August 10th, 2009

Moving Data.gov towards the Semantic Web

Posted by Paul Miller @ 3:46 am

Categories: Open Data, Podcasts, Research, Semantic Web, Semantic Web People, Standards, Talking Semantics, Web 3.0

Tags: Government, Semantic Web, Podcasts, RDF, XML, Internet, Software/Web Development, Web Development, Paul Miller

Government transparency in all its forms would appear to be very much in vogue at present, spanning everything from the Obama administration’s Data.gov portal and Prime Ministerial pronouncements in the UK Parliament to municipal proclamations of openness in Vancouver and compelling grass-roots demonstrations by activists and even newspapers.

At the heart of many of today’s initiatives lie programmes to surface Government data for use and re-use by third parties. The ‘open’ in ‘Open Data’ is, of course, a very loaded term, and I’ve looked before at some of the ways in which data might become ‘open’ whilst remaining effectively useless. Nevertheless, Governments’ current enthusiasm for being seen to embrace transparency should certainly be both welcomed and encouraged, and there are real opportunities to work with Government in ensuring that today’s transparency fervour continues undiminished, whether by omission or commission.

Given the complex and varied nature of the data involved, and the obvious linkages between the entities (you and I, our communities, our schools, our hospitals) described in numerous different databases, there’s a clear opportunity for technologies and approaches from the Semantic Web community to play a significant role in simplifying the whole process of moving these legacy databases online.

Already interested in Open Government from previous roles, and (obviously!) committed to encouraging real-world adoption of semantic technologies, I’ve spent some time recently talking to a number of those involved. A number of those conversations are now available as podcasts, and I’ll continue to seek out fresh examples and perspectives to share.

My most recent podcast conversation, released today, is with Professor Jim Hendler and Dr Li Ding of the Tetherless World Constellation at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. The team at Rensselaer have been working with some of the US Federal Government’s data sets on Data.gov, and so far they’ve converted sixteen data sets from their original form, resulting in 2,927,398,352 freely available RDF triples and a number of demonstration applications.

Other conversations already released in the series include;

• David Eaves, talking about Vancouver’s commitment to Open Data
• John Sheridan, Head of e-Services at the UK Government’s Office of Public Sector Information, talking about his Department’s efforts to get Government data online
• Mark Birbeck, talking about work with the UK Government’s Central Office of Information to embed lightweight RDFa into workflows and web pages

Each offers an example of ways in which ‘open data’ contributes to Government transparency, or to increasing the value of the massive sunk investment in collecting, managing and curating the data upon which Governments depend. The Semantic Web’s notion of Linked Data (whether actually in RDF or not! ) offers a means to increase the utility of the data we have, without a massive programme of reengineering the systems used to manage it. The examples we see today, and the work of the individuals and teams with whom I have been speaking, will teach us a lot about how to make this work at Government scale.

June 17th, 2009

Nova Spivack interviews Wolfram Alpha's Russell Foltz-Smith

Posted by Paul Miller @ 1:26 pm

Categories: Commercialisation, Semantic Web, Semantic Web Companies, Semantic Web People

Tags:

Radar Networks attracted a fair degree of attention with their roll-out of Twine, and the company’s CEO has built a reputation as one of the more thoughtful thinkers in the space. Nova took to the stage at the Semantic Technology Conference today, not to talk about his own company or ideas, but to lead a conversation with Russell Foltz-Smith from Wolfram Research.

Wolfram Research, of course, is the company behind the recently launched Wolfram Alpha; a ‘computational knowledge engine’ that attracted a wave of attention that reached into the mainstream media.

“Putting all of the world’s computable knowledge; it sounds impossible… or over-confident, maybe. What is computable knowledge?”

“It’s ’systematic knowledge.’ It can be compared, contrasted, correlated, computed on. It’s not a movie review. Examples are classical physics, financial data and models, weather data and models… It’s not the latest opinion on who Britney Spears is dating. We don’t have a model to do anything with that in our system.”

Nova asks if it’s the difference between objective and subjective… Alpha deals with objective information. ‘Facts,’ almost?

Nova asks about sources, pointing to the example of Tibet; is it a ‘fact’ that Tibet that is part of China, or not… ?

“In the case of geo-political things, and religious things, we have to make choices… and allow the community to let us know whether they agree or not…” Couldn’t the system represent multiple views, tied to the diverse sources? Could we not show the different opinions, and allow the user to make informed decisions themselves?

