ReadWriteWeb

Factual, a new open data project founded by Gilad Elbaz, just launched its public beta today. Elbaz's last company, Applied Semantics, was acquired by Google in 2003 and became one of the core components of the search giant's AdSense contextual advertising product. Factual, which is mostly geared towards developers, is somewhat similar to Freebase, though Factual allows for a more free-form approach to building a database than Freebase. Factual provides users and developers with tools to create, contribute and mash up open data on any subject.

Google Squared launched to a lot of hype earlier this year, but the initial reaction from most pundits was rather negative. Squared, which gathers and displays structured data, often returned rather nonsensical results, and we would venture to guess that only a few people are actually using it now. Today, Google announced some updates to Squared that should make it more useful. Now, if you do a search on Squared, for example, the results will contain up to 120 facts - up from 30 in the initial release.

Last week we ran a series of posts outlining the 5 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 5 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.

Editor's note: we offer our long-term sponsors the opportunity to write 'Sponsor Posts' and tell their story. These posts are clearly marked as written by sponsors, but we also want them to be useful and interesting to our readers. We hope you like the posts and we encourage you to support our sponsors by trying out their products. This one is by Hakia, one of the participants in the recent 2009 Semantic Technology Conference.

Participants in the 2009 Semantic Technology Conference walked away considering fundamental questions about what is and isn't semantic technology. The relevance of this post's title will hopefully become clear by the end to those of you mischievous readers who may have stumbled upon it with other ideas. The conference was a great and well-organized affair in San Jose, California. One of the highlights was the Semantic Search Keynote panel, with all of the major players on stage (Ask, Bing, Google, Hakia, TrueKnowledge, and Yahoo!), as seen in the picture below.

Three weeks ago Google demonstrated a new product in Labs called Google Squared; it's a search engine that creates structured data from big piles of information and lets users compare various things by their attributes. There have been suggestions that Google Squared will crush Wolfram Alpha. Well, Google Squared went live today and while it's a great idea, in reality the service doesn't look very useful. It doesn't look like it's going to crush anyone.

The user interface is inflexible, the data is odd looking and it's hard to imagine using Squared regularly. It's a great idea but we'll see where it goes.

During a talk at the New England Database Day conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Google's Alon Halevy admitted that the search giant has "not been doing a good job" presenting the structured data found on the web to its users. By "structured data," Halevy was referring to the databases of the "deep web" - those internet resources that sit behind forms and site-specific search boxes, unable to be indexed through passive means.

Faviki is a new social bookmarking tool that offers something that services like Ma.gnolia, del.icio.us, and Diigo do not - semantic tagging capabilities. What this means is that instead of having users haphazardly entering in tags to describe the links they save, Faviki will suggest tags to be used instead. However, unlike other services, Faviki's suggestions don't just come from a community of users and their tagging history, but from structured information extracted straight out of the Wikipedia database.

The Powerhouse Museum of Science and Design in Sydney, Australia has begun to utilize the Reuters Open Calais API (our coverage) to tag their collection. The museum's online collection database houses some 66,303 objects, so tagging them all by hand would be quite a task. By using the Open Calais web service, the museum is able to automate much of the process.

It was just a couple of weeks ago that Yahoo! announced that it would begin indexing semantic markup language such as microformats in its search engine. That's a huge win for the bottom-up approach to building the Semantic Web, and provides an incentive for publishers to start adopting semantic markup like RDF and microformats. As a publisher, Yahoo! is also eating its own dogfood, so to speak, and putting microformats to use on its own sites.