ReadWriteWeb

Nova Spivack's semantic web company Twine is developing a free service to write and host semantic ontologies; the classification trees that enable machines to put concepts in topical context. Ready to play Aristotle and create an ontology of cheese, model airplanes, global anti-hunger organizations or any other topic?

What blogging was to publishing, a simple tool that made far more people able to participate, Twine's new ontology writing and hosting service could be to the act of teaching machines about new topics.

According to a comScore study done last year, booking travel over the Internet has become something of a nightmare for people. It's not that using any of the booking engines is difficult, it's just that there is so much information out there that planning a vacation is overwhelming. According to the comScore study, the average online vacation plan comes together through 12 travel-related searches and visits to 22 different web sites over the course of 29 days. Semantic search startup UpTake (formerly Kango) aims to make that process easier.