Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Start-up Semantic Communities LLC has launched a beta of Ardorado.com, a portal of sorts dedicated to human passions, or “ardors,” ranging from music to Monty Python, camping to comics.

The stated mission of Semantic Communities is to bring the benefits of the Semantic Web and Web 3.0 technologies to everybody, putting semantic web tools, technologies and standards — MediaWiki, Virtuoso triple store, SPARQL, RDF, FOAF, and PHP–to good use by ordinary people and businesses.

According to Emil Freund, president and CEO of Semantic Communities, Ardorado.com is part mash-up, part social network, and part directory, and its goal is to help passionate like-minded people looking to meet and interact with others as passionate about a topic as themselves as well as read news and find the best sources of information or experts on these topics, while at the same time providing a platform through which businesses, professional service providers, and serious hobbyists can directly engage with the audience that is interested in their message. It offers a semantic profile for its members, featured or registered bloggers, site owners, and online communities; the ability to associate a blog or a site with one or several related interest; and semantic representations of interests, relationships between interests, relationships between members and between sites, blogs, on-line communities and their associated interests.

Semanticweb.com recently spoke with Freund in more detail about the portal. Following are excerpts of that conversation and a follow-up discussion in email.

Semanticweb.com: Other “semantic-driven” sites are designed to help individuals follow their passions and interests. What makes Ardorado different?

Freund: Social networking is a hot topic. But to keep up with your passions you have to sign on to multiple networks. So why not create a place where we can bring interests together into one place and then create connections between interests. Every social network asks what your interest is, but they do very little with that. At the same time we [the founders] were all reading about the semantic web, and we thought it was very powerful. So why not recast social networks and how people communicate to each other and take these closed networks and push the social network around our interests on all these standards. So we built a huge interest database — we found lots of valuable information [about interests] in sources such as Facebook, StumbledUpon, and LiveJournal, while being incredibly sensitive to people’s privacy.

We very consciously leveraged FOAF technology early on in our project during the time we collected our interest data. We collected analyzed, correlated millions of on-line profiles, and as a result of this process we developed the InterestMatrix semantic database.

Semanticweb.com: Tell us more about the InterestMatrix.

Freund: The InterestMatrix drives Ardorado. For the purposes of the beta we organized interests by how many people and instances said they were interested. We took a cut at ten people saying they are interested in something — it’s the minimum number for the beta. That represents 80% of the total population sample, so the long tail is ridiculously long. Our intention is to publish that entire long tail down to just one person having an interest. But that just wasn’t feasible right now. Once we get funding and can buy several supercomputers we can go through the calculations a bit more efficiently.

We did lots of statistical analysis around the interest data that we collected, and have a method that lets us correlate relative connectedness [of interests] — the nearness or farness of interests. For example, if you type in golf as an interest, related interests are football, baseball, beer, cooking, and skiing. You might be surprised by cooking. This kind of information is not out there. The point was we wanted to create a place where people can come in and indulge their interest and show those folks that there are other golfers out there who are also interested in cooking and maybe you want to go hook up with those folks. We also think this is the kind of information that someone who wants to run an ad on the U.S, Open might want to know. When did you last see cooking-related commercials on a golf program?

Semanticweb.com: So is part of the business model about making that kind of information available to companies to help them plan advertising and marketing campaigns?

Freund: We have a layered business model. The first layer is simply traffic, so we can sell off display ads into the bulk market. Then, because we believe that we can offer something very valuable because we know about interests, we can offer opportunities for high-value targeted display ads. If someone searching for Ford Mustang on our site gets to that page, you know they are interested in Ford Mustang and that’s a valuable place for ford Mustang ads.

The other thing we have in mind is targeted classifieds. A lot of interests that people have happen to be hobbies and crafts. We plan to offer members the opportunity — for example, a member is interested in needlepoint and has a business related to it–we would sell a classified ad opportunity for that person on the needlepoint page. The big bucks wll probably be in targeted ads. The super big bucks will be when the network effects take off — for example, to offer Ford the opportunity to have an official Ford Mustang page, along with the unofficial one. We can offer them an opportunity to click off our page to take them to another environment — we firmly believe in not locking people in. As long as there is some financial transaction between us for taking the traffic away from me, I’m happy with it.

But the ultimate layer — because we have the Interest Matrix–we believe that in and of itself is incredibly valuable, because it can tell people that someone interested in Ford Mustangs is interested in any number of things, so people can get creative with how they buy ad words. Go back to the golf example. Say the ad word ‘golf’ is very expensive. But because we know that there are people interested in golf who are also very interested in cooking, and ‘cooking’ is a cheaper ad word to buy, why not buy that? Buy cooking and pop up a golf ad, and people may click through. Or Ford Motor might learn that people interested in Ford Mustangs are also interested in needlepoint, so why not buy a relatively cheap ad in a needlepoint magazine — they’d reach an audience segment they wouldn’t otherwise reach with an ad in a car magazine.

The Interest Matrix also has positive and negative relationships. You only see the positive on the site. But the negative information is also valuable to an advertiser. For instance, it shows that people interested in the TV show The Fall Guy are interested in pizza, video games, and alcohol, but not really in wine specifically. That’s valuable information for an ad planner — don’t sell a Gallo wine ad on The Fall Guy.

I don’t know anybody else who has this. We will make that available further out. We’re working on the interface.

Semanticweb.com: You’ve talked about your company’s commitment to open data representation standards, and showing that the semantic web can create value in the mass market. Why do you care?

Freund: That’s right. We encourage people to be members and we will create a FOAF page for you. Part of our commitment to being semantic and using semantic-like technologies — our goal was to bring the value, power, and future of the semantic web to ordinary experiences. We use semantic technologies to drive the kinds of experiences that are not being driven by that. There’s a lot of semantic work on fancy ontologies for the pharmaceuticals industry, for example, but little of this is happening at the Internet-surfing level. The future of the web has to be simple question, simple answer. Keyword searching gets you to the neighborhood of an answer, but not to the answer itself.

The power of semantic web data is that it also represents meaning and some level of understanding. We’re not after the simple question, simple answer problem, but we wanted to go and experiment in this mash-up, social network, directory world and see how can we use the power of semantic technology to bring together information in new and meaningful ways for people.

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