ReadWriteWeb

FluidDB is offering a new tool called "Flimp" (FLuiddb IMPorter) for importing JSON, YAML or CSV data sources into FluidDB. FluidDB is a new type of database, described as "a hosted database with the heart of a wiki." We've covered the project here previously. As a test, FluidDB imported all the metadata from data.gov and data.gov.uk using Flimp and made it publicly available. The company has posted a Flimp tutorial using that government data.

When Google acquired Metaweb last summer it got Freebase Gridwork, a tool for cleaning up messy datasets, as part of the deal. Today Google released a new version of the tool, now called Google Refine. Like its predecessor, Google Refine is open source.

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has published a Request for Comment on a proposed standard for link relations across multiple web formats. From rel="stylesheet" to rel="bookmark," rel="payment," and rel="me," according the the consensus of the IETF community members, link relations are now first class citizens with a centralized Registry where they can be found. The IETF is a nearly 25 year-old Internet standards body.

What does that mean? "Web linking is the most fundamental web building block," says Yahoo! standards wonk Eran Hammer-Lahav. "Typed links - links with a clear semantic meaning - existed on the web since the very beginning, but for the most part lacked any generally acceptable definition... Agreeing on what a link type means across formats is critical for a semantically rich web, in which links are used to provide a richer user experience, as well as better search and automation features."

Evri, a semantic content discovery engine for real-time content, has decided to switch gears and change its focus. "Going forward, we consider ourselves a mobile company," said Evri CEO Will Hunsinger. To that end, the company is now launching a handful of new mobile applications that use Evri's core technology to enable the discovery of relevant news and media on the topics you care about.

Currently, the mobile lineup includes apps for tech, football, baseball, celebrity gossip and rock music, but dozens more are in the works. There's even an iPad app coming, which Evri describes as a "smarter Flipboard."

One year ago, Yahoo announced that it had signed a deal to replace its own search engine with Microsoft's Bing - but the big question for us was what that meant for all the incredible search-related programming infrastructure Yahoo makes available to outside developers. Today Yahoo began offering the beginning of an answer to that question.

In a post on the Yahoo Developer Network blog, VP Social Platforms at Yahoo Neal Sample broke the news.

This blog was founded in 2003 on the philosophy of a read/write Web - a Web in which people can create content as easily as they consume it. This trend eventually came to be known as Web 2.0 - although others preferred Social Web - and was popularized by activities like blogging and social networking.

It would be easy to say that the 'social' element is still the primary part of today's Web, since the popular products of this era enable you to say what's on your mind (Facebook), what's happening (Twitter), or where you are (Foursquare). All of these are mostly social activities. But more significantly, these and other products output data that will increasingly be used to build personalized services for you.

The Semantic Web is all about structuring data so that humans and computers can more easily interpret the Web and discover relevant data for a wide variety of purposes. Google, a company built on the ability to advertise based on contextual data, announced today a major acquisition in the Semantic Web space. As of today, Metaweb, maker of Freebase and a leader in the Semantic Web, has joined forces with Google.

Extractiv has quietly launched a service that crawls the Web for text on a specific topic, then transforms it into "structured semantic data." It's a direct competitor to Thomson Reuters' Calais product, which has been doing this for a couple of years now. This type of service is potentially valuable to media companies, search services and monitoring applications - because it turns messy, unorganized HTML content into data that is organized into categories and given other semantic 'meaning.'

I sat down with Extractiv CEO Shion Deysarkar at the recent Semantic Technology conference in San Francisco, to find out how Extractiv intends to compete with the more well-known and big media backed Calais.

At the Semantic Technology conference in San Francisco last week, I met up with two W3C representatives to discuss the current state of the Semantic Web - a Web of added meaning and structured data. W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium, is the official standards organization of the Web and is led by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. I spoke with W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead Ivan Herman and W3C eGovernment Interest Group leader Sandro Hawke.

The main takeaway from the conversation was the rapid adoption of RDFa, by big commercial companies such as Facebook and Best Buy. It's come as a "very pleasant surprise" to Ivan Herman.

Just because the new iPhone arrived in stores today doesn't mean the rest of the technology world shut down. In fact, today in San Francisco the 2010 Semantic Technology Conference continued its week-long series of talks and sessions about the semantic Web - the ability to understand and intelligently interpret content from the Web. A fascinating example of how the semantic Web is colliding with the real-time Web is through Twitter and the impending release of annotations - and Ph.D student Joshua Shinavier provided some fascinating semantic scenarios for their use.