Two such "divining" projects include CoPhIR (Content-based Photo Image Retrieval) Test-Collection and IBM's MUFIN (Multi-Feature Indexing Network). These projects tie into SAPIR's back end by extracting data from the Flickr archive and indexing features such as scalable color, color structure, color layout, shape edges and texture.

As shown in the video of Madrid's Plaza de España, SAPIR identifies matching media in the same way that humans derive intrinsic value from visual and sensory clues. Users can also choose to combine search terms with additional text to further drill down in search results. As is the case with regular search, if you already know the city where your image was taken, you're one step closer to finding your result. Additionally, SAPIR also has the ability to index sound and video files.

While the catalogue of media is still very limited, theoretically we may one day be able to search for almost anything using this technique. If Ashton Kutcher wears a pair of sunglasses we like, we can scan the image and search for the storefronts stocking them. If we're looking for the name of a town square, we can find it in the tags of similar images. And finally, if we're looking to self-diagnose we can compare photos of ourselves against jaundice or malaria patients.

The advantage of this tool is that we may one day have a chance to collect up the disparate bits in the digital ether and identify them as useful points of information. To test SAPIR in its early research stage, visit the homepage. You may also want to test out MUFIN to compare results.

NetBase employs the same principals across a variety of enterprise tools, but healthBase is its first foray into consumer-facing products. While the company is used to powering corporate, federal and market research, healthBase allows NetBase to show off its content intelligence tool in a way that gives us insight into our selves and our bodies.

Because NetBase is not reliant on manual annotation or custom taxonomies, the system is also very scalable. It took roughly 2 days to produce all of the data in healthBase - a feat that would never be possible by a combination human and machine system.

"It's important for us to address real issues with semantic technologies outside of a lab," Says Tellefsen. To try healthBase visit healthbase.netbase.com

2. Cuil

3. Hakia

4. Worio

5. Ubiquity

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

6. Semanti

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

Common Tag is a new tagging format that creates references to concretely defined concepts with their own metadata and URLs. With Common Tag, site owners can simply topic hubs, cross-promote content, and enrich pages with data, images, and widgets.

According to the Common Tag website, "The Common Tag format was developed to address the current shortcomings of tagging and help everyone - including end users, publishers, and developers - get more out of Web content. With Common Tag, content is tagged with unique, well-defined concepts - everything about New York City is tagged with one concept for New York City and everything about jaguar the animal is tagged with one concept for jaguar the animal. Common Tag also provides access to useful metadata that defines each concept and describes how the concepts relate to one another. For example, metadata for the Barack Obama Common Tag indicates that he's the President of the United States and that he's married to Michelle Obama."

The project aims to help make content as discoverable and connected as could reasonably be assumed. The creators also hope to make content more engaging. When a web app can determine what a piece of content is actually about, the UX improves exponentially. The website gives the example of a developer creating an app that uses an article about the most recent Star Trek movie and lets users purchase tickets on the same page. The site reads, "Since both the publisher and ticket service use Common Tag, the application is able to easily make the connection without having to guess at what the content of the two services is about."

Tags are expressed using RDFa, a standard format for defining data in HTML. Relevant code can be found in the Common Tag Quick Start Guide. Interested parties can learn more in the Yahoo! Common Tag group.

According to a Q&A with partner company Zemanta, CTO, Andraz Tori, said the idea for Common Tags "started in informal discussion with Peter Mika from Yahoo! and research about what would be the easiest way to let publishers get more out of their content by semantically marking it up." We've seen Common Tag as a vehicle to make Web content more discoverable, connected, and engaging.

"We then learned on previous efforts and decided that we need a full-blown ecosystem from day one. Not just academic support, but web industry support. As you can see the idea was well received."

In terms of adoption, Tori stated, "This is the first time that this number of web companies have stepped together from day one to introduce a tagging standard. We tried to build on previous academic efforts. Over that we added business incentive to participate."

You can also interact with the items being tracked via the Glue plugin which features a "like" button and another "2 Cents" button which lets you leave a comment about whatever it is you're viewing.

