I’m a fan of the waterfowl model of semantic technology. Clever semantics — as well as ‘advanced’ search boxes, arcane query syntax, and consumer interfaces that require user training — can paddle away as frantically as they like, but only while hidden well below the waterline. SPARQL, SKOS and SQL really shouldn’t be visible to most users of a web site. Ontologies and XML are enabling technologies, not user interface features.

With this week’s unveiling of the Knowledge Graph, Google has taken another step toward realising the potential of their Metaweb acquisition. The company has also clearly demonstrated its continued enthusiasm for delivering additional user value without requiring changes in user behaviour (well, except that those of us outside the US have to remember to use google.com and not our local version, if we want to try this out).

For those who don’t remember, Metaweb was one of those companies that got people excited about the potential for semantic technologies to hit the big time. Founded way back in 2005, Metaweb attracted almost $60Million in investment for their “open, shared database of the world’s knowledge” (Freebase) before disappearing inside Google in 2010.

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SemTechBiz is Less Than 2 Weeks Away

The Semantic Tech & Business Conference (SemTechBiz) is coming to San Francisco on June 3-7! Join us for case studies, innovative panels, tutorials, and keynotes that will provide you with practical advice, hands-on guidance, and breakthrough approaches to solving business problems with semantic technology. Passes go up $200 at the door. Sign up now and save !

On Friday, May 11, a group of Semantic Technology thought leaders from around the globe met with their host and colleague, Paul Miller, for the latest installment of the Semantic Link, a monthly podcast covering the world of Semantic Technologies. This episode includes a discussion about Semantics in the Financial Services Industry, and “the Linkers” were joined by special guest, Lee Feigenbaum, VP Marketing & Technology at Cambridge Semantics. Lee shared insights gained over many years working in the semantic technology field and with numerous customers in the financial services industry.
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Remember the days before Wikipedia had all the answers? We looked things up in libraries, referring to shelf-filling encyclopaedias. We bought CD-ROMs (remember them?) full of facts and pictures and video clips. We asked people. Sometimes, school home work actually required some work more strenuous than a cut and paste. We went about our business without remembering that New Coke briefly entered our lives on this day in 1985.

Wikipedia is far from perfect, and some of the concern around its role in a wider dumbing down of thought and argument may be justified. But, despite that, it’s a remarkable achievement and a wonderful resource. Those who argued that it would never work have clearly been proven wrong. Carefully maintained processes and the core principle of the neutral point of view mostly serve contributors well.

With Wikimedia Deutschland‘s recent announcement of Wikidata, many of the early concerns about Wikipedia itself have resurfaced once again. Read more

On Friday, April 13, a group of Semantic thought leaders from around the globe met with their host and colleague, Paul Miller, for the latest installment of the Semantic Link, a monthly podcast covering the world of Semantic Technologies. This episode includes a discussion about various approaches to building semantic systems, and “the Linkers” were joined by special guest, Daniel Tunkelang, Principal Data Scientist, LinkedIn. Daniel — who will deliver a keynote address at the June Semantic Technology & Business Conference — shared insights gained over many years working at LinkedIn, Endeca, and Google, and IBM among others.
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Earlier this week I spent an enjoyable hour on the phone, discussing the work done by a venerable world-class museum in making data about its collections available to a new audience of developers and app-builders. Much of our conversation revolved around consideration of obstacles and barriers, and the most intractable of those proved something of a surprise.

Reluctance amongst senior managers to let potentially valuable data walk out the door? Nope. In fact, not even close; managers pushed museum staff to adopt a more permissive license for metadata (CC0) than the one (CC-BY) they had been considering.

Reluctance amongst curators to let their carefully crafted metadata be abused and modified by non-professionals? Possibly a little bit, but apparently nothing the team couldn’t handle.

A bean-counter’s obsession with measuring every click, every query, every download, such that the whole project became bogged down in working out what to count and when (and, sadly, that really is the case elsewhere!)? Again, no. “The intention was to create a possibility” by releasing data. The museum didn’t know what adoption would be like, and sees experimentation and risk-taking as part of its role. Monitoring is light, and there’s no intention to change that.

