June 16th, 2009

Semantic Technology Conference kicks off with Keynotes from Open Calais and Siri

Posted by Paul Miller @ 9:54 am

Categories: Commercialisation, Open Data, Semantic Web, Semantic Web Companies, Web 2.0, Web 3.0

Tags: Web, Advertisement, Tool, Siri, Tom Tague, Tague, Enterprise Adoption, Virtual Personal Assistant, Virtual Personal Assistant Paradigm, Podcasts

This year’s Semantic Technology Conference got fully underway this morning, with Keynote presentations from Tom Tague of Thomson Reuters’ Open Calais Initiative and Tom Gruber from Siri.

Despite the wider economic situation, attendance for this fifth year of the event feels a little up on last year, and there’s clearly real enthusiasm in the buzzing Halls.

Tague’s Open Calais has been one of the success stories for useful and easy application of semantic technologies beyond a core community of enthusiasts and adopters, and has been covered here and on Cloud of Data a number of times since it launched. Just today, they announced a new set of partners and a postal service that should remove one more perceived barrier for another set of potential adopters.

Speaking to the theme of ‘Web 3.0 - the Web of Me,’ Tague’s abstract suggests;

“The mainstream adoption of Web 2.0 technologies – from RSS feeds to social networks – is hastening the demise of the portal. With each new face on Facebook, and each new Twitter account, our once routine habits and traffic patterns shift. This wave of change in the way we consume, transact and interact on the Web is dis-intermediating ‘destination’ sites of all kinds. Our once centralized content has been atomized.

And yet our fundamental problem persists. We’re overwhelmed with input, yet still can’t find the one thing we need… now.

Semantic technologies – and the content interoperability and Linked Data connections they beget – offer new hope. That is not to say the answer lies in building new search engines, and few would argue for another news aggregator. Rather, our point of inflection lies at the point of consumption. Our task is to simultaneously refine and enrich our digital experience of everything from content and community to commerce.”

Early on, Tague made a ‘non-apologetic statement;’

“People need to start deriving financial benefits from semantic technology. It’s time”

Absolutely!

Tague looks back at the move from ‘Web 1.0,’ described as ‘the last Web we agreed on,’ to ‘Web 2.0,’ which he sees as largely defined by the ‘addition of social.’ Today, he reckons, we are ‘extraordinarily content-rich’, ‘extraordinarily information-poor’ and ‘experientially deficient.’ Despite a wealth of content, we are failing to make the most of it.

‘We’re at the inflection point’ where ‘innovation is exploding’ as we move from developing and inventing toward mainstream adoption of technologies in the semantic technology space. Lots of things will be tried; 90% will fail, but that’s ok.

‘Everyone needs plumbing,’ and that’s what Calais is; semantic plumbing. 13 version releases in 18 months; about 100 presentations, 13,000 registered Open Calais developers, a million great ideas.

Tague reckons the various efforts he comes in contact with fall into six broad buckets;

Tools; Social; Advertising; Search; Publishing; Interface.

First, Enabling Tools. Data Management, Data generation, Databases, Integration and workflow. ‘A big yes.’ ‘We need tools.’ Everyone needs tools, especially as you move from early adopters toward the mainstream. Tools build the bridges that cross the chasm to enterprise adoption.

Enterprise adoption will not happen because it’s cool. Enterprise adoption will not be talked about on Twitter. Enterprise adoption will happen because it’s cheaper/faster/better than what they have just now.

‘Tool vendors need to simplify their story; it’s not about more functionality.’ ‘If I can’t understand your story, then Enterprise IT certainly can’t’

Second, ‘let’s put some frosting on top of social.’ ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if we could…’ Some of it might be cool, but there’s a challenge in monetising social. Adding frosting to the top of an industry that hasn’t worked out its own monetisation is fraught with risk.

‘I haven’t seen a compelling story yet.’