As with the previously released Firefox plugin, the Glue IE plugin also delivers the same type of interactions as you would expect: the connected conversations around everyday things, recommendations, and web-wide "top lists" that include the top items across the entire Glue network.

You can grab the Glue IE plugin from the main page of the Glue web site here. Note: the "Download" button still features the Firefox logo only at this time, but clicking the button reveals the IE download is available as well.

Disclosure: Alex Iskold (@alexiskold) is the founder of AdaptiveBlue, the company behind Glue, and occasional RWW feature writer.

In testing LinkWithin on our own WordPress blog, the suggested posts were always spot-on, but obviously, your mileage may vary.

A Few Caveats

Because LinkWithin does most of the computing on its own servers, it can take a little while before its results appear on your blog (usually around one hour). The plugin also doesn't play nice with every theme, though the team promises to fix any problem you might encounter within a few hours after you contact them.

Verdict

LinkWithin is still a bit rough around the edges. It would be great, for example, if you could actually customize how the related items are displayed on your blog. For now, you are restricted to showing three related stories, for example, and the related stories will appear on both your homepage and on individual posts.

If you are looking for a different way to showcase more of your blogposts on your blog, however, LinkWithin is definitely worth a try.

Thanks to Marjolein Hoekstra (@cleverclogs) for telling us about this new service.

At this month's DEMO 09 conference, one of the most apparent trends was the emergence of several new intelligent web services. In this transitional period between Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 (or whatever it is that comes next), the tools of the future are just now being revealed. Although at first glance some of these services and applications may seem somewhat incomplete, in many cases they actually represent years' worth of work to have reached the point they're at now. These are no simple Web 2.0 applications; these are highly complex and intelligent tools of tomorrow's smarter web.

A.I.-Powered Shopping (Gazaro)

Gazaro is a new service that lets you make what they call "personal sales fliers." Instead of sifting through the local paper to find the latest deals, you just tell Gazaro what sorts of products you're interested in. The service then scours the web for the best deals and presents its findings in a clean, easy-to-read interface. But Gazaro isn't simply a price comparison engine. It's a really smart one.

Gazaro knows that a "camera" is a "camera" or that an "LCD" is an "LCD." It's not doing simple keyword matching, it really understands the difference. In other words, you'll never get results for a camera lens or camera accessories when you're searching for just a camera because Gazaro knows those are not the same things.

The reason it can differentiate between items is because it's powered by Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) on the back end. In this case, "A.I." is no buzzword - the company was incubated by Apption Software who had developed A.I. technology for use in the enterprise. They realized that the same technology could deliver value in a consumer application as well, and from there came Gazaro.

When Gazaro goes out and crawls the internet, it compares the items it finds to the items it already knows in order to determine what exactly the new items are. If it encounters something it doesn't know, it makes an educated guess using its A.I. "brain." And the more it crawls, the more it learns.

After identifying what an item is, Gazaro then determines if the item found is actually a good deal. How good of a deal it is or not is represented with the "Gazaro Deal Score." These deal ratings are based on Gazaro's knowledge of historical prices, how often an item goes on sale, what other retailers are selling it for now and what they've sold it for in the past. All that analysis is done using the A.I. technology in order to rate the deal on a scale from 1 to 10, with 10 being the best deal.

To the consumer using the system, the complexity of what the A.I. is doing is all hidden behind the scenes. The end user only sees a simple interface where they can enter in the items they're shopping for and then find the best prices. Gazaro can also alert users to new sales and deals using email, RSS, or Twitter. At the moment, Gazaro is for consumer electronics shopping only, but in time the system could expand and learn more product categories.

Understanding Intentions (Primal Fusion)

Another company of interest is Primal Fusion whose new "thought networking" service is a semantic technology platform designed to help you research the subjects that interest you. Unfortunately, "thought networking" is a buzzword-sounding phrase that doesn't really convey what the system does. Primal Fusion essentially is an alternative to doing traditional web searches when you want to learn about a particular topic.

Once signed up for the Primal Fusion service, you enter in your topic in the search box provided and you'll see a tag cloud of words appear which are relevant to the word you initially searched on. You can either select those words by checking them or you can click on the individual words to further drill down into a more specific aspect of the original topic.