Nova; “is the world’s computable knowledge infinite?”

Russell; “the foundation of computable knowledge is likely to be finite… The amount of knowledge that can be computed and generated from that is infinite…”

Nova; “I can see that maths could be finite. But geopolitics, health, etc… that’s much, much larger…”

Russell; “The instances seem very complex… Huge, but finite… I don’t want anyone to think we’ll have this done in ten years… It’s a long term thing.”

Nova; “Stephen [Wolfram] reckons it could be done in three years…?”

Nova; “Looking at the back end, the ontology seems to be implicit. I didn’t see any classes, just a lot of instances… a set of facts. As the team grows, how do you prevent people adding facts in different ways?”

Russell; “There are a set of stored facts; things you know about a city. But then there are computed facts that you couldn’t store in a traditional ontology.” Huh?

Nova; “Can you make a statement about what percent of the world’s computable knowledge is there today?”

Russell; “I can’t make a statement…”

Nova; “The syntax is quite interesting… but enigmatic. It wasn’t necessarily that the knowledge wasn’t there, but that I’d asked for it in the wrong way. Can’t you make a manual? … Stephen [Wolfram] said it would be an impossible task to write the manual… or to make a generic natural language on top.”

Nova; “In some cases a naive query will get you the answer, but maybe there’s a need for a layer that helps you when you don’t get what you want…”

Russell; “I think we’re getting close… we’re going to put an API out in the next few weeks, and hopefully someone will build the application using that to parse natural language and translate it for Alpha… Do we spend our time doing that, or putting more data and more models into the system… I reckon our time is best spent adding more data…”

Nova; “Is there a set of schemas or ontologies to link all of this stuff together?”

Russell; “There isn’t an ontology over the whole system… but within a domain there is structure… Is there some grand scheme that we have internally? Not really. The company has been doing this stuff for 23 years, so there’s a bit of a shared understanding internally.”

Examples keep coming back to mathematics… To succeed, Alpha has to offer compelling examples that are far broader…

Nova; “What about reasoning. You’ve said that you can derive additional knowledge. What kinds of reasoning is the system capable of?”

Russell; “I’d call it very simple reasoning. For example changing the currency based upon your geo-location… Is there any weak or strong AI in here? Not really. Could you build something like that? Probably. Will we? I don’t know…”

Nova; “Alpha seems to be a subset of Mathematica capabilities… Would you expand that, and bring a full Mathematica to the Web”

Russell; “It is, and there are plans to extend the capabilities. I don’t know if we’d go to a full-blown Mathematica on the web.”

Russell’s mentioning a subscription service for people working with more data, or needing more compute time. The public web site tends to time out a query in 4-8 (or 48?) seconds… The professional subscription version will have a monthly subscription version that will allow you to compute bigger questions. There will also be a pay-per-use API… and ‘primitive’ advertising. More advanced advertising, based on transactions, to be launched soon.

Nova; “Alpha’s really cool, but I want to do this on my own knowledge… inside an enterprise, inside a government agency…”

Russell; “We can roll out a custom Wolfram Alpha for those who want it behind the firewall. We will also let people upload their own data sets. We need to find a sensible way to let people do this…”

Nova; “There was a lot of hype - possibly my fault - around Alpha being a Google Killer. Obviously it’s not that. It’s something quite different. Who is the user, and what are they using it for?”

Russell; “Use will evolve, and it already has. There’s an obvious use by students, but the school year has just ended.

Nova; “Wolfram Alpha; now even Ph.D’s can cheat on their homework.”

Nova; “Are consumers using it? Obviously they’re having a play, but are they coming back and using it?”

Russell moves off to talk about academic use… Dodging the question?

Nova; “Are the financial capabilities in Alpha differentiated from the capabilities banks and investors already have in their vertical?”

Russell; “more sophisticated than a general finance web site, but probably less sophisticated than you’d find on a terminal in a bank.”

Nova; “Do I really need to know how long it would take an ant to get from San Francisco to Cairo?”

Russell; “Because of the way the system is engineered, it just keeps computing until it runs out of time. With simple queries you’ll get a lot of data. It just keeps computing.”

Nova; “What’s the big challenge, moving forward?”

Russell; “Setting priorities.”

