A recent report asked the question, is the future of sharing the Semantic Web? The abstract states, “Current information sharing is based mostly on using so-called Web 1.0 search tools and Web 2.0 tools such as social media to collect and display data and information on the Web and make it easier for people to access. The next generation of Web technologies — collectively called the Semantic Web — will move sharing into the era of Web 3.0.”

It goes on, “Semantic Web technologies are already used in government sites such as Data.gov and Recovery.gov, which are part of the Obama administration’s push for open government. Read more

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 !

Oleg Shilovitsky, CEO of Inforbix and speaker at next month’s SemTechBiz Conference, has written a new article discussing the move to intelligent data. He writes, “I think the word ‘intelligent’ adds a special panache to most anything. It imparts a refreshing ‘smell’ that evokes the impression that something ‘smart’ is involved.  So a move from ‘dumb’ to ‘intelligent’ must be a good move, right? Jos Voskuil would answer ‘yes’ when it comes to moving data towards something more intelligent.”

Shilovitsky quotes a recent post by Voskuil regarding dumb data: “Here it was even more a key point of the discussion that most of the legacy data is stored in dumb documents. And the main reason dumb documents are used is because the data needs to be available during the long lifecycle of the the plant, application independent if possible. So in the previous century this was paper, later scanned documents (TIFF – PDF) and currently mainly PDF. Most of the data now is digital but where is the intelligence?” Read more

[Editor's Note: This guest editorial is provided by Sean Golliher. He can be found on Twitter at @seangolliher]

Google announced they’re rolling out new enhancements to their search technology and they’re calling it the “Knowledge Graph.”  For those involved in the Semantic Web Google’s “Knowledge Graph” is nothing new. After watching the video, and reading through the announcements, the Google engineers are giving the impression, to those familiar with this field, that they have created something new and innovative.

While it ‘s commendable that Google is improving search it’s interesting to note the direct translations of Google’s “new language” to the existing semantic web vocabulary. Normally engineers and researchers quote, or at least reference, the original sources of their ideas. One can’t help but notice that the semantic web isn’t mentioned in any of Google’s announcements. After watching the different reactions from the semantic web community I found that many took notice of the language Google used and how the ideas from the semantic web were repackaged as “new” and discovered by Google.

Read more

Google’s Knowledge Graph has been the subject of lots of attention over the past few days since the announcement. And the focus of a lot of questions, too.

There’s been discussion on chat boards, for instance, about just who’s gotten access and who hasn’t. In a discussion with a representative from Google, The Semantic Web blog has learned that, like many other new Google services, the roll-out is gradual, in order to ensure the system is handling new functions well. First-come, first-served are those who are signed into Google – but then again, not everyone who is signed in. But the plan is to have everyone who’s signed in on board over the next few days, the rep says; so if you are and don’t have it yet, it should be hitting your browser shortly. Those not signed into Google accounts probably have a week or two of a wait left. So far, the rep said that things have been pretty smooth, so Google’s going at the pace it was hoping to.

Read more

Andrea Di Maio of Gartner