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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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 !

…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

[Editor's Note: This week, we welcome Yefim "Jeff" Zhuk of Sallie Mae as he presents a series on Knowledge-Driven Architecture. This series follows up the author’s presentation at the recent international 2011 Semantic Technology Conference San Francisco and further expands on the subject of integrated software and knowledge engineering, originally described by Mr. Zhuk in the book “Integration-ready Architecture and Design.” Part I | Part II | Part III]

Part IV – Creating a semantically rich service environment locally and across industry

Part III focused on the Conversational Semantic Decision Support (CSDS) and related Use Cases.

This example can be expanded from requirements to design and development phases, including hints on service names and application messages. Standards, recommendations and best practices offered by W3C [6] can serve as the base for conversational scripts, which would help a SME, (in this case, a software developer) to successfully implement them and create a truly semantically rich SOA environment.
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[Editor's Note: This week, we welcome Yefim "Jeff" Zhuk of Sallie Mae as he presents a series on Knowledge-Driven Architecture. This series follows up the author’s presentation at the recent international 2011 Semantic Technology Conference San Francisco and further expands on the subject of integrated software and knowledge engineering, originally described by Mr. Zhuk in the book “Integration-ready Architecture and Design.”]

Business and technical people don’t always understand each other. (That might be an understatement.)

While technology speaks XML and Web Services, business prefers natural language.

Translation from business to technology is called the development process.

“Cooking” an application involves several translation layers and teams:

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The upcoming Semantic Web Summit will kick off with a conversation about how people are using the Semantic Web today, hosted by Amiad Solomon of Peer39 and Lee Feigenbaum of Cambridge Semantics. Perhaps one example you’ll hear about then is the work underway at Semicolon (Semantic and Organisational Interoperability in Communicating and Collaborating Organisations), a research and development project partly funded by the Norwegian Research Council, to create faster and cheaper semantic and organizational interoperability within and without the public sector.

Cambridge’s Anzo Semantic Web solution is being used to help Statistics Norway make it easier for those within or outside the government to benefit from  interoperability among the data sets the department produces. That data — statistics on important aspects of Norwegian society —  typically gets stored in thousands of individual Excel spreadsheets or made available in HTML on the web, neither format of which makes it particularly easy to bond with other data.   

But, says Per Myrseth, chief specialist, Information Risk Management at Det Norske Veritas AS, one of the organizations working on the pilot, “At the macro level that data is potentially Linked Open Data.”

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Photo credit: Flickr/kevindooley

The Semantic Web is so very much about adaptability – adaptability of data to serve new purposes, adaptability to top-down and bottom-up approaches, and delivery of a whole new Web space that users will adapt to, without necessarily even realizing the mechanics behind the change. Semantic Web entrepreneurs are discovering that adaptability matters to their own business models as well, when the field is still so green, many people still aren’t 100 percent sure about why the Semantic Web might matter to them, and potential big customers may be skeptical about the street cred of an emerging company in a space that may still feel a little blurry to them.

Take the case of startup Bueda, co-founded by CEO Vasco Pedro. It originally envisioned that its tagging technology would come in handy for scenarios such as helping content sites rich with video and images better monetize advertising opportunities around their user-generated content, as well as generally help publishers with support for improved recommendations and search accuracy. The idea got people’s interest, says Pedro, but also left them a little confused. At its matching engine API’s launch a few months back, “we had an interesting set of use cases,” Pedro says, but acknowledges it was too general and diffuse for users to easily grasp onto. There was a lot of input about how to enhance the API, but to what clearly understood end? “Unless there’s a very clear motive for using it people are just going to dip their toes in. So we had to eat our own dog food and come up with an application that uses the API.”

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Did you know the French business, professional and individual phone directory had been semantified? The site,11800, is presented by an Internet marketing and technology company called SecondWeb with the help of the CubicWeb semantic web framework from France-based Logilab.

That’s probably the biggest public web site that’s build using the framework. But about 70 percent of Logilab’s business now is around using the framework it originally developed for internal use to build for its customers applications that rely on its object-oriented design model of using reusable data model and view components – or ‘cubes’ – that are their own entire applications providing data models, which then can be piled together in ‘constructions’ that integrate multiple types of sources and publish semantic data. The semantic views already integrated into the framework for publishing data include SIOC, OWL, FOAF, and DOAP ontologies.

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This is part of our Creative Destruction 7 Act play series. The market we are currently focused on is Healthcare. In Part 1 we looked at the big picture. In this Part 2 we drill into consumer health sites that are leveraging semantic web technology. In Part 3 we will look at innovation in the enterprise space, how semantic web technology is being used by researchers in pharma and biotech firms.

This is part of our Creative Destruction 7 Act play series. The market we are currently focused on is Healthcare. In Part 1 we looked at the big picture. In this Part 2 we drill into consumer health sites that are leveraging semantic web technology. In Part 3 we will look at innovation in the enterprise space, how semantic web technology is being used by researchers in pharma and biotech firms.

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This is the half-yearly report card on the Semantic Web. How are we doing in 2010? The breakthrough to the mainstream was predicted by Gartner to be in 2008. Oops, that did not happen. Gartner was not alone in predicting breakthrough only to be disappointed by the powers of inertia. So then we entered the “trough of disillusionment” when semantic web was banned by anybody trying to raise money or get a project approved.

But it feels different this time. Yes, we are evangelists here, not just reporters. We want this to be successful. And we know that wanting does not make it happen. But the signs of breakthrough now seem too real to dismiss.

In this post we look at 7 signs that the semantic web is crossing the chasm to the moanstream.

Image Courtesy Flickr and Paul Watson and (of course Geoffrey Moore)

This is the half-yearly report card on the Semantic Web. How are we doing in 2010? The breakthrough to the mainstream was predicted by Gartner to be in 2008. Oops, that did not happen. Gartner was not alone in predicting breakthrough only to be disappointed by the powers of inertia. So then we entered the “trough of disillusionment” when semantic web was banned by anybody trying to raise money or get a project approved.

But it feels different this time. Yes, we are evangelists here, not just reporters. We want this to be successful. And we know that wanting does not make it happen. But the signs of breakthrough now seem too real to dismiss.

In this post we look at 7 signs that the semantic web is crossing the chasm to the moanstream.

Image Courtesy Flickr and Paul Watson and (of course Geoffrey Moore)

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Back in May we published the Semantic Web 100, our list of the people tweeting interesting stuff about the Semantic Web.

That’s a lot of people to follow and a fair amount of noise obscuring the signal – lots of tweets about the World Cup or where to eat/meet/drink as well as useful but repetitive retweets.

We look through a lot of tweets so you don’t have to. But we keep that job almost manageable by restricting our tweet-cruising to people in the SemanticWeb100.

By interesting we mean a) relevant to the Semantic Web b) something original, not simply a copy of some other content.

We did this via old-fashioned “curation” (ahem, its called “editing” to ye olde publishers). We read the tweets to identify the ones that look interesting to us. Call it Filter # 1. You can do your own Filter # 2 (what we used to call “reading”) after the break.

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