Next, advertising. Almost a dirty word in the semantic technology domain last year. But advertising is fuel, and semantic technologies have a clear role to play in enhancing advertising (see my podcast with Scott Brinker from last year…).

Semantic search; ‘the semantic industry’s brilliant yet under-achieving child.’ The answer to a question no one is asking? General, consumer-facing semantic search… directly competing with Google et al? Not viable.

But vertical search in specific domains… a huge growth opportunity, and people are willing to invest the time, effort and money to make it happen. Room for a handful of players in each domain?

Search; ‘a bifurcated marketplace.’

Publishing; content producers, editorial/aggregation, ‘robotic publishing.’

‘Classic publishers can get enormous value from this technology… not all of the value is in the user experience.’ Much of the value is being found in the back office, making existing data and investments work harder.

Little value in ‘robotic publishing,’ because the content isn’t that readable. Aggregation services like Huffington Post and Daily Me present ‘enormous opportunities.’

Interface; gaming a huge and growing market. $57bn industry. A ’seamless, interactive and responsive experience,’ it’s ‘graphically engaging and fun.’

Zemanta, AdaptiveBlue, Feedly, Apture et al ‘trying to make the consumption experience different’ [better?]. Not suggesting that these are like a game, but many of the drivers may be similar?

“People are on their mobile devices and in the browser; go where the people are.” Which links well to the next keynote…

“Do you care about semantics or about user value?”

“Don’t fund/buy semantic infrastructure beyond what you need; use infrastructure built by others where possible.”

“Think very hard about the user experience; make it compelling and exciting.”

Following Tague’s presentation, Tom Gruber took to the stage to talk about Siri; a company building a Virtual Personal Assistant (with an interesting iPhone app to start things off) that we discussed during a podcast last week. As Gruber’s says;

“We are beginning to see a new interaction paradigm for the web: the Virtual Personal Assistant (VPA). A VPA is task focused: it helps you get things done. You interact with it in natural language, in a conversation. It gets to know you, acts on your behalf, and gets better with time. The VPA paradigm builds on the information and services of the web, with new technical challenges of semantic intent understanding, context awareness, service delegation, and mass personalization.

Siri is a virtual personal assistant for the mobile Internet. Although just in its infancy, Siri can help with some common tasks that human assistants do, such as booking a restaurant, getting tickets to a show, and inviting a friend. We will describe the technology underlying Siri and how it fits in the larger ecosystem of services and data providers. And we will offer a vision of where assistants like Siri are going.”

Tom starts off by showing the Knowledge Navigator video from Apple… which dates all the way back to 1987. Many of the ideas are now coming to fruition; touch screens, a global network, awareness of temporal and social context, speech in and out, a ‘conversational interface,’ ‘delegation of work’ to the machine, and trusted use of personal data.

Is the Knowledge Navigator possible today? ‘No, but we’re getting there.’

Siri is pretty close… in certain well understood contexts, as Gruber shows in a video demo of the evolving iPhone application.

What is a Virtual Personal Assistant? It does things for you; it’s task-oriented. It understands your intent via a conversational metaphor. It gets to know you; it’s not the same for everybody, unlike a search engine.

‘Service delegation [like Siri]; the mother of all mashups’

‘Context is king’ in communicating with a VPA; where am I, what time is it, who am I, etc.

“This really is the beginning of the age of the start of Virtual Assistants.”

Need to solve authorisation/ authentication. If we reach a ‘data commons’ there will be more, better, information to drive choices and decisions.

Tom Tague is a regular member of the Semantic Web Gang podcast, which I moderate. Tom Gruber was the latest guest in my Executive Briefing podcast series.