In the example they demonstrated today, a student researching climate change might see a tag cloud featuring words and phrases like "pollution," "co2," "greenhouse gases," etc. In addition, the service can also return relevant photos to your topic from sites like Flickr.

Initially, Primal Fusion searches Wikipedia to deliver the tag cloud, but once you have your specific interests checkmarked you can then change a drop-down box to search the web instead. This web searching is done courtesy of a Yahoo BOSS integration and it's here where Primal Fusion one-ups a normal search engine. Instead of just returning the top 5 or 10 results on the original keyword, it sifts through all the results found and returns only those relevant to your specific interests - even if those results would have been pages deep on a normal search query. Whatever Primal Fusion retrieves can then be extracted to a web page, document, or RSS feed. At the moment, Primal Fusion only extracts to web pages - files and feeds will come later. The web pages created by the service are public sites representing your research around a particular topic and are filled with links and images relevant to your query.

Because Primal Fusion comes off as somewhat of a confusing mind-mapping tool, many folks will probably miss the point: Primal Fusion is infrastructure, not an application. The way it understands the relationships between words and phrases and how it can then extract the most relevant search results based on that understanding is what's most important about the company's technology.

Remember: This Is Only the Beginning

If you go out and try most of the services we've profiled in this series, you might walk away feeling a bit disappointed. You'll probably be thinking of all the things the service doesn't do but that you wished it could. Or perhaps you'll find the UI unappealing or the recommendations provided somewhat incomplete. However, It's important to understand that many of these services aren't ready for mainstream use just yet. Instead, they represent the beginnings of tomorrow's web - a web that better understands the data it contains. And by better understanding itself, the new intelligent web of the future can then better understand and serve you.

According to MIT's Technology Review, the program allows users to select email recipients by creating a search query as opposed to typing in names, addresses, or the name of a mailing list. For example, a user could use SEAmail to send a message to a group - created on the fly - like "all professors who graduated from Harvard University since 1960."

Being able to pinpoint your recipients in this way would not only be helpful, it could also stem the overflow of email that creates information overload by making sure that only the exact recipients who need to get the message are contacted.

A Semantic Email Chooser

In SEAmail, a email addressing interface (as shown here) could be used to build a list on the fly, without necessarily needing to know a single name. Instead, all an email user would need to do is fill in the parts of the form using the drop-down boxes to guide their selections along the way. The system would then take care of the rest.

Pulling from Databases

Obviously, in order for a semantically-based email system to work, there needs to be a rich database on the back-end that contains relevant information about the people sending email to each other and their interests. In the Stanford tests, this data is being retrieved from already existing databases which are then integrated into the system.

While such a thing may work well at a university like Stanford, it may be less useful to real-world businesses where there aren't numerous existing databases to draw upon, only Active Directory or some other resource management system.

Drawbacks and Concerns

1) Does this solve real problems?

There's also the small question as to whether SEAmail is solving a problem that really needs to be solved. Take for instance one of the touted benefits of the system: name resolution. The article provided an example where people wanting to send a message to "Michael Genesereth" could simply type his name as a recipient, and his most recent email address would automatically be selected. Sounds excellent, right? Except for one minor problem - that technology has existed in most email systems, and certainly within Microsoft Exchange, for years on end.

To continue the comparison with Microsoft Exchange, the advancements SEAmail makes have more to do with putting the power of creating these queries into the hands of users, who often don't get involved with the business of creating distribution lists, leaving it up to I.T. to do it for them. Exchange's built in ability to create query-based distribution lists already make it dead simple for admins to create lists based on almost any requirement you can dream up: city, state, organization, company, department, title, floor, supervisor, etc. In order for SEAmail to be revolutionary, it would need to do more than make it easy to create relevant lists - it would need to so while using much more detailed data about the intended recipients than any system allows for today.

2) Or Does it Create More Problems (like spam)?

