever form it's available. Comma separated values (CSV) files are remarkably popular. They're exported sometimes from spreadsheets. It's remarkable how much information is in spreadsheets. Or sometimes pulled out of a database and then put up on the web. It's not as good, not as useful to the community, as if Linked Data had been put up there and linked. But the first step of actually putting the data out there is the one that nobody else can do.


Data.gov, a catalog of public data, was launched in May by the U.S. government

The way to go is for government departments to go the extra step and convert [their data] into Linked Data. One of the nice things about Linked Data, when they have a pile of it, is that they could run a SPARQL server on it. SPARQL servers are a commodity product, a solution for all of the people who say 'but actually I wanted to have XML.' A SPARQL server will generate an XML file [and] allow somebody to write out, effectively, a URL for the XML file.

"Linked Data is the backplane, it's the thing that you connect to in both directions."

In fact, I don't see why SPARQL servers shouldn't provide CSV files, something which as far as I know isn't in the standards. But I'd recommend it, certainly in government context, because CSV files are what people have and what people want.

So the message [for government] is to use RDF. Linked Data is the backplane, it's the thing that you connect to in both directions. As a [web] producer your job is to make sure that you produce Linked Data one way or another. And as a consumer, there are lots of ways to consume that data once it's out there as Linked Data.

In Part 2 of this interview we discuss: how previously reticent search engines like Google and Yahoo have begun to participate in the Semantic Web in 2009, user interfaces for browsing and using data, what Tim Berners-Lee thinks of new computational engine Wolfram Alpha, how e-commerce vendors are moving into the Linked Data world, and finally how the Internet of Things intersects with the Semantic Web. Read Part 2 here.

Footnotes:

1. The very first sentence written on this blog, on 20 April, 2003, was: "The World Wide Web in 2003 is beginning to fulfill the hopes that Tim Berners-Lee had for it over 10 years ago when he created it."

2. For more on read/write browsers, you can read another early RWW post entitled What became of the Browser/Editor.

3. DBpedia is a community project to extract structured information from Wikipedia; see ReadWriteWeb's profile of this and similar resources.

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http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/interview_with_tim_berners-lee_part_1.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/interview_with_tim_berners-lee_part_1.php Interviews Wed, 08 Jul 2009 06:00:00 -0800 Richard MacManus
Search and Rescue: 6 Approaches to Semantic Data Collection semantic_search_logo_jun09.jpgIt's been more than ten years since Tim Berners-Lee first spoke about the semantic web and computers indexing all web-based data. He said, "The day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The 'intelligent agents' people have touted for ages will finally materialize." Since then a handful of companies have attempted to tackle the issue of machine-based indexing and language interpretation. None of them are perfect. Below are 6 unique approaches to semantic data collection.

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]]> 1. Powerset semantic_search_bing_jun09.jpg This site was one of the first to publicly apply machine-based natural language processing to a consumer search engine. Nevertheless, because public expectations were so high, when Powerset launched a Wikipedia-only beta, reviewers were harsh. The site was acquired by Microsoft shortly after the initial launch and the team has been low key ever since. While Powerset is one of the definitive semantic engines in existence, Microsoft is currently concentrating on using Powerset's technology to index Wikipedia pages in Bing. Powerset's search result pages actually contain a "Try this on Bing Reference" note in the sidebar of the site.

2. Cuil

semantic_search_cuil_jun09.jpg This team touted its language processing product as being much faster to index pages than Google; however, consumers rarely covet speed over quality and the site was criticized right from the start. Expectations were not met as Cuil's claim to 120 billion pages indexed did not match up to the results on Google's reported 1 trillion unique URLs. However, what Cuil did right was separate related search results from regular web results. That being said, without any human intervention, the related results are often bizarre and irrelevant. For instance, my name produces the rankings of Ultimate Fighting Challenge Champions.