Nova; “So let’s talk about Google. They made some aggressive marketing moves during the Alpha roll-out, and they’re continuing to roll products out to chip away… Do you think that what you’ve built is defensible, just because it’s hard… or can you defend it in other ways?”

Russell; “There are significant barriers to what we’re doing. Someone else could build this… but would they want to? That’s an open question.”

Nova; “Do you hope to work with other companies? Perhaps revenue share with them?”

Russell; “Obviously.”

Nova; “There’s been a lot of interest in how Alpha might connect with open standards and the Semantic Web…”

Russell; “If you want the platform to be used, we’ll have to do some of this stuff… RDF, OWL, etc could play a huge role.”

Nova; “Timeframe?”

Russell; “It’ll depend on pick-up of the API… which is due out in a few weeks.”

Nova; “So what’s the implication for education? It makes it possible to do some things without even thinking…”

Russell; “It’ll be a heated debate for a while… Some things are positive, some negative. There’s going to be a reorientation… It has to happen.”

Nova; “The danger is that if you delegate thinking [inside education] to a computation service… you may not actually understand enough to know if the answer that comes back is correct.”

Russell; “That’s a valid concern.”

Q&A

“You rely more on your computational engine than natural language… but you lay a lot of emphasis on the linguistics in your system. So if it’s not NLP what is it?”

Russell; “Domain linguistics, mainly; mathematical language, engineering language, etc… We think about how people describe things and search in these domains… and crawl the web looking for examples of how people use language in these domains.”

“Stephen is focussed on quality of data, which is important to a lot of people here. There aren’t a lot of tools. In addition to making your data store, I wonder if there might be scope to make some of your data curation tools available to the community, to improve the data out there.”

Russell; “Great point. Can we make these tools genuinely useful to people, without creating a support nightmare…”

April 8th, 2009

Ivan Herman discusses Semantic Web activity at the World Wide Web Consortium

Posted by Paul Miller @ 8:33 am

Categories: Podcasts, Semantic Web, Semantic Web People, Standards, Talking Semantics, W3C

Tags: W3C, Ivan Herman, Semantic Web, Internet, Paul Miller

Ivan Herman is Semantic Web Activity Lead at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and in this podcast he talks about a range of current activities across the Semantic Web community.

March 4th, 2009

Dame Wendy Hall talks about Web Science

Posted by Paul Miller @ 6:17 am

Categories: Podcasts, Research, Semantic Web, Semantic Web People

Tags: Web, Computer Science, Computer, Dame Wendy Hall, Channel Management, Productivity, Marketing, Paul Miller

I must admit that I’ve tended to be rather sceptical about the whole topic of ‘Web Science,’ as proposed by the University of Southampton and MIT through their shared Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI).

My initial view was that we really don’t need yet another academic subject just to ‘permit’ us to study the Web, and that we’re perfectly well served by the Computer Scientists, Anthropologists, Sociologists, Economists, Psychologists and Neuroscientists that already seek to understand both the Web and its impact upon all of us.

Dame Wendy Hall is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton, and currently President of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Together with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Professor Nigel Shadbolt and Daniel J. Weitzner she is a Founding Director of the Web Science Research Initiative.

I spoke with Wendy last week to learn more about Web Science and her views on the Semantic Web, and the result has just been released as a podcast.

During the conversation she speaks persuasively of the need to bring researchers from diverse disciplines together in a space that is not labelled ‘Computer Science,’ and to find the hooks that will appeal to groups and individuals put off by the nature of gatherings where Computer Science - and Computer Scientists - tend to dominate.

So maybe Web Science isn’t an unnecessary ‘new’ subject, but a label for something that’s already happening; a label that provides institutional credibility to an area of research whilst simultaneously allowing the Anthropologist working to understand our use of Twitter to reassure her friends that she’s really not doing Computer Science!

December 8th, 2008

Mark Greaves of Vulcan sees business opportunities in the Semantic Web

Posted by Paul Miller @ 11:35 am

Categories: Commercialisation, Investment, Open Data, Podcasts, Research, Semantic Web, Semantic Web Companies, Semantic Web People, Standards, Talking Semantics, W3C

Tags: Knowledge, Vulcan, Mark Greaves, Semantic Web, Podcasts, Strategy, Aerospace & Defense, Internet, Management, Manufacturing

Vulcan shares many traits with its reclusive founder, Paul Allen, yet behind the scenes the company is responsible for philanthropic support to research and community-building activities, as well as investing commercially in the likes of Radar Networks (the company behind Twine) and Evri.