Although in theory, the system's ability to pinpoint users could cut back on unintended email, there's also the possibility that the system could lead to more email. Oren Etzioni, director of the Turing Center at the University of Washington, has some concerns about the potential for misuse of the system. "This technology has clear benefits, but it's also ripe for misuse," he says. "The technical issues are solvable. The tricky things are the social issues. How do we create a workable system, given the vagaries of human nature?" Etzioni worries that a system that makes it too easy would lead to some people receiving overwhelming amounts of mail and no good way to limit it.

3) What about Social Networking?

Technology analyst Craig Roth thinks that the most glaring issue here is that the system doesn't take into account how social networks are being used by those who need to contact, market to, or inform others. He notes that consumers today can use LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, and Xing while enterprise customers have IBM Lotus Connections, MySites in Microsoft SharePoint, and the social search capabilities that were in BEA Pathways were merged into Oracle's secure enterprise search.  

Arriving Later this Year

Of course, it's hard to get a real feel for the potential of a system like this until it's actually put into practice. As it turns out, that will happen very soon. SEAmail will be launched at Stanford later this year, initially in the computer science department. It will later be rolled out to the rest of the university over time.

That dynamic backend technology - semantic markup - adds additional context to data about the artist which can include anything from previous bands, past collaborators, venues played, and more. The metadata is then linked together to create relationships that you may not have even known about before. 

Most of the information for the project comes from MusicBrainz, an open content music "metadatabase" that lists information for over 400,000 artists. To make a BBC music page, the contextual information surrounding the artist is imported to their BBC page. By using the artist's "MusicBrainzID," web page creators can integrate the artist's Wikipedia biography, too. Reusing this content is a better use of their time and energy, says Shorter, because the content is already available on the public domain.

As more projects like this take advantage of the publicly available metadata available, the beginnings of a real semantic web can finally take root. 

1. Me. Access books, music, movies, restaurants, wine etc. that you liked and commented on via the browser. All your favorites are always synched up and right there when you need them.

2. Friends. When you're looking for social recommendations on the go, you can tap into an intelligent, aggregate list of things your friends liked around the web.

3. Popular. This screen lets you expand your circle and stay connected to what is happening on Glue around the web. You'll find 100s of books, music, movies, restaurants, wines and more that are popular among the Glue users.

As you browse through the items, you can either display them in the standard view as shown above, or you can switch over to a more fun "cover flow" view that allows you to quickly flip through the different films, books, restaurants, etc. similar to the way you browse through your albums on your iPhone/iPod.

The iPhone app is definitely a must-have for Glue users as they will enjoy having access to their friends' recommendations even when they're away from their computers.

Spock currently offers a public records search option to logged in users. In addition to the pictures, news, and web results Spock returns, public record data is pulled from USSearch.com. However, to get the details to those records, you still have to pay a one-time fee.

Privacy Concerns

Since its launch, many have people have raised concerns about how Spock operates. As noted earlier this year on Skiptease, there are several reasons to be wary of Spock, including the following:

1. Spock allows anyone to create and edit your personal information on the site, which raises numerous privacy concerns as well as concerns about the reasons people may have for editing your information on the site.

2. Editing or deleting information added about you does not guarantee that the changes will be made on Spock.com.

3. If you aren't informed that a profile or personal information has been added about you on the site, you might not discover the information until it shows up in a search engine query.

4. Even when your Spock profile is claimed by you, you still have little control over the information published on it. You can't personally get rid of any information and you have to request that the page be removed by the Spock search.

5. Turning a people search and social networking site like Spock.com into a wiki format where anyone can add and edit a profile on you allows people with a malicious intent to hijack your online identity and reputation.

6. The Spock people search allows users to flag inaccurate information. However, if you don't know that you are in their search database, there is no way to handle the information that has been published about you on the site.

On SEOMoz, after experiencing issues editing her own info, Jane Copland asked if a search engine that allows strangers to edit personal information about other people and then doesn't offer those people a quick way to remove the information they don't appreciate was "just a part of the internet we have to get used to" or if Spock goes a bit too far.

We found editing our profile information on Spock easy, though...that is, until an error message appeared which prevented us from continuing with the deletions we made. Afterward, we returned to our profile only to find that everything we had previously removed was still present.