3. Hakia

semantic_search_hakia_jun09.jpg This is a natural language search engine where sponsored results, regular web results and "credible" web results are broken down visually into separate categories. Similar to Wikipedia, Hakia employs a community monitoring system for credibility and "credible" results must be peer reviewed and seemingly free of corporate interest. One of the great features of Hakia is that users can tab over the site to show only images or news.

4. Worio

semantic_search_worio_jun09.jpg Worio is considered a "discovery engine" as it is not technically a search engine destination site. While users are still required to visit the Worio destination, search is actually powered by Yahoo, Google or Windows Live search. Regular web results appear in the larger left-side column and natural language-based "discoveries" appear on the right. These discoveries are further refined by personal bookmarks and shared relevancy with Facebook friends.

5. Ubiquity

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Ubiquity is perhaps the opposite of a semantic web engine, but it serves a similar function for those looking to aggregate useful data. The Firefox plugin allows users to create command lines that incorporate natural language search with a series of mashups. Users can then combine relevant data from Craigslist, translation tools, maps, reviews and social networks for easy user visualization. While the end product is an extremely useful document, users may not be ready for the drastic behavioral change of using command lines for semantic data collection.

6. Semanti

semantic_search_semanti_jun09.jpg From a consumer standpoint, Semanti sits somewhere on the spectrum between Worio and Ubiquity. ReadWriteWeb reviewed the product earlier this week and like Ubiquity it is a Firefox plug-in rather than a destination site. However, like Worio, it employs leading search engines, bookmarking and Facebook friends to produce results. Semanti's key difference is that it prompts users to choose from multiple definitions prior to completing the search. Decision-making is actually human-powered rather than machine-powered. CEO, Bruce Johnson, said, "I tried machine-based semantic tagging, but my priority has always been a faster search experience." While this is not the "use of intelligent agents" that Berners-Lee suggested, it is a "semantic" tool in that it helps the user distill meaning and relevancy from language.

If you've got more examples of semantic data collection tools, list them in the comments below.

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http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/search_and_rescue_6_approaches_to_semantic_data_collection.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/search_and_rescue_6_approaches_to_semantic_data_collection.php Semantic Web Thu, 25 Jun 2009 15:45:41 -0800 Dana Oshiro
Open Government: Berners-Lee and the UK to Show Obama How It's Done "So that government information is accessible and useful for the widest possible group of people, I have asked Sir Tim Berners-Lee who led the creation of the world wide web, to help us drive the opening up of access to Government data in the web over the coming month." Can't you picture Barack Obama making that statement? He didn't though; that was the UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown in a statement about electoral reform, according to a report from Charles Arthur of the Guardian.

Berners-Lee, a man whose invention of the web has had a greater impact on humanity than all but a handful of inventions over the last 50 years, is now one of the world's leading advocates not just for government data on the web but for free public access to raw bulk data that anyone can process for analysis and mashups. While the new Obama administration has made big promises about open government, it may now quickly find itself falling behind the UK.

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]]> Open government data means increased accountability for politicians and increasingly innovative services for the public. If search is the killer app for web pages linked together and email was the killer app for open messaging protocols, some kind of comparable killer apps could well be built on top of developer access to the huge stores of data about our world that the governments currently hold close to their chests.

The Obama administration has had a mixed record so far in terms of opening up government data. The launch of Data.gov was widely celebrated, though we found it too limited an offering. The Democrat controlled Senate finally opened up its voting record in machine readable XML format last month (that's great), but the nominee for the first federal CTO position faced zero questions about data transparency in his congressional hearings (that's bad). The White House said yesterday that it has clearly heard the public call for more open APIs (Application Programming Interfaces filled with open data) - so things certainly won't be standing still on this side of the Atlantic either. US CIO, Vivek Kundra, wrote an excellent blog post on the challenges and opportunities of open government data on Monday.