April 3rd, 2009

AdaptiveBlue updates Glue; I avoid 'sticky' puns with this title

Posted by Paul Miller @ 6:19 am

Categories: Semantic Web Companies, Web 2.0, Web 3.0

Tags: Film, Web Browser, Web Browsers, Wiki, Social Networking, Internet, Online Communications, Marketing, Advertising & Promotion, Paul Miller

New York-based semantic technology startup AdaptiveBlue yesterday unveiled an update to their Glue product, and the world’s technology writers were unable to contain their enthusiasm for the obvious puns. I spoke with AdaptiveBlue’s CEO, Alex Iskold, ahead of the launch to hear about the latest enhancements.

Currently offering an iPhone App and a Firefox browser extension, Glue provides useful functionality in aggregating interactions with identifiable objects such as films and books from across the various sites on which people find with them. As I described when Glue originally launched last year,

“There are plenty of offerings that will put you in touch with your social network on a single site. Glue is interesting because it escapes the tyranny of the site and connects people to things across a growing number of sites. My interactions with Social Networks and the Semantic Web on Amazon.com are visible to members of my network who prefer to shop with Barnes&Noble, and those who are amongst the 32 owners of this book hanging out on LibraryThing. My personal preferences are respected, as I only need to interact with the item on a site of my choosing. Members of my network gain the ‘benefit’ of that interaction without needing to change their habits and visit sites of my choosing. Behind the scenes, semantic technologies are hard at work reconciling the 0387710000 with the 978-0387710006, the 4561465 and the various other ways in which we choose to refer to a single body of intellectual expression. When a match is found, the Glue Firefox plugin does a nice job of subtly highlighting the fact… without getting in the way of whatever task you are trying to complete.”

Since that launch there have been 110,000 downloads of the browser extension, and Alex reports 35,000 ‘active’ users.

Yesterday’s visible additions to the product mostly appear quite superficial, but they’ll be important in converting more of those downloaders to active users, especially once the pool of potential users is expanded by the upcoming version for Internet Explorer.

First, the Glue Bar at the top of a browser window is 25% thinner. Even though the Glue Bar is ‘contextual,’ and only appears on pages where relevant content (a book, a film, a person, etc) is detected, the old version could still intrude quite a long way into the browsing experience. For those who actively engage with the bar only occasionally, it’s now an awful lot less intrusive and therefore more likely to be tolerated in day-to-day browsing for the benefits it brings.

More significantly, the ‘2 cent’ comments that users of the previous version were able to make are now aggregated and made far more visible to other Glue users via what Iskold described as ‘Connected Conversations.’ As with the core Glue offer, users’ 2 cent comments about a film on Netflix, Wikipedia or IMDB are pulled together and made visible to their peers, regardless of the site on which they happen to be viewing details of the same film. These comments can also be shared via a user’s social graph on Twitter, Tumblr and Friendfeed, reaching a community beyond Glue.

By aggregating the interactions of every Glue user with items scattered across the Web, Glue is also now able to compile - and display - lists of the most popular books, films, etc. Unlike traditional measures that might track rentals from Netflix and sales from Amazon, Glue is able to measure a far more complex set of interactions with a given resource. Users might buy from Amazon or rent from Netflix. They might also demonstrate their interest by reading about a film on Wikipedia or IMDB… and Glue would track those interactions too. Below, for example, we can see that Knowing is the most popular film on Glue this week.

These lists are calculated daily, and are based upon the aggregate of all user activity over the preceding seven days.

The list of sites that Glue understands is growing, but remains heavily biased to the US market. Alex suggested that the team were keen to consolidate their US position before devoting more attention to adding international sources. However, with a Glue API to follow their Internet Explorer release, it’s possible that a sufficiently motivated community will soon be able to start adding some of these new resources for themselves…

November 11th, 2008

With Glue, AdaptiveBlue frees us from the tyranny of the site

Posted by Paul Miller @ 5:58 am

Categories: Investment, Semantic Web Companies, Web 2.0

Tags: Network, Site, Semantic Web, Social Networking, Networking, Internet, Online Communications, Marketing, Advertising & Promotion, Paul Miller

Glue from AdaptiveBlue has been out since late last month, and various sites have provided reviews of this useful little tool. See, for example, Dan Farber, Chris Morrison, Sarah Perez, and Jennifer Zaino.

