April 20th, 2009

Can semantic technologies help brands profit from social media?

Posted by Paul Miller @ 8:16 am

Categories: Commercialisation, Podcasts, Semantic Web, Talking Semantics

Tags: Brand, Social Media, Branding, Semantic Web, Marketing, Internet, Paul Miller

In my latest podcast interview with those shaping our evolving engagement with Semantic Technologies, I speak with Eric Hillerbrand.

Drawing upon years of experience in the development and deployment of Semantic Web solutions, Eric has spent the past few years considering the ways in which semantic technologies could bring structure and value to the increasingly visible online conversations around products and brands.

Have a listen, and share your views on the ways in which this might impact your brand, or your interaction with those of others.

April 16th, 2009

The Semantic Web Gang discuss ontologies

Posted by Paul Miller @ 1:42 pm

Categories: Podcasts, Semantic Web, Semantic Web Gang

Tags: Ontology, Semantic Web, Strategy, Internet, Management, Paul Miller

Back in October I wrote about the first Vocabulary Camp, or VoCamp. These informal gatherings have gone from strength to strength, and the fourth is currently underway on the Spanish island of Ibiza.

A report from the island by Yahoo’s Peter Mika begins this month’s episode of the Semantic Web Gang podcast, and leads to a wide-ranging discussion of the role that vocabularies and ontologies continue to play within the Semantic Web. The very nature of these ad hoc VoCamps says much, though, about the way in which attitudes have shifted away from expectations that massive all-encompassing ontologies are the best way to help machines to reason about the world around them.

April 15th, 2009

Leigh Dodds talks about Talis Connected Commons

Posted by Paul Miller @ 11:05 am

Categories: Open Data, Podcasts, Semantic Web, Semantic Web Companies, Talking Semantics

Tags: Connected Corp., Podcasts, Internet, Paul Miller

I wrote about Talis’ Connected Commons last month, and today spent some time talking with the company’s Platform Programme Manager, Leigh Dodds.

The conversation has just been released as a podcast which looks at the rationale behind the company’s offer and the specific licensing choices that beneficiaries are asked to make.

Have a listen, and see if the Connected Commons might help your next project.

Disclaimer: Talis is my former employer

April 13th, 2009

True Knowledge API lies at the heart of real business model

Posted by Paul Miller @ 10:01 pm

Categories: Commercialisation, Semantic Web, Semantic Web Companies

Tags: Knowledge, Knowledge Base, True Knowledge, Query API, True Knowledge Home Page, Strategy, Management, Paul Miller

Semantically powered question answering start-up True Knowledge today made its Semantic Search API available for public consumption, taking the next step on the company’s journey out of beta and providing a clear steer as to the way in which they intend to generate revenue.

As the company’s press release notes,

“True Knowledge offers two distinct API services for developers: the ‘Direct Answer API’ and the ‘Query API.’ The Direct Answer API allows developers to leverage True Knowledge’s natural language question answering technology, giving any search site or application the ability to provide a single direct answer for questions asked on any subject in plain English. This is especially well suited to mobile applications where providing a lengthy list of search results may be impractical.

The Query API allows developers to bypass True Knowledge’s natural language translation system and directly query True Knowledge’s knowledge base using a simple query language. This allows automated systems such as web and mobile applications to tap into True Knowledge’s vast machine-understandable knowledge of the world, making them behave more intelligently.”

The company was founded in August 2005 and is based in the British city of Cambridge, at the heart of ‘Silicon Fen.’ A $4m Series A investment round was closed in July 2008, led by Octopus Ventures.

I spoke with CEO William Tunstall-Pedoe ahead of today’s announcement to see how the core knowledge base continues to improve, and to discuss the company’s plans.

For those who haven’t tried it, True Knowledge offers an interesting slant on attempting to answer your question rather than simply return hundreds or thousands of documents that might contain the answer as traditional search engines tend to. Tunstall-Pedoe quoted Google’s Larry Page during our conversation, noting that Page has asserted that

“the perfect search engine would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want.”

It is this that True Knowledge attempts with their ‘Internet Answer Engine,’ and core to their solution are a comprehensive (137 million facts, and growing) knowledge base, a proprietary system for understanding a query and a powerful inference capability that enables the system to answer questions more reliably. Part of that reliability, as Tunstall-Pedoe frequently stresses, lies in the system’s ability to know when it doesn’t know the answer. Along with a success rate of less than 50% for providing answers to questions, this may seem little more than an academic curiosity, but an ability to reliably know when to fall back to less structured approaches (such as passing the query to Google) is far better than ‘guessing’ or delivering wholly inappropriate responses… especially once the Answer Engine’s capabilities are embedded in some third party site.

True Knowledge’s process of inference also allows the system to cope with ambiguity, and even with contradictory ‘facts.’ During our conversation, we told the system that President Obama was born in Cambridge. It allowed us to make this assertion, but subsequent analysis of the overwhelmingly contradictory data drawn from elsewhere in the knowledge base means that it was deemed to be untrue and flagged as such.

A different query, in which I ask ‘How far is San Jose from SFO?,’ shows both how the system copes with ambiguity and the manner in which supporting facts are drawn from sites such as Metaweb’s Freebase.

The current True Knowledge home page is not going to draw huge numbers of users away from their search engine of choice, but that isn’t really the point. As Tunstall-Pedoe pointed out, the site is intended to showcase the company’s capabilities and facilitate the addition of new knowledge (as well as the millions of facts drawn from Wikipedia, Freebase and a growing body of licensed commercial content, over 120,000 facts have already been added by individuals in the beta programme.) The real utility of True Knowledge will lie in licensing the underlying system for use in vertical and horizontal third party applications, and public availability of the True Knowledge API begins that process. There’s a long way to go in further extending the knowledge base, suggesting that vertical search applications may be the first to sign up; it’s much easier to approach comprehensiveness within a bounded domain than across all areas of knowledge.

The market for semantically enhanced search is growing crowded, and stalwarts of the search industry have been hard at work too, with Google and others getting increasingly good at returning actual answers to factual questions.

Tunstall-Pedoe used a slide to demonstrate the differentiation the company sees between itself and ‘obvious’ competitors such as Wikipedia, Freebase, and hotly anticipated Wolfram Alpha. Key differentiators in the diagram included True Knowledge’s ability to infer (something Wolfram Alpha also claims), its language independence (although currently only available in English, the concept extraction techniques used by True Knowledge should work equally well in other languages), and the system’s reliance upon an internal ontology comprising 20,000 classes (plus biological species, product information, etc). True Knowledge (unsurprisingly) scored far better than the competition, but in a market that also includes the likes of Hakia and Powerset (neither of which could usefully answer my question about San Jose and SFO) the true picture is a lot more complex.

True Knowledge is certainly interesting, and frequently impressive. It remains to be seen whether a Platform proposition will set them firmly on the road to riches, or if they’ll end up finding more success following the same route as Powerset and getting acquired by an existing (enterprise?) search provider.

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.

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…