Having Berners-Lee on the team should be a huge boost for the UK government efforts, though. Most recently Berners-Lee made headlines for (trying to) lead the TED conference of global thought leaders in a chant of "Raw Data Now!" That conference was the same one where Bill Gates opened a jar full of mosquitoes into the crowd like a mad man, so that the elite group could get some feeling of the fear associated with malaria like so many millions of other people feel.

In other words, Berners-Lee is a hard core advocate of open data. It's hard to imagine a more high profile move for a government to take than to announce that he's coming on board to help the effort.

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http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/open_goverment_berners-lee_and_the_uk_to_show_obam.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/open_goverment_berners-lee_and_the_uk_to_show_obam.php Data Services Wed, 10 Jun 2009 09:12:11 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick
Future of the Web Debate: Submit Your Questions Here ReadWriteWeb is the exclusive Media Partner for an interactive debate on the future of the Web being held this coming Wednesday 11 June. The debate features Tim Berners-Lee and will be webcast live. You can submit questions for the debate - and vote on existing questions - by clicking here (see below for other options). According to the organizers, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the Semantic Web and Net Neutrality remain the most popular topics.

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]]> One emerging topic is privacy, which is timely given the recent news that researchers secretly tracked the locations of more than 100,000 people through their cell phones.

Other interesting topics include: the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the emerging Web, the harmfulness (or otherwise) of proprietary technologies to the Web, and how we can make ourselves less vulnerable to "web failure".

Submit your questions now, on RWW if you have to...

Now is your chance to submit some controversial questions :-) And if you can't be bothered signing up for an account at the debate website (there were grumblings in the last post that it doesn't have OpenID), simply leave your questions here in the comments on ReadWriteWeb -- and I will submit the best of them myself.

I am really looking forward to this event, it's a chance to discuss and argue about where the Web is headed. Mark your calendars, the debate and webcast happens on Wednesday 11 June. Berners-Lee's keynote is at 2:45 p.m. EST and the debate starts at 3:45 p.m. EST (World Clock times below).

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http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/future_of_the_web_debate3.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/future_of_the_web_debate3.php Events Fri, 06 Jun 2008 23:14:49 -0800 Richard MacManus
Future of the Web Debate: Needs Your Votes! As we blogged recently, ReadWriteWeb is the exclusive Media Partner for an interactive debate on the future of the Web being held by the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the Tetherless World Research Constellation. In this post we check in to see what the top questions are so far - and we encourage RWW readers to vote on these questions here.

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]]> The event is June 11 and features Tim Berners-Lee and other Web thinkers. The debate's content will be defined by users, via a digg-style question submission and voting process (see our coverage of similar user generated ideas sites).

The debate's theme is 'the future of the Web'. To submit a question or vote on them, you first need to create an account. It only requires a username and an email address, so nothing too onerous. We encourage RWW readers to vote on questions, it takes just a few minutes and will really help create an interesting debate (which RWW will be covering).

Top Questions

A representative from Rensselaer told us that "right now we have about 25 questions running the gamut from internet privacy to how the web can solve the global hunger crisis." He mentioned that "there are some really good questions that go beyond the obvious - for example, a question about crossing language barriers as Internet access expands in the developing world."

The most popular topic "by far" is the semantic web, but the equal most popular question overall is about net neutrality.

Here are the top questions over the last 30 days, at time of writing:

  • Semantic Web a dream?
  • Is net neutrality essential for democracy?
  • Can you imagine the future of the world (wide Web) without the Semantic Web? What would such a world (wide Web) look like?
  • Muttilingual Internet--Fracturing or Blossoming?
  • What controls should be in place on the Web, if any?
  • How do we make sense of the proliferation of data from the ever growing number of User's social activity feeds?
  • Can the web help us solve the world hunger problem?
  • How can we make ourselves less vulnerable to "web failure"?

To submit a question and/or vote on them, create an account here.