I am not going to write another review. I would, however, recommend that you give Glue a try, and congratulate the AdaptiveBlue team on closing a $4.5million Series B round that sees existing investors Union Square Ventures increase their contribution and welcomes RRE Ventures.

For me Glue is a compelling example of putting semantic technologies to work in ways that quietly help the user to enjoy a more compelling experience, without getting in the way.

There are plenty of offerings that will put you in touch with your social network on a single site. Glue is interesting because it escapes the tyranny of the site and connects people to things across a growing number of sites. My interactions with Social Networks and the Semantic Web on Amazon.com are visible to members of my network who prefer to shop with Barnes&Noble, and those who are amongst the 32 owners of this book hanging out on LibraryThing. My personal preferences are respected, as I only need to interact with the item on a site of my choosing. Members of my network gain the ‘benefit’ of that interaction without needing to change their habits and visit sites of my choosing. Behind the scenes, semantic technologies are hard at work reconciling the 0387710000 with the 978-0387710006, the 4561465 and the various other ways in which we choose to refer to a single body of intellectual expression. When a match is found, the Glue Firefox plugin does a nice job of subtly highlighting the fact… without getting in the way of whatever task you are trying to complete.

It’s nicely done, but the pool of sites that the back-end technology understands is still (relatively) small… and pretty dominated by US stores. Clearly AdaptiveBlue have a lot of work to do in order to grow the number of sites on which the plugin is activated. The company’s AB Meta format will presumably be one part of a concerted push to devolve that work out to site owners themselves, although there must surely be opportunities to capitalise upon the work over at Yahoo! around SearchMonkey. Could Glue re-use some of that structure, some day soon?

Disclosure: AdaptiveBlue CEO Alex Iskold is a member of the Semantic Web Gang, which I chair

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.

September 15th, 2008

US money heads to European startup, Zemanta

Posted by Paul Miller @ 1:33 pm

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

Tags: Investment, Zemanta, Social Networking, Semantic Web, Online Communications, Marketing, Advertising & Promotion, Internet, Paul Miller

This morning’s feeds carried repeated mentions of a new (and relatively small) investment in a young startup called Zemanta. In itself, nothing that interesting. The story had added bite, though, because the investor was American and the startup European. Not Irish, or Dutch, or British, or French, or German. But Slovene. Around the world, readers scrabbled for atlases; atlases that stood a fair chance of being older than this young and energetic country.

The ever-reliable VentureBeat got the story early, reporting that;

“[Fred] Wilson’s firm Union Square Ventures just announced it’s investing an undisclosed seed round in the startup.”

TheNextWeb.org followed up, and reported the investment as $700,000, or almost €0.5M. Mike Butcher over at TechCrunch UK reports the sum as a smaller $650,000. In either case Zemanta has attracted over $2M in the past year, having come out of Seedcamp last year to attract investment from European funds at Eden Ventures and The Accelerator Group. The company’s own blog has more on the subject, as does Union Square’s Fred Wilson.

Discussing all of this with Zemanta Founder and CTO, Andraž Tori, he commented;

“The money will be used to improve our US business presence.

We’ll keep improving our contextual analysis and interface.”

An update to Zemanta’s core product is expected this week. Tori said,

“In three days we are releasing personalisation - recommendations based on the author’s social network context.

Using the author’s social network context when doing text analysis and understanding is really exciting new ground!”

Indeed it could be. Andraž suggested that this would be achieved by integrating with existing and future APIs from relevant social networking sites, and it will be intriguing to see how well this works in practice.

And I know where Slovenia is. I’ve been!

Zemanta Founder and CTO Andraž Tori has an article in the current issue of Nodalities Magazine. In ‘New Web Cambrian Explosion’ he argues of the need for applied Semantic Web technologies.

