ReadWriteWeb

Earlier this month the New York Times launched a beta testing playground called Beta620. It's a site for the news organization to try out new web experiments, some of which may graduate to become full-fledged New York Times products.

An interesting Semantic Web experiment went live this week, called Longitude. As the name suggests, it presents a geographical interface for accessing content from The Times. It uses The Time's large store of metadata, along with Linked Open Data from the Web.

The dream of creating a structured database of the world's content has eluded Google's grasp. But at least it got a bunch of useful retail data out of it.

The Web world is nothing if not Darwinian: it's survival of the fittest and products need to evolve with the times. Some Web products fly and some don't. Those that don't fly either die out, or evolve into something new. The latter is what happened to Google Base, which in 2011 is a shadow of its former self - and is even about to lose its API. It did however spin off a more successful offering, in the form of the Google Merchant Center for retailers. In this post, we look back on the initial vision for Google Base and then analyze what it actually evolved into.

Probase is a Microsoft Research project described as an "ongoing project that focuses on knowledge acquisition and knowledge serving." Its primary goal is to "enable machines to understand human behavior and human communication." It can be compared to Cyc, DBpedia or Freebase in that it is attempting to compile a massive collection of structured data that can be used to power artificial intelligence applications.

It's powered by a new graph database called Trinity, which is also a Microsoft Research project. Trinity was spotted today by MyNoSQL blogger Alex Popescu, and that led us to Probase. Neither project seems to be available to the public yet.

These and other projects shed some light on Microsoft's search and big data ambitions.

We've covered Linked Data - a W3C specification for publishing structured data - frequently at ReadWriteWeb. We've covered its importance, its growth and various projects and tools taking advantage of it. But what about tools to actually get your hands dirty and work with it yourself?

RDF is one way of using Linked Data. Michele Pasin, a researcher and Web developer at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities has created a list of resources for Python developers working with RD - including Python libraries, tutorials and Python friendly RDF triplestores.

April 2011 will mark the 150th anniversary of the first hostilities of U.S. Civil War, and museums, municipalities, and historic sites are making their preparations for the events and exhibits to commemorate it. And while, no doubt, times are tough for funding cultural heritage projects, there's a lot of excitement and momentum building around the sesquicentennial, making it a great opportunity for those exploring how technology can make history more interactive.

"A more valuable field trip" - that's the argument that Pennsylvania high school social studies teacher Jeff Mummert makes, pointing to the increasing accessibility of both mobile and augmented reality technologies as ways to "offer deeply interactive projects for students and the general public."

To that end, Mummert has created the Civil War Augmented Reality Project (which recently evolved to become HistoriQuest). Aimed at giving both students and the general public a richer experience, the Civil War Augmented Reality Project wants to build apps that will use augmented reality to connect primary documents and photographs to local historic points of interest.

How does a technology built for apartment-hunting end up being evaluated by the U.S. Army for use in Afghanistan? Cazoodle is using public data sources like Flickr and OpenStreetMap to build detailed guidebooks for American soldiers. Last week at Strata I sat down with company CTO Govind Kabra to find out how they do it.

Its project for the Army is to build a detailed database of information about places in Afghanistan, using only public sources on the Web. The goal is to describe in detail the towns and cities including everything from names, locations and populations, as well as lists and coordinates for schools, mosques, banks and hotels.

People still know little about data visualization, much less how to access data to turn it into a visual experience.

A post on Datavisualization.ch provides a thorough perspective about the value of Open Linked Data for visual creators.

The post explains the Semantic Web and Linked Data. To show the connection, Peter Gasner adds the concept of Open Data as a third pillar for visual creators.

Yesterday I posted about DBpedia and how it turns Wikipedia into a database. It's a fascinating example of what is happening to the Web and even more to the Internet and its evolution.

Big data is the topic we will all watch this year. As the discussion evolves, Linked Data will be a topic that will come up increasingly often. We already see its growth. It's a wonderful time in many ways. It's real proof of the Semantic Web. To the researchers and early users, that's a terrific development that will also unleash something else. A gushing flow of ways to use Linked Data in some commercial or non-commercial context.

DBpedia is a community driven effort that treats Wikipedia like a database, enabling people to do more sophisticated queries, distribute the open encyclopedia's data to the Web and add back to Wikipedia for the purposes of enriching it.

In a blog post this week, the community showed again what makes the service a unique effort with the launch of the latest version of the technology.

The concept of Linked Data has largely been the domain of academics and geeks. But this is a new time and space for the Web and the possible uses of Linked Data are becoming more widely recognized.

To illustrate the concept of Linked Data, Richard Cyganiak and Anja Jentzsch created the Linked Data Diagram of the Cloud. This image is widely used but it shows how much data has been added to the Internet in the past few years.