Courtesy: Flickr/takacsi75

Valentine’s Day is all about celebrating the coming together of two parties who are made for each other. That’s as true when it comes to semantic technology as it is for two people – sort of.

Yes, semantic tech aligns with the concept of matchmaking in its own ways. They aren’t always as romantic as a quiet dinner with a bottle of wine and a bouquet of roses, but hey, love comes in many forms. Here’s a quick look at semantic tech and its role in matchmaking, of various kinds:

• In the journal Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience you’ll find the work Semantic Web Service Matchmakers: State of the Art and Challenges. The semantic matchmakers it’s talking about get involved in helping developers partner up with the right web services: The mission of Web service discovery, its abstract explains, is to seek an appropriate Web service for a service requester on the basis of the service descriptions in Web service advertisements and the service requester’s requirements. But a problem in that discovery process is ambiguity, because the standard language used for encoding service descriptions does not have the capacity to specify the capabilities of a Web service.  According to the abstract of the article, “This brings up the vision of Semantic Web Services and Semantic Web Service discovery, which make use of the Semantic Web technologies to enrich the semantics of service descriptions for service discovery. Semantic Web Service matchmakers are the programs or frameworks designed to implement the task of Semantic Web Service discovery.” The paper surveys and analyzes typical, contemporary Semantic Web Service matchmakers across six technical dimensions.  continued…

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Today, we are pleased to offer Jeff’s latest article as a 27-page PDF file. In this new article, he focuses on the process of transitioning from IT architectures of today to Semantic Cloud Architecture with very practical “baby steps” — steps which require minimum upfront investment. The emphasis of this article is on collaborative work of business and enterprise architects with the Business Architecture Sandbox for Enterprise, (BASE) that was demonstrated at the 2012 Semantic Tech and Business Conference –San Francisco.

Zhuk says, “The discussed approach is gradually shifting the focus of IT from technology to information by standardizing business event processing, placing the seeds of semantic technology in the current business ground, and establishing a self-sustaining process of transformation to semantic cloud architecture. The article provides the context and speaks technical details for this transition.”

Read/Download the full paper (registration required)

As a teaser, here is the beginning of the article and Section Headings…

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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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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. continued…

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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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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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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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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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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.

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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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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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The old rules of innovations were:

1. basic R&D funded in academia

2. first non-grant revenue from defense

3. first commercialization from either finance or healthcare

4 a looong time later, trickle down innovation to consumer.

That flow changed during the social media era.

The old rules of innovations were:

1. basic R&D funded in academia

2. first non-grant revenue from defense

3. first commercialization from either finance or healthcare

4 a looong time later, trickle down innovation to consumer.

That flow changed during the social media era.

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Now 10,000 sites strong, Acquia’s hosted version of Drupal – Drupal Gardens, which debuted in January – is positioned not only to eliminate barriers to adoption of the open source content management system to a crowd that would rather be hands-off on the hosting, configuration, security and upgrade front. It also is positioned potentially to help push the Semantic Web ahead, bringing technologies such as RDF to the attention of a new swath of users if it successfully surfs the wave behind Drupal.

Think about that passionate community behind Drupal. Some half million sites already have been built in the Drupal do-it-yourself mode, and about 6,000 modules contributed to it. (Whenever this blog has done a story that mentions Drupal, by the way, the response to it is usually significant.) Acquia, the company co-founded by Drupal creator Dries Buytaert to provide software, tools and support for Drupal social publishing sites, has expanded to about 65 employees over the last two years – a growth spurt that was in part responsible for Buytaert’s recent relocation to Boston from his native Belgium. Making Drupal more accessible via a hosted version can stoke those fires – especially as Buytaert moves ahead with plans he disclosed to The Semantic Web blog about building a commercial ecosystem around Drupal Gardens.

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In our Creative Destruction 7 Act Play series, we have looked at the following markets: Financial Services, B2B Media, STM Publishing, Education, Legal Publishing, Advertising, eCommerce.

We now turn our attention to Market Research. In this Part 1, we look at the current cash cows and market incumbents.

Market Research grew up with advertising during the radio age of the 1920s. It grew much bigger during the TV age of the 1950s, but remained essentially the same. It is now being fundamentally reinvented during the Internet age.

Image courtesy of Flickr and Miller Info Commons.

In our Creative Destruction 7 Act Play series, we have looked at the following markets: Financial Services, B2B Media, STM Publishing, Education, Legal Publishing, Advertising, eCommerce.

We now turn our attention to Market Research. In this Part 1, we look at the current cash cows and market incumbents.

Market Research grew up with advertising during the radio age of the 1920s. It grew much bigger during the TV age of the 1950s, but remained essentially the same. It is now being fundamentally reinvented during the Internet age.

Image courtesy of Flickr and Miller Info Commons.

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