Last week, I had the opportunity to talk with Mark Greaves, Vulcan’s Director of Knowledge Systems Research, and the resulting podcast was released earlier today.

Drawing upon a background that includes the likes of Boeing and DARPA, Greaves is persuaded of the benefits to be found in applying semantic technologies to existing business problems and processes.

Greaves identifies four broad areas ripe for development;

• Search
• Enterprise Information
• Social Semantic Web Applications
• Web-scale Knowledge Publishing

It will be interesting to see the extent to which Vulcan - and others - invest in these areas next year.

December 8th, 2008

Semantic Web Gang looks back at 2008; favours both infrastructure and lightweight apps

Posted by Paul Miller @ 5:42 am

Categories: Open Data, Podcasts, Semantic Web, Semantic Web Companies, Semantic Web Gang, Semantic Web People

Tags: Semantic Web, Podcasts, Internet, Paul Miller

Looking back over 2008, the Semantic Web Gang found much to discuss in their last podcast of the year.

A year that began with a $42million investment in Metaweb continued with Yahoo!’s support for semantic technologies, Microsoft’s purchase of Powerset, and the release of much-hyped Twine. We also saw a plethora of events focussed on Semantic Technologies of all stripes, with a refreshing growth in those targeted toward a business audience supplementing the already rich stream of academic and technical gatherings.

Toward the end of the podcast Gang members consider their personal semantic technology highlights from 2008, and end up pretty evenly split in considering the relative importance of infrastructural underpinnings such as Calais and SearchMonkey on the one hand, and light weight user-facing applications such as Zemanta and Glue on the other.

What were your highlights for the year?

November 28th, 2008

Hapax CEO recognises importance of shared infrastructure moving forward

Posted by Paul Miller @ 3:48 am

Categories: Commercialisation, Semantic Web, Semantic Web Companies, Semantic Web People, Standards

Tags: Natural Language Processing, Advertisement, Brand, Ontology, Amplify, Branding, Marketing, Paul Miller

I had an enjoyable conversation with Mark Redgrave recently, ahead of his company’s unveiling of their ‘meaning platform,’ Amplify.

Mark is CEO of London-based Hapax, a company that has been applying patented technology to natural language processing (NLP) since 2000.

According to the Press Release,

“Amplify is a web service that brings human understanding to content. Amplify analyses content and returns its meaning in a usable and actionable structure. Amplify enables brands, advertisers and publishers to extract greater value from online content, allowing them to ensure brand safety and target more effectively.

By applying its meaning platform to the online advertising industry, Amplify can eliminate the guesswork in brand safety and targeting decisions. Using patented computational linguistics technology, Amplify enables publishers, social networks, ad networks and media agencies to automatically surface the significant topics, attitudes and pending decisions within any text. Whether to enhance existing targeting mechanisms, create a safe advertising environment or build brand specific products, Amplify provides the core foundation: the meaning of content.”

Amplify is currently being tested by ‘a couple of big Ad networks,’ and an open API is expected in the New Year, which will enable web developers to call upon Amplify within their own applications. This will be free below a certain number of transactions, and chargeable for more intensive use.

There are a lot of companies in the NLP space, and a lot of those are like Hapax in recognising the opportunities for both Advertising and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Unlike less advanced solutions that might indiscriminately place advertising for a particular hotel chain on web pages mentioning hotels or cities where the chain has a presence, the emerging generation of NLP-backed solutions are more accurate. Do you want to prominently advertise your hotel on a page discussing crime at the location? Or on a site bemoaning the soulless nature of hotel chains such as yours?

As Redgrave commented,

“This is the missing part of the jigsaw - until now, online advertising has relied on making assumptions based on very limited data. Existing classification techniques such as keyword or statistical analysis provide only half the story as they’re unable to capture the actual meaning. Amplify can now do this - not just accurately but also on a massive scale.”

Sitting beneath Amplify - and almost all of its competitors - is an ontology. This provides Amplify with much of its understanding of the world, and captures the meanings and structures that it will use as the basis of interpreting any text it is given for analysis.