A partner from Union Square Ventures will be joining the Semantic Web Gang later this week, for an episode of the monthly podcast that will be exploring investment opportunities in the Semantic Web space.

August 5th, 2008

Everywhere I look, I see Clouds

Posted by Paul Miller @ 2:30 am

Categories: Open Data, Semantic Web, Web 2.0, Web 3.0

Tags: Software, Web, Cloud Computing, Web 3.0, Cloud, Linked Data Movement, Channel Management, Marketing, Paul Miller

No, not a comment on the weather in East Yorkshire this ’summer,’ but rather a reflection on the recent eruption of content related to Cloud computing. Having taken a long weekend away from the computer, punctuated by occasional iPhone-powered checking of my feeds to sate the addiction, it really did feel as if there was a new Cloud computing post near the top of the pile every time I looked.

First up was a great piece from fellow ZDNet blogger, Dion Hinchcliffe. In ‘Enterprise cloud computing gathers steam‘, Dion writes about the Cloud’s ability to lower IT costs within the enterprise and accelerate technological innovation at the same time.

“Interestingly, it’s at this very intersection of issues that cloud computing appears especially compelling. By offering easy access to more efficient IT capabilities across computing, storage, and applications while providing direct and immediate access to both external innovation and innovation capability, cloud computing offers an on-demand, scalable, and repeatable resource that can be used the solve two of the major challenges facing IT departments today. We’ll see in a moment how cloud computing can help with these issues in ways that traditional on-premises computing is hard pressed to match.”

Dion’s piece was followed (at least in my reading, if not necessarily chronologically) by a guest post on TechCrunchIT by Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff. In ‘Welcome to Web 3.0: Now Your Other Computer is a Data Center‘, Mark paints a compelling picture of the shift back to shared compute resources;

“For almost ten years now, we have been witnessing a decisive shift from client-server software to software as a service. Google, eBay, and Amazon.com established the value of multi-tenant internet applications in the consumer market, and salesforce.com, Google, and others have been proving that this same multi-tenant model is winning in the enterprise as well.”

Interestingly, especially in the context of this blog, Mark makes use of the ‘Web 3.0′ moniker… but in a very different way;

“This shift to Web-based applications has generated two powerful waves so far. Now, we are seeing a third wave—one that we are calling Web 3.0—and it may prove to be the most significant and disruptive yet to the traditional software industry.

While the world doesn’t need another buzzword, I feel that both the emerging generation of entrepreneurs and developers, as well as traditional software ISVs, need to grasp the enormity of Web 3.0 and its potential to create change, disruption, and opportunity. Web 3.0 is about replacing existing software platforms with a new generation of platforms as a service.”

He suggests that Web 1.0 was, fundamentally, a ‘transactional’ web; Web 2.0 a ‘participatory’ web; Web 3.0 a web in which anyone can innovate by calling upon shared resources in the Cloud.

“Web 3.0 changes all of this by completely disrupting the technology and economics of the traditional software industry. The new rallying cry of Web 3.0 is that anyone can innovate, anywhere. Code is written, collaborated on, debugged, tested, deployed, and run in the cloud. When innovation is untethered from the time and capital constraints of infrastructure, it can truly flourish.”

The transitions that Dion and Mark identify and describe are significant shifts in the IT industry. These shifts are as significant to the increasingly mainstream capabilities of the Semantic Web as elsewhere, although neither Dion nor Mark directly make that leap in their posts.

Discussing these posts internally, a colleague was quick to remind us that these huge hosted data centres are not just full of powerful servers. They’re full of data, ripe for interconnection and manipulation in very similar ways to those in which computers and software applications are already being meshed and combined. The Linked Data movement is increasingly central to the Semantic Web and it is a small step to move beyond its current projects to consider web-based applications that draw seamlessly upon these web-addressable pools of accessible and usable data.

