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

It cannot be denied that Stephen Wolfram knows data. As the person behind Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha, he has been working with data — and the computation of that data — for a long time. As he said in his blog yesterday, “In building Wolfram|Alpha, we’ve absorbed an immense amount of data, across a huge number of domains.  But—perhaps surprisingly—almost none of it has come in any direct way from the visible internet. Instead, it’s mostly from a complicated patchwork of data files and feeds and database dumps.”

The main topic of Wolfram’s post is a proposal about the form and placement of raw data on the internet. In the post, he proposes that .data be created as a new generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) to hold data in a “parallel construct.”

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Eric Hoffer, a regular panelist on The SemanticLink monthly podcast, summed up the most recent episode calling it a review of the past year and a look forward. Hoffer writes, “The framework for the discussion was: (1) What company, technology or issue caught your attention in 2011? (2) Are we ‘there’ yet? (3) What are people watching for 2012?” Topics that were discussed included: “schema.org and its impact on who pays attention (i.e. SEO space); linked data (and open data); increase in policy maker awareness of the need to pay attention to interoperability issues; commercial integration of technology (ontologies plus nlp capabilities) to leverage unstructured content; and of course Siri (a key example of such integration).” Read more

This month, we present the twelfth Podcast episode in our monthly series of discussions with Semantic Web thought leaders from around the globe. In this episode, we reflect on the last year and make some predictions for 2012.

We also are making a request below for input from you, our audience, in the form of two poll questions. Please take a moment to let us know what you think! Read more

In the dying weeks of Britain’s last government, then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown promised a new Institute of Web Science. But the new government cancelled it. Then, late last month, that same government gave the idea a polish, a new name, and unveiled it once again as the Open Data Institute. W3C’s Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Southampton’s Professor Nigel Shadbolt are still in charge. Semantic stuff, and open data stuff, and government transparency are still the point. Millions of pounds are still on the table. But something has changed. Partly it’s the name, but it’s also a (welcome) shift in emphasis; away from the technology and towards the value. Others could learn the lesson that government appears to have learned, and focus far more on what their technology or product offers and far less on the technical intricacies of how it works. Read more

On Friday, October 14, 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 schema.org. The Semantic Link panel was joined by special guest, Ramanathan V. Guha, Google Fellow, and one of the principal people behind schema.org.

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