With the upcoming public record subscription service, Spock has the potential to become even more of a privacy concern than before. By tying together your photos, web search results, social network profile info, and public record information, which invariably contains things like age and address history, we can see where Spock starts to cross the line from becoming simply a useful tool to one that starts to creep us out a little.

Do you agree? Let us know in the comments.

Note: we tried to contact Spock for more information on the service, but emails sent to the company bounced. Yikes.

What's Glue?

Glue is a new browser plugin from Adaptive Blue. It uses semantic technology to connect you to your friends around things like books, music, movies, stars, artists, stocks, wine, restaurants, and more. The plugin places a bar - not a toolbar, just a bar - at the top of your browser window when you visit certain popular web sites like Amazon, Yahoo! Finance, Wine.com, IMDB, Wikipedia, Citysearch, Last.fm, and many others.

As you read about the album, movie, book, or whatever else it is that you're viewing at the time, you'll have a toolbar at the top of the page where you can see which of your friends had visited the same page, if they liked it, and if they left a comment.

Glue Is Not Co-browsing

Glue is not a co-browsing plugin like Me.dium nor does it try to socialize the entire web surfing experience like Socialbrowse (our coverage). Also, unlike Headup, another semantic browser plugin we covered recently, Glue doesn't bother you with pop-up messages as you surf. Glue simply provides a social element to web pages in context - there's no destination site to join and your social graph doesn't need to be re-created in order to use it.

How It Works

In order to tap into your network of friends, Glue uses APIs from popular social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed to import your friends. You can choose to import one or all of those friend lists into the plugin.

To participate in the Glue network, all you do is continue browsing the web normally. When you visit a supported site, the Glue friend bar appears. If you choose, you can view what your friends say about the item on the page, or you can ignore the bar and continue on your way. However, your visit is recorded and when one of your friends visits that same page, they can see that you've been there recently, though not the exact date or time your visit occurred. This information is only stored for the last 20 things you've visited on the web.

While surfing, if you want to share your thoughts about the item you're viewing, you can optionally use the Glue "like" button and/or the "2 cents" button which lets you add a quick thought about item. You can also click on the bar to see the profiles of your friends, other recent Glue users, and you can explore their interests even further by clicking into their profiles, which display in a pop-up box that appears when you click their avatar. You can also optionally click on "Actions" to explore the item you're viewing on other Glue-supported sites.

Making The Social Web Relevant

By providing this social experience in context, Glue can actually be more useful to you than simply joining isolated social networks surrounding your interests where your data and that of your friends is trapped inside the network's walls. It may also have some appeal over a lifestreaming service like FriendFeed, because you don't have to happen across the information - it's there when you're actively interested in something and have sought it out on the web.

In the official version coming soon, the company is also soon going to provide a method for any web publisher to "Glue-enable" their site by simply adding AB Meta to their sites, by inserting three lines of code in the header of a page.

Glue is the next generation of the Adaptive Blue plugin, a tool that currently has around 350,000 active users. Current Adaptive Blue users will find their plugin updated to Glue through the standard Firefox plugin update process. For everyone else, you can download the plugin here.

Although at the present time Glue is available as a Firefox plugin only, an IE version is in the works and an iPhone plugin will arrive in a few weeks.

Disclosure: AdaptiveBlue's CEO, Alex Iskold, is a feature writer for RWW.]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/put_the_social_web_in_context_with_glue.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/put_the_social_web_in_context_with_glue.php Products Tue, 28 Oct 2008 12:00:00 -0800 Sarah Perez Semantinet today announced the launch of its first product, headup.com. Headup is a browser extension that cross-references data from all your social networks, including Twitter, Gmail, Facebook, Last.fm, Digg, and FriendFeed. Headup integrates directly into these sites and allows you to quickly get more information about your friends' activities on other networks. The extension only works in Firefox and is based on Silverlight 2, which Microsoft just released this week.

Semantinet provided us with 400 invites for our readers. You can find more details about how to claim yours at the end of this post.