Google did web developers, application users (and themselves) a huge favour when they formalised the apis that provided access to large bodies of map data. Mashups exploded, and everyone sat up and took notice of the opportunities for innovation boot-strapped upon the shared capabilities of Google’s code and servers, and the underlying data licensed by Google.

As more and more data - and compute capability - moves to the Cloud, and as the licensing frameworks formalise in order to explicitly ensure a wide range of re-use for those data, we’re moving ever closer to a mode in which software is available on demand (SaaS)… and so is data (and no, I’m not going to call it DaaS!)

This wealth of Web-addressable data needs web-native structures in which it can be stored and manipulated. The siloised mentality, code and structures of the RDBMS are unlikely to fit the bill here, whereas the web-native model of the Semantic Web is ready and waiting.

And yesterday evening, as I pretended to watch Dragons’ Den, a flurry of Cloud-related posts appeared in my BusinessWeek feeds to join the piece by Stacey Higginbotham that I wrote about last week.

Everywhere I look, I see Clouds. But the Dragons haven’t noticed yet.

And here in East Yorkshire? The sun might actually be coming out.

August 1st, 2008

Kevin Kelly looks to the next 5,000 days of the Web

Posted by Paul Miller @ 6:44 am

Categories: Semantic Web, Web 2.0, Web 3.0

Tags: Web, Kevin Kelly, Kevin, Channel Management, Semantic Web, Marketing, Internet, Paul Miller

Like most of us at Talis, I’m a big fan of the TED videos. There’s always a wow moment lurking in each of these recordings, and many of them do a great job of challenging assumptions. More often than not, they’re also powerful examples of how best to convey new ideas in presentation form.

Amongst the videos highlighted in the latest email alert from the TED team was this one, recorded at the Entertainment Gathering last December, in which Kevin Kelly notes that the Web is a mere 5,000 days old… and asks how we can predict what the next 5,000 will bring.

Mal Booth clearly got the same email, and was also impressed.

Kevin begins by looking back, reminding us about the extent to which things have changed in the past 5,000 days. He suggests that we could not have anticipated the services that have arisen, or the economic models by which they are supported.

He postulates the emergence of a global machine, more reliable than any other we have ever built. Within that machine, he suggests, we come together to navigate some 55 trillion links between documents, making 100 billion clicks per day and sending 2 million emails every second (most of which seem to arrive in my inbox!) As Tim Berners-Lee did in Beijing, Kelly draws parallels between the size of the Web and the size of the human brain. Kelly suggests that the size of the Web is doubling every year, such that the ‘total processing power… in raw bits’ of the Web will surpass that of humanity by 2040.

So how does this fit with the Semantic Web?

One of three broad trends that Kelly predicts for the next 5,000 days is a restructuring of the Web; a restructuring that Kelly argues is the Semantic Web.

He points to a progression from the pre-web linking of computers, to the web’s linking of pages, and on to the Semantic Web and the linking of the data lying behind pages and applications wherever they may be.

“You have to be open to having your data shared… which is a much bigger step than just sharing your web pages or your computer.”

“The next 5,000 days; it’s not going to be [just] the Web, only better.”

Worth 20 minutes of your time, to watch this…

July 31st, 2008

Crunchbase meets the Semantic Web

Posted by Paul Miller @ 9:47 am

Categories: Podcasts, Semantic Web, Talking Semantics, Web 2.0

Tags: Job, API, Crunchbase, Semantic Web, Recruitment & Selection, Internet, Human Resources, Workforce Management, Paul Miller

Technology web site TechCrunch is one of those staples (like ZDNet, of course) to which we all turn for news and analysis on the companies shaping the Web. Their CrunchBase directory provides a wealth of information on the companies and people featured in their stories (and elsewhere, as it’s editable by anyone), and they recently took the step of opening up an API to the data.

Amongst those taking advantage of the API is Semantic Web developer, Benjamin Nowack.