These ontologies tend to be painstakingly constructed, and there is currently very little evidence that companies are pooling their efforts in order to reduce duplication, cut costs, and produce more comprehensive shared offerings. I talked about this elsewhere, recently, and noted at the time that Redgrave was unusual in the readiness with which he recognised the need to pool effort on the general background information that every ontology probably starts out by defining.

November 10th, 2008

Dapper incentivises structuring of web data with MashupAds

Posted by Paul Miller @ 1:17 pm

Categories: Commercialisation, Semantic Web Companies, Semantic Web People

Tags: Web, Data, Channel Management, Marketing, Paul Miller

Amit Kumar, the ‘father of SearchMonkey’ when he was Director for Product Management at Yahoo! Search, is now VP for Product Management at Dapper and clearly he is still finding the carrots with which to entice content owners to semantically structure their data.

Dapper announced MashupAds today, also releasing a video to explain their solution.

In this case, increased context and rigour in the data on a web site should lead to more relevant and targeted advertising; with higher revenue as a result.

Both ReadWriteWeb and TechCrunch provide more detail.

November 4th, 2008

Semantic Web Gang talks to Twine CEO and Chief Architect

Posted by Paul Miller @ 7:23 am

Categories: Commercialisation, Podcasts, Semantic Web Companies, Semantic Web Gang, Semantic Web People

Tags: Radar, Semantic Web, Aerospace & Defense, Internet, Manufacturing, Paul Miller

Following the public launch of Radar Networks’ Twine toward the end of last month, October’s episode of the Semantic Web Gang features a conversation with Radar’s Nova Spivack and Jim Wissner.

The hour long discussion covers some of the ways in which Twine could generate revenue, as well as exploring the role played by semantic technology in the company’s future plans.

October 20th, 2008

Radar Networks opens Twine to the world with version 1.0

Posted by Paul Miller @ 10:07 pm

Categories: Commercialisation, Investment, Semantic Web, Semantic Web Companies, Semantic Web People, Web 2.0, Web 3.0

Tags: Network, Radar, Beta, Radar Networks, Twine, Twine 1.0, Aerospace & Defense, Semantic Web, Networking, Manufacturing

Less than a year after its unveiling at last year’s Web 2.0 Summit, and a mere eight months after closing a $13 million Series B funding round, Radar Networks‘ Twine today moves out of beta as a 1.0 Release, open to all comers.

The ‘Semantic Web’ with which it was so closely associated (an association that has attracted flak) at the outset is almost nowhere to be seen, and this is bound to incite a further round of criticism, nay-saying, and mud slinging. What many of those critics forget, though, is that this is quite explicitly billing itself as a consumer application.

If my mother, my brother or my children can ’see’ the Semantic Web, it has failed - big time.

Talking with Radar Networks’ CEO Nova Spivack ahead of today’s launch, he was keen to stress the

“big focus in this release upon usability.”

Twine is billing itself as

“a place to keep up with your interests”

A company briefing document suggests;

“Radar Networks is a venture-funded startup focused on ‘interest networking’ – the practice of connecting with others around the topics we care about most.

If a social network is about who we are interested in, an interest network is about what we are interested in.

The company’s first product, Twine, is the logical next step beyond a social network – It connects people around the content they find interesting.”

The team has invested a lot of effort in easing new users into Twine, and streamlining workflow once inside. There’s still some work to do; frankly the interest feed is a pain to keep ‘caught up’ when you are subscribed to a sizeable number of twines; especially given users’ penchant for cross-posting items to multiple twines, most of which you’re also likely to be subscribed to. It’s fixable, though, and this release is a significant step forward from earlier iterations in the beta process. [Update, 0017 PST, 21 October: responding to this post, Nova Spivack tells me that enhancements to the interest feed will be rolling out over the next 24 hours.]

Twine 1.0 is definitely noticeably faster than previous releases, with Spivack suggesting that the site was

“1,000 times faster than last week”

Writing late on Monday evening in the UK as the Twine team add the last lick of Californian paint, I am still seeing the site occasionally slow to a crawl, but I’m not going to hold that against them. The site is technically still in beta as I write. If it’s still slow after this post sees the light of day, then I’ll complain.

As with so many ’social’ sites, it can be difficult to clearly communicate value to a new user. Indeed, for many sites there is no value for a new user until they have invested significant effort in manually constructing their network. Twine is a little different, and the new signup screen encourages prospective users to enter some of their interests before actually signing up.

