According to Robert Scoble who got it from tracking FTC, Apple is buying Siri. (This has yet to be confirmed by Siri or Apple). The front story is mobile, specifically a bruising battle between Apple and Google. But once again the back story is semantic technology. Siri is not some cute iPhone app banged together in a garage over a Red Bull fueled long weekend. Siri has hard core semantic tech that originated from Darpa (just like that little system called the Internet).

Like the Facebook OpenGraph story, this is another example of semantic web going mainstream. The Open Graph front story was all about social media, but the back story was their adoption of RDFa. That has been a big boost to the semantic web community.

Siri looks like a good exit for investors and will give them confidence to invest more in companies that use semantic web technology. These ventures may be positioned as social, mobile or real time but we see semantic web as the key to that golden triangle.

Get Me To A Restaurant And Get Me Home Safely

Why do so many use cases focus on finding a restaurant? I guess geeks like eating out. Actually this video from Siri has a fun bit at the end, calling for a taxi when drunk and that is designed to illustrate that their voice recognition can handle slurred words:

Mashing Up Lots Of Hard Core Tech To Make It Look Dead Simple

In our corner of the world, we love the fact that Siri uses semantic technology as Tom Gruber (Tom is cofounder, CTO and VP of Design) explains to SemanticWeb.com in our interview in February.

But Siri uses a lot of great technology including location based services, mashups of multiple APIs, voice recognition and makes it all look so simple. That is an art and the Siri team deserve a huge round of applause for pulling this off.

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