As he reports on his blog, Benji has created Semantic Crunchbase, an expression of the Crunchbase content as that ‘Linked Data’ about which Sir Tim Berners-Lee and others are currently so passionate. Remember,

“Linked Open Data is the Web done as it should be.”

Benji is continuing to add features to his demonstration, and will be blogging some of them (including the intriguing-sounding ‘Pimp my API‘) in future posts to his blog.

“Imagine [writes Nowack] you are looking for a job in California at a company that is at a specific funding stage. CrunchBase knows everything about companies, investments, and has structured location data. CrunchBoard on the other hand has job descriptions, but only a single field for City and State, and not the filter options to match our needs.”

And then stop imagining, and just run the query.

“This is where Linked Data shines. If we find a way to link from CrunchBoard to CrunchBase, we can use Semantic Web technology to run queries that include both sources. And with SPARQLScript, we can construct and leverage these links. Below is a script that first loads the CrunchBoard feed of current job offers (only the last 15 entries, due to common RSS’ limitations/practices, the use of e.g. hAtom could allow more data to be pulled in). In a second step, it uses the company name to establish a pattern join between CrunchBoard and CrunchBase, which then allows us to retrieve the list of matching jobs at stage-A companies with offices in California.”

For more information on Benji, listen to a podcast interview he did with my colleague Danny Ayers earlier this year.

July 16th, 2008

Yahoo! SearchMonkey Developer Challenge illustrates diversity

Posted by Paul Miller @ 10:01 am

Categories: Semantic Web, Web 2.0, Web 3.0

Tags: Developer, Yahoo! Inc., StumbleUpon, Semantic Web, Internet, Paul Miller

Back in May Yahoo! opened up their SearchMonkey platform, and kicked off a competition in which developers could put SearchMonkey through its paces.

The whole Yahoo! open platform initiative continues to grow apace (and largely unchallenged by Google and Microsoft), with BOSS rolling out earlier this month, and back in the SearchMonkey space the Developer Challenge’s winners have been announced.

According to UCLA student Marco Vitanza, who picks up the $10,000 Grand Prize for his Blogspot Infobar,

“SearchMonkey is a great first step towards the semantic web, creating the incentive for site owners to add semantic tags to their content while providing a richer, more useful search experience for users.”

Marco is joined by four other winners, one each for ‘Best Infobar’ (from BooRah), ‘Best Enhanced Result’ (from Greg Schechter, for Xbox.com), ‘Best Data Service’ (from David Hinckley), and most ‘Innovative Structured Data’ (from StumbleUpon).

StumbleUpon’s entry, for example, enriches results returned from Yahoo! Search, adding simple reviews and ratings from StumbleUpon to the Yahoo! page as illustrated by this screenshot from the Yahoo! Search Gallery listing for the entry.

Each entry takes a different path toward meshing data from diverse sources, yet each results in an end-user experience that is richer and more compelling than the vanilla search result from Yahoo! or either of their major competitors. With the arrival of BOSS, the ‘limitation’ of having this enriched interaction only available to those who happen to be on a Yahoo! Search web page diminishes, and opportunities for rich and innovative mashing and meshing of data in context and at the point of need draw ever closer.

Congratulations to this year’s winners, and to all those who entered; I look forward to seeing what those who follow them are capable of, and await responses from Mountain View and Redmond with anticipation.

April 29th, 2008

Sir Tim Berners-Lee addresses WWW2008 in Beijing

Posted by Paul Miller @ 6:48 am

Categories: Semantic Web, Semantic Web People, Standards, W3C, Web 2.0, Web 3.0

Tags: Web, Tim Berners-Lee, Channel Management, Marketing, Paul Miller

Speaking from the stage in China’s Great Hall of the People last Thursday evening, World Wide Web inventor and Director of the World Wide Web Consortium Sir Tim Berners-Lee shared some of his hopes for the Web with his audience of WWW2008 delegates, impeccably polite and ever-helpful conference volunteers and a collection of local dignitaries. Read the rest of this entry »