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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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A few short years ago, a group of semantic technology companies rode a wave of venture capital and inflated expectation. They were going to change the world. They were going to bring semantic technologies to the mainstream. They were going to make people very rich. They were the must-have keynotes of the conference circuit. And then, one by one, they disappeared. Powerset vanished inside Microsoft, to do something for Bing. Twine vanished inside Evri, amid rumours of a fire sale and investors covering their backs. Freebase vanished inside Google, and bits of Freebase DNA routinely pop up across Google’s sprawling empire. And Siri vanished inside Apple, as we scrambled to understand whether the Cupertino money machine was after semantic smarts or ‘just’ speech recognition technology. Now, though, the rumours suggest that Siri may be back, and that it’s going to be the thing that makes the next iPhone a compelling buy. Read more

On Friday, September 9, 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 the latest document around the RDF 1.1 standard (a Working Draft). The Semantic Link panel was joined by special guest, David Wood, Co-Chair of the RDF Working Group at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

David Wood, 3 Roundstones

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Semantic technologies of various flavours have the potential to discover connections and enable insights that are powerful, valuable, intriguing, insightful, and surprising. However, as with so many technologies, there’s a flip side. As tools grow more capable and data sets continue to blossom, it becomes ever more likely that the segmented lives of web users — whether public and private, law-abiding and nefarious, or respectable and risqué — will be joined up without our explicit consent. As developers who see the best in people build ever-richer tools, technology companies that cannot — or will not — understand the value of the ageing legal system’s checks and balances continue to use them in pushing the boundaries of what society considers to be acceptable. There are already scare stories, and as the reality becomes more capable, those scare stories will undoubtedly become increasingly terrifying. Some of them may even turn out to be true. But it’s not necessary to believe the full Orwellian horror of a Mountain View search engine (or a Menlo Park social network) that knows everything about you, and acts upon that knowledge. Even in the smaller every-day injections of semantic smarts into business processes, there are things that should perhaps make us sit up and take note. Just because semantic technologies can discover patterns in customer behaviour, doesn’t mean we should necessarily act upon them too soon.

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On Monday, July 18, a group of Semantic thought leaders from around the globe met with their host and colleague, Paul Miller, for the eighth installment of the Semantic Link, a monthly podcast covering the world of Semantic Technologies. This episode includes a discussion about Google+, the recent Open Data Challenge in Europe, the British Library, BioBlitz, and more.
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Back at the end of May, I posted ‘Looking Ahead to SemTech;’ an attempt to distill some advice for those visiting the event for the first time. We followed up a few days later, convening the team from the Semantic Link in front of a live audience of over 500 SemTechers; the vast majority of whom were new. And then, as the jet lag subsided, the Semantic Link returned to the more familiar environment of a Skype call to look back over the week that over 1,200 conference attendees had just experienced.

And now, as the jet lag from another trip to California recedes, I’m left with one over-riding impression of this year’s SemTech; a growing connection to reality. In a week of conversation with strangers brought together by a shared need to wrest the last dregs from the coffee pot, I found a group of individuals for whom — increasingly — arguments about turtles and owls were a bemusing irrelevance. Microdata, microformats, rich snippets, RDF/XML, JSON, SPARQL and the rest, it appeared, were mere tools in their toolbox rather than the rallying cries around which competing Crusades might coalesce. Oh, the pragmatism.

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On Monday, June 20, a group of Semantic thought leaders from around the globe met with their host and colleague, Paul Miller, for the seventh installment of the Semantic Link, a monthly podcast covering the world of Semantic Technologies. This episode includes a discussion about schema.org and a review of some of the goings-on at the recent SemTech: Semantic Technology Conference. Read more