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Two posts here on SemanticWeb.com over the past few days resonated with themes to which I seem to return with increasing frequency. First, Angela Guess pointed to a GigaOM interview with fellow Semantic Link podcaster Andraž Tori, then Jennifer Zaino picked up on the Global Futures Forecast‘s [PDF] enthusiasm for ‘the Semantic Web.’

Andraž is CTO of Zemanta, a company that began life in the small European country of Slovenia before spreading its wings to London and the US. Ever since I first met Andraž and became aware of Zemanta’s usefulness, it has been one of a very small number of tools that — to me — epitomise the real power and usefulness of semantic technologies. There are, of course, plenty of semantic technologies that are better at handling formal classification of data. There are plenty that cope an awful lot better at scale. There are plenty, even, that do a better job of seamlessly and flexibly knitting together facts and assertions from across the web. But Zemanta (and TripIt, my other perennial favourite) don’t make a big issue of their semantic smarts. They don’t — really —make you change your behaviour very much in order to derive benefit. They just help you get something done, quicker, easier, and better than you would have done it without them. TripIt, for example, gets travel arrangements into my calendar (where I need them), faster than I could type them in myself. But that’s just an ancillary benefit of all the other stuff that the site is doing to my travel details on my behalf.

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On Friday, February 10, a group of Semantic thought leaders from around the globe met with their host and colleague, Paul Miller, for the latest installment of the Semantic Link, a monthly podcast covering the world of Semantic Technologies. This episode includes a discussion about data; specifically, the recently announced “wikidata” project with special guest, Denny Vrandecic.
At the recent SemTechBiz Berlin conference, Denny presented a talk titled, “Wikidata: The Next Big Thing for Wikipedia.” As evidenced in the “Wow’s” expressed by the panelists in this month’s podcast call, this is indeed a big deal for Wikipedia and for Semantic Web. Read more

After December’s episode of the Semantic Link, we asked for your thoughts on both the topics we should cover, and the ways in which you would like to interact with the podcast. You spoke, very clearly asking for an opportunity to pose questions for the team to answer during recordings. This is that opportunity.

February’s episode of the show will be recorded this Friday, 10 February, and we’re joined by a guest with a lot to contribute during our conversation.

There is growing interest in publishing, sharing and using data on the Web. The Semantic Web’s Linked Data effort is clearly one approach to this, but there are others. At Wolfram Alpha, for example, founder Stephen Wolfram suggests that a new Top Level Domain (TLD) for data will make data easier to find on the web. And inside the Wikimedia Foundation (the home of Wikipedia), a new WikiData project is rapidly taking shape.

WikiData project director, Denny Vrandecic, joins us to share his perspectives on these and other approaches to the space.

And now over to all of you. Please use the comments facility below, to share your perspectives on the question, or to submit your comments and questions for Denny and the regular gang to consider. Then tune in the week of 13 February to hear the result!

On Friday, January 13, a group of Semantic thought leaders from around the globe met with their host and colleague, Paul Miller, for the latest installment of the Semantic Link, a monthly podcast covering the world of Semantic Technologies. This episode includes a discussion about user interface and user experience (UI/UX) design, and “the Linkers” were joined by special guest, Nova Spivack.
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“There’s our SPARQL endpoint.” Or “Just view the page in Tabulator.” I have lost count of the number of times that either of these have been the only response to an innocent request to see what some new piece of semantic wizardry can do. For a developer seeking to integrate one semantics-rich data set with another, SPARQL may very well be the tool for the job. And for someone (probably a developer, again) who wants to track the way that data is pulled together to build a page, Tabulator has a lot going for it. But as a shop window for the power of semantics? As a demonstration of what’s possible? Seriously, is it possible to pick worse ways to show off to the world?

In January’s episode of the Semantic Link, we were joined by serial entrepreneur Nova Spivack (perhaps best known to readers as the Founder and CEO of Twine) for a discussion about the importance of delivering a good user experience. In the time available, we only scratched the surface, and I’m sure it’s a topic to which we’ll return. Read more