Depending on Silverlight might seem like a risky move at first, but a fresh install of Silverlight takes less than 10 seconds and Semantinet argues that it decided to use Siverlight instead of Flash because of its better privacy controls and in order to achieve its design goals.

How Does it Work?

Headup's mission is to connect you with your friends' activities across different social networks and to learn about your likes and dislikes so that it can make recommendations for you. Headup will add little icons to items it recognizes, which can be names, songs, videos, etc.

You activate headup by clicking on these icons. If a friend likes a particular song on Last.fm, for example, it will give you the option to play the song in the headup window, see when the band will play in your town, and what your friends thought about the song. If headup recognizes a person, the pop-up will also give you information about their latest Twitter updates, or Last.fm plays.

After the install, headup already works without having you having to set anything up, but once you import your contacts, it will go out and look at your personal connections from Twitter, FriendFeed, or Gmail.

Headup can also make use of Yahoo's Fire Eagle geolocation service to provide you with relevant local information. Headup will also make a limited set of recommendations, though this is not the focus of the product. After it recognizes your tastes, for example, it can recommend YouTube videos you might like.

Headup smartly stays out of the way when you don't want to use it. Overall, headup is a very useful little tool and it will only get more powerful as Semantinet connect it to more services.

Invites

If you want to try headup yourself, head over to the beta sign-up page and use 'RWWCODE' as your invite code. Once you tried it out, feel free to let us know your thoughts about it in the comments.

SemantiNet Introducing: headup from SemantiNet Ltd on Vimeo

What We Know

We tried our best to get some information from the tight-lipped co-founders, but we were only able to get a few details out of Dag and Adam:

• Consumer play: Siri is working on commercializing the results of the SRI-led CALO project. This project was part of a DARPA program call PAL. The goal of this project was to synthesize the current state of artificial intelligence research and to develop a "personalized assistant that learns."
• Goal: Siri wants to change the 'personal interaction paradigm' for the internet. Tom Gruber has talked about the need for this at length during a talk at SemTech 2008 earlier this year. In this talk, Gruber focuses on bringing 'intelligence to the interface' and creating products that are personalized and context-aware. Judging from this and the work of the CALO project, we expect Siri to have a strong information management aspect, combined with some novel interface ideas.
• Mobile: Based on our discussion with Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer, we think that there will be a strong mobile aspect to Siri's product and at least some emphasis on location awareness. Siri's beta signup page seems to confirm this suspicion.
• Partners: Siri currently has 12 hardware and software partners, all of which would be "names you already know."
• Launch: Siri is planning to release a public version of its product in the first half of 2009.

What Will Siri Do?

For now, that's all we know, but feel free to speculate about Siri's product in the comments. You can also sign up for Siri's public beta here.

In order to create this index of credible and trustworthy sites, Hakia is relying on volunteers. Hakia is specifically recruiting librarians, though it seems anybody can sign up, which could potentially leave the site open to spammers. Hakia asks submitters for their professional credentials, but it is not clear if the company will actually check these.

Hakia uses a very strict definition for what makes a site credible. To be included in the index, a site should have gone through a peer review process, not have any commercial bias, and the information should be current. The fact that Hakia insists on only adding peer reviewed sites should greatly enhances the signal-to-noise ratio of the search results.

Great Structured Results

In our tests, we were often impressed by hakia's ability to structure its regular search results. For 'Sarah Palin', for example, Hakia organizes the results by official websites, images, news, biography, awards, and speeches. A search for 'Portland, OR,' on the other hand, first displays general information about the city, images, transportation options, and restaurant guides.

All results now also feature images and user-generate content.

Whenever we tried to ask more general questions ("What is a blog?"), however, Hakia's results were often underwhelming and uneven. Sometimes we got results that were spot-on, while at other times, the results barely had anything to do with our query.

Hakia also introduced 'my hakia,' a personal start page which still looks a bit unfinished, but seems to rely on Hakia's expertise in structuring search results to give users more background information about current events.

Overall, we liked Hakia's updates and we are looking forward to the expansion of the 'credible sources' to other topics, as we were quite impressed with the results it returns already.