Straightaway, a prospective user is able to discover information that others have added to Twine. Behind the scenes, the semantic technologies that make Twine work are doing what they do best; without the user having to concern themselves. If interested in what they see, the visitor is then able to work through a straightforward sign-up process and begin to realise the additional benefits of connecting to other members and registering with subject threads (’twines’) of interest in order both to post material of their own and to receive updates from other members of the twine.

Once a member, there are two main - linked - functions within Twine. The first is tracking and commenting upon content posted to twines by other people, and the second is bookmarking content that you discover out on the web.

New items and comments posted to twines of interest are visible in the Interest Feed that greets you each time you log in to Twine, as well as in optional email alerts, RSS feeds and the like. On the basis of user behaviour, Twine will also begin to recommend people and twines that may be of interest, and Spivack notes that an upcoming release will greatly enhance this feature by explaining why the recommendations are being made. In the same way as you can with Amazon, it would be useful to be able to declare non-interest in these recommendations, so that particular people and twines do not recur.

A simple bookmarklet enables Twine users to post items of interest into Twine. Around 50% of all twines are private and restricted to an individual or a group. The rest are public, and open to be read by anyone with a web browser. This example shows the result of trying to submit a page from the BBC. In this case, all of the text has been auto-generated by Twine, and all that I need to do is select the twine(s) and/or people with which I wish to share, and (optionally) add a comment of my own before saving. The result is as below (click to see the real thing), where you can see Twine’s power beginning to express itself in the series of facets and tags down the right hand side;

Items can also be submitted by email, and in an upcoming release Twine will be able to directly consume RSS.

During the beta programme, Twine has grown in size, complexity and utility. According to Radar Networks, they have seen 500,000 unique visitors during the beta, 50,000 of whom are described as ‘active’ in adding over 1,000,000 items to 20,000 twines.

More than half of those users originate outside the United States, and they tend (around 75%) to be male, well educated, comfortably employed, and between 31 and 50 years of age; a pretty good demographic to monetise, in other words.

Turning to monetisation, Spivack suggested that;

“social networks do not monetise because you’re basically there to communicate”

Twine, on the other hand,

“is different, because you’re there to keep up on a topic. [You might therefore welcome] targeted advertising around that topic”

Spivack reports that the company is actively signing up a variety of partners looking to benefit from Radar’s patent pending recommender system, and he expects the first adverts to begin to appear early next year.

Other features due in enhancements that are expected to roll out each month from now on include the release of an API and far more investment in making existing semantics or structure work that much harder.

As soon as November, for example, Spivack suggests that the company will release a new mining system that will use Natural Language Processing (NLP) to do a far better job of parsing information from pages that Twine users bookmark into the system.

During 2009, Spivack suggests that we will

“start to see the other 90% of our Platform.”

Into 2009, users will gain the ability to create far more item ‘types’ (events, product data, etc,) and a public API that’s already operational within the company will include capabilities such as the import of existing third party ontologies.

The API is apparently fully RESTful, and

“similar to Freebase.”

One (unnamed) partner is using the API to integrate Twine into Microsoft Office. Powerset, anyone?

Despite alluding to similarities, Spivack was quick to stress that he has

“No interest in doing what Freebase is doing… building an encyclopaedic view of the world. [He would] much rather make it easy to pull Freebase data into Twine.”

Twine has come a long way since I first saw it. As with all complex applications, some rough edges remain, but there is certainly enough utility for the avid hoarder of ’stuff’ to get to work populating their twines today. Is it for everyone? No, probably not. But for all those people who want to track a professional subject, a hobby, or their favourite band, there’s something here. For people who want to do those things, and who see the value of doing it along with similarly enthused individuals around the planet, there’s even more.

The Semantic Web’s technologies lie behind Twine. Sometimes you can almost see that, if you know where to look. Often you can’t. Given Spivack’s ambitions for 2009, the semantics in Twine are going to get a whole lot richer. The trick will be adding that richness whilst ensuring that the application continues to get demonstrably faster and more usable at the same time.

See Radar Networks’ overview of Twine functionality in this short video, and listen to Radar Networks’ CEO Nova Spivack talking to me about the Semantic Web several months before Twine was announced

Nova Spivack will be joining October’s episode of the Semantic Web Gang to report on the first week of full operation, and to discuss the company’s next moves.