ReadWriteWeb

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

One of the first web design books I bought was Creating Killer Web Sites, a 90s classic by David Siegel. That book was known for pushing visual style over HTML standards. It also encouraged the use of HTML hacks, for example using tables to create layouts. Siegel's techniques were basically workarounds, but they just worked in an era when building web pages was painful due to browser incompatibilities.

In Siegel's latest book, Pull, he tackles the Semantic Web. Once again, Siegel plays loosely with existing web standards.

The book and media industries are going through interesting times, to put it mildly. As physical books prepare for their demise, the confusion around pricing of digital ones grows. Yet, whether physical or digital, to sell books you need marketing. People need to hear about a book before they buy it.

This is where the book review come in. Every publicist and publisher's dream is to land a positive review with an authoritative source. A good review in The New York Times or the L.A. Times used to be a pass to big figure sales. Sounds like it still should be, but it is not, because most book reviews are poorly formatted and cannot be recognized by Google and other software.

Over the last week we ran a series of posts outlining the five biggest Internet trends of this year: Structured Data, Real-Time Web, Personalization, Mobile Web / Augmented Reality, Internet of Things. Effectively this was ReadWriteWeb's State of the Web 2009.

We've now compiled the main points into a single presentation, available on Slideshare and embedded below. You can view the presentation in full screen by clicking the "full" button at the bottom of the presentation. You can also download the presentation as a Powerpoint file. All of the links in the presentation are clickable, should you wish to explore a certain topic more.

This week ReadWriteWeb will run a series of posts detailing what we think are the five biggest, most cutting-edge Web trends to come out of 2009. We'll be posting one trend analysis per day. Then at the end of the week we'll publish a major update to our standard presentation about web technology trends.

The first major Web trend we're looking at is Structured Data. In prior presentations, this has sometimes been referred to under the umbrella term of 'Semantic Web'. However the way 2009 has panned out so far, it's become clear that this trend is much more than the Semantic Web. In this post, we'll analyze the developments in Structured Data this year and provide you with 3 product examples: OpenCalais, Google, Wolfram Alpha.