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http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/future_of_the_web_debate_needs_your_votes.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/future_of_the_web_debate_needs_your_votes.php Events Sun, 01 Jun 2008 21:00:00 -0800 Richard MacManus
Interactive Debate on Web's Future, Featuring Tim Berners-Lee ReadWriteWeb is the exclusive Media Partner for an interactive debate on the future of the Web, featuring Tim Berners-Lee. The event is June 11 and is being run by the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The debate will address questions such as: Is net neutrality essential for democracy? What role does AI have in the future of the Web? What will Web 4.0 look like?

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]]> These are issues we at RWW analyze often. Ok, we don't use the term "web 4.0". But see our post 10 Future Web Trends and its follow-up 10 More Future Web Trends.

This event is happening on June 11 at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. If (like me) you've never heard of Troy NY, don't worry because the debate will be webcast and the questions for discussion will be derived from the Web community. In other words, you can submit your questions on the Rensselaer website and then participate in a digg-style user-based ranking system. The most popular questions will drive the discussion at the June 11 debate. During the webcast, viewers will also be able to interact with the panelists by submitting questions and comments in real time.

Where ReadWriteWeb comes in is that we want to get our community behind this, because talking about the future of the Web is something that I'm sure a lot of you enjoy doing :-) RWW is proud to support this event and we hope you get involved. We will also try to live-blog it.

Before the debate, Tim Berners-Lee will deliver a keynote address. The event also doubles as the launch of The Tetherless World Constellation, which aims to "design new techniques to explore social, scientific, and legal impacts of the evolving technologies deployed on the Web."

For details about the event and how to submit and rank questions, go to: http://tw.rpi.edu/launch/.

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http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/interactive_debate_on_web_future.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/interactive_debate_on_web_future.php Events Fri, 23 May 2008 01:21:33 -0800 Richard MacManus
Comment of the Day: First Base With Semantic Web In our post Tim Berners-Lee Says the Time for the Semantic Web is Now, the Web's inventor is quoted as saying that "people are realizing it’s time to just go do it." But commenter Gregory isn't getting as excited - he thinks that "we haven't even gotten to first base". And no we're not talking about something Valleywag would cover. It's the Semantic Web, kids. Congratulations Gregory, you've won a $30 Amazon voucher - courtesy of our competition sponsors AdaptiveBlue and their Amazon WishList Widget. Here's his full comment:

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"i strongly agree with your "reach new heights" thinking...

no matter how fine the mesh, human consciousness will be more subtle, and having a lot of the grunt work conceptualization taken care of machine-wise will reallyt allow this to become obvious...

the genome guys thought for a few minutes they got to the fundamental building blocks, and found that, no way, there was so much more at subtler levels that it only increased the questions...

same with the semantic web thing...

the danger? algorithms taken as reality, in the same way your insurance sx canceled by a computer because of some obscure programmer's decision

anyway, it is going to arrive sooner rather than later, after all, technology is just the out-picturing on the material plane of the natural and inherent abilities of consciousness, and we haven't even gotten to first base"

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http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/semantic_web_first_base.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/semantic_web_first_base.php Comments Competition Wed, 27 Feb 2008 23:59:52 -0800 Richard MacManus
Tim Berners-Lee Says the Time for the Semantic Web is Now In an hour long interview posted today about the Semantic Web, W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee says all the pieces are in place to move full steam ahead and realize the potential of a world of structured, machine readable data. Available as a part of the Talking with Talis semantic web podcast series, the interview (listen here) is summarized on interviewer Paul Miller's new ZDNet blog dedicated to the semantic web. A full transcript is available here.

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.

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]]> My standard explanation of the value of the Semantic Web is this:
Once our software is capable of deriving meaning from web pages it looks at for us, then there's a whole lot of work that will already be done, allowing our human, creative minds to reach new heights.

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.

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http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/tbl_calls_for_semweb.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/tbl_calls_for_semweb.php Semantic Web Wed, 27 Feb 2008 10:50:33 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick