Update: Yandex today (April 26th) reported that net income in the first three months of 2012 rose 53 percent from the same period last year to 1.26 billion rubles ($43 million) as text-based advertising revenue rose, according to Bloomberg. Sales gained 51 percent to 5.9 billion rubles.

In November Russian search engine Yandex joined Google, Microsoft Bing, and Yahoo! to collaborate on schema.org. The Semantic Web Blog recently caught up by email with Alexander Shubin, Yandex product manager and head of strategic direction, to discuss this and other developments.

The Semantic Web Blog: Can you update us about how Yandex is doing? We know it’s still leading search traffic in Russia, but do you see more competition there, and how have international expansion plans been proceeding?

Shubin: Yandex is the leader in Russia with 59 to 60 percent market share. Russia is one of the few countries where a local search engine keeps a leading position, in spite of international players’ expansion.

Last year Yandex was launched in Turkey, where we suggest 12 services (including web search) so far. According to our statistics, yandex.com.tr processes more than 1 million queries daily. Turkey is the first non-Russian speaking market for us and we have done a lot of work to deliver services that would be interesting for the local community.  The main target for Yandex in Turkey, where one search engine still keeps 90 percent of search market, is to become the Number 2 player and to deliver more local search results and services than our competitor does.

Turkey is more or less an experiment for us: If we meet our target there, we can potentially do the same on any other non-Russian speaking market. But it is too early to make any conclusions or announcements so far as we have worked in Turkey only half of year. Stay tuned!

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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 !

Linked data is becoming even more interesting to the OCLC, a non-profit, membership, computer library service and research organization of 72,000 libraries in 170 countries and territories around the world. It’s named Richard Wallis — formerly of the U.K.’s Talis Linked Data and Semantic Web Technology company and one of our frequent Semantic Web Blog guest authors — to the position of Technology Evangelist.

The OCLC has as a major asset Worldcat, a global catalog comprising the collections of more than 10,000 libraries and adding up to more than 258 million records and 1.8 billion-plus holdings, in traditional library metadata format. WorldCat.org is the publicly searchable view of their core data in library format based upon library records (Marc records). More semantic web-oriented is other work the OCLC been doing over the last couple of years, Wallis explains, including experiments with using RDF/Linked Data at viaf.org, where the Virtual International Authority File publishes authoritative descriptions of names or organizations, and something similar for the Dewey Decimal Classification system at dewey.info.

In his new role, Wallis will collaborate with members and facilitate projects with OCLC teams as libraries and the cooperative drive efforts to expose WorldCat data as linked data, and will represent OCLC and WorldCat to the global library and web/IT leader communities. The VIAF and Dewey projects certainly provided an opportunity for OCLC to see the benefit of linking things together. On top of that, “the climate for Linked Data and libraries has changed dramatically over the last 12 months,” Wallis says.

Interest was evident at the Linked Data in Libraries event he ran for Talis this past summer, for example, and efforts like the W3C’s Linked Data in Libraries interest group, the Linked Open Data in Libraries, Archives & Museums work, the British Library’s work on the British National Bibliography as Linked Open Data, and the Library of Congress’s   Bibliographic Framework Initiative General Plan all are adding fuel to the fire.

The opportunity is there for the OCLC to take the lead on Linked Data in the somewhat fragmented library world as those organizations start to hear more and more about the concept. “Linked Data is starting to be something talked about in the library world, but like any other world, it’s still a bit of an enthusiast environment,” Wallis says. As he evangelizes to the library community what Linked Data is about – and to the web community about what the OCLC is doing with its chunk of data that is relevant to the wider Linked Data and Web of Data world – he hopes “to be in at the beginning of a process where those two communities come together to help come up with the best way of applying Linked Data principles to library data.”

In a statement announcing the appointment, Robin Murray, OCLC Vice President, Global Product Management, said, “Richard Wallis is a leader in Semantic Web and Linked Data technology, and we believe he will help the OCLC cooperative extend our efforts to help libraries move to Webscale.”

Data Liberate, the consultancy Wallis began upon leaving Talis, will continue as a personal blogging site. “I still have interest wider than the library community and I believe that those interests can keep me up to date with the wide world and advise my advice into the OCLC,” he says.

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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…and we want to hear from you.

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.

January’s episode of the show will be recorded this Friday, 13 January, and we’re joined by a guest with much to contribute. I’m sure he needs no introduction for most of you. Nova Spivack was behind semantic technology startup Twine, and has subsequently turned his hand to supporting a range of semantically relevant offerings such as Bottlenose (our coverage) and StreamGlider (our coverage).

Drawing upon some of Nova’s experiences, and digging further into questions that we have touched upon before, we’re going to take a look at the following topic this month:

Is it important to hide semantic smarts behind a simple user experience/interface? If not, why not? If so, how are we beginning to see that manifested?

Siri‘s obviously one example that we’ve discussed before, but there have been other examples recently that also attempt to hide significant power behind UI simplicity. Read more

You know Volkswagen as Das Auto company. But perhaps it’s time to start thinking of it as “Das Semantic Web Company.”

William Greenly is the Volkswagen Technical Lead for the auto vendor’s Volkswagen.co.uk online platform at integrated communications agency Tribal DDB. In that capacity he is taking the partnership the companies have had for more than four decades to a new level. His role there has encompassed managing data around Volkswagen’s products, its retailer and web site content, and its interfaces with social networks and many third-party back-end systems, including those germaine to the auto industry such as manufacturer consortiums.

Now, the focus is on using semantic web technology to drive a more elastic, flexible and streamlined digital world for “The Car” company.

The journey began as a strategic brief about contextual search engines serving content based on context within the site and possibly across affiliate sites, a big idea that was quite quickly bound to something more tactical. That being improving site search, Greenly says. “So the objectives were about site search and improving it, but in the long-run it was always the idea to contextualize content, to facet content, to promote it in different contexts.”

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Are you a domainer? More specifically, are you a domainer who’s sitting on a lot of parking sites that aren’t turning the profit they once used to, and for whom the cost proposition of building out each one individually to generate revenue is just plain prohibitive?

Well, a yearish-old company called Epik, which provide a platform and services to help domainers cost-effectively scale their properties by way of “mass-customization,” as well as manage and trade them, is moving semantic web technologies to the front burner to drive more business opportunities to site owners – and revenue opportunities to their customers, too.

“The semantic technologies until now were mostly on the backburner while we got a critical mass of sites up, but now we have a tipping point in terms of the scale of the opportunity,” says John Lawler, Epik SVP of products. “Now we’re going whole hog to make this all semantically enabled.” Through its own domain ownerships and relations with others, the potential is to build a truly federated semantic network, he says.

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When I helped launch the Semantic Technology Conference and later the SemanticUniverse.com website, I also started watching the Semantic Technology Industry.  In the time since that first SemTech Conference in 2005, I have watched the technologies and the surrounding community grow significantly. Along the way, the business of the Semantic Web has also grown up.  Standards have been refined, tools developed, books written, partnerships formed, investments made, and companies have grown. Today, organizations have real-world implementations to show.  The case studies are robust, and are allowing companies to do things in ways they simply could not before.  Often, they are able to do so in less time and at a lower cost than before. There are companies that have built solid in-house, B2B and B2C semantic applications and tools.  There are startups and innovations.  There are creative semantic solutions to traditional data management issues and business concerns.

There is a lot going on in the world of Semantic Web business.  And yet, we have barely begun to scratch the surface.

In September, SemanticUniverse.com and the SemTech Conference were acquired by WebMediaBrands.  For more information about the acquisition, see the initial announcement  and Tony Shaw’s recent blog post .  I am absolutely thrilled about what this merger means for the community.  We will offer the same excellent multimedia content and live events you have come to expect from both organizations.  In coming days, weeks, and months, we will introduce new community tools and resources.  If you are new to the world of Semantic Web, Web 3.0, and Linked Data, we want to welcome you and offer a guiding hand, and we will be working hard to provide the platform for you to connect with other members of the community.

We have big plans. 

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A little over a month ago, Dave McComb and I announced that we had sold the Semantic Technology Conference, as well as the SemanticUniverse.com web site, to WebMediaBrands. Lots of people sent congratulatory messages, which was gratifying and much appreciated. Thank you again to all of you who have wished us well.

Of course people also ask questions like:

• Did you do well out of the deal?
• Why did you sell?
• What’s going to happen with the show in future?

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Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Non-profit Grassroots.org has a big mission, which is getting a boost from semantic tools: Adopting 10,000 non-profit members and providing them each with $10,000 on average in services per year at no charge.

It’s a mission that’s going to take a hefty helping of volunteers eager to contribute their skills to groups ranging from the Youth Sports Alliance of Grand Rapids Michigan to The Foundation for the Arts in Vale to the SnoGlobe Equality Alliance in Washington State.

Grassroots.org, a 501C3 organization, provides its members with more than a dozen free services, such as web hosting or VoIP solutions, often with the help of businesses in these industries, and also helps manage their services projects. Two of the services it offers — web design and graphic design — are heavily volunteer-driven. To find volunteers with such expertise, Grassroots.org relies on a number of methods, from word-of-mouth to Idealist.org to Craigslist — and most it recently turned to semantic web-based matchmaking service Bintro.

The organization has been around since 2001, but it’s grown significantly in the last year from serving 680 non-profits to more than 2,000, says Shane Hankins, the executive director for Grassroots.org. “We’re adding 35 new organizations a week, and with that we need to recruit a lot of volunteers,” he says.

He credits the uptick in non-profits’ membership to having a better marketing plan and also to the economy. “With the economic issues facing everyone, non-profits are seeking better and cheaper solutions, so we’re a fit there,” he says. “Also I think there’s a general trend where more people are interested in volunteering, which benefits us on the supply side. And tools like Bintro help facilitate that.”

As a non-profit organization, Grassroots.org has some of the same challenges around most effectively utilizing its resources as do the clients it serves. Bintro helps there, because someone doesn’t have to constantly go onto the site and repost the same listing in order for its volunteer opportunities to remain at the top of the heap, which is the traditional way most placement sites work.

“Once you post it it’s an ongoing process,” Hankins says. “We still get referrals from some things we posted months ago, which is wonderful.”

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Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Recovery.gov, the U.S. government web site with data on spending related to the Recovery Act, re-launched this week. The re-design, a project of geographic information systems vendor ESRI, lets users navigate through maps to trace how funds are getting spent in each state, and download the data on federal contracts, grants and loans that was rolled up from across the states in both Excel and XML formats.

One thing that Diane Mueller, vice chair of the XBRL International Steering Committee and VP, XBRL Development, at JustSystems, likes is that the effort supports a number of industry standards, which helps users avoid repeating mapping exercises every time they download data. The next step is creating ontologies or maps that make it easier to make connections across different types of data sets — making it a more seamless process, for example, to tie geospatial information related to an agency such as the Department of the Interior to other agency data about funding that is being applied to saving animals in western Utah.

“That’s when we get into conversations like XBRL for NIEM (National Information Exchange Model), one of the fine federal standards for sharing information between federal agencies,” Mueller says. “You have to create those mappings between the standards as well. That’s the next level to go on.”

Such are the challenges around really opening up government data for use by the citizenry. The ability to make government data easily accessible is just the first step in creating real accountability — it’s also key to make sure that users are able to access and interpret that data accurately. Some of the U.S. government projects fall short there, with Mueller pointing to the recent news that the White House is disclosing visitor access records in the .CSV spreadsheet format.

“This is a good example of how not to post your data,” she says. After you pull that .CSV file into Excel to see who visited whom on what day, maybe you want to make some synaptic semantic connections between that visitor and the company he works for, for instance, so you trot over to the SEC site and grab the corporate filing information in XBRL. And then maybe you want to find recent news around that executive and his company, and that requires leveraging news feeds conforming to the NewsML format. Then you start cutting and pasting all these data finds together– a manual and so in and of itself an error-prone process — for a mash-up and you lose the metadata associated with it. Now its validity can’t be verified by others with whom you’d like to share the information, because they can’t directly link back to the source for an authenticity check.

“The thing that always is missing in most of these conversations about publicly accessible information is harmonization,” she says. “The very first thing you have to have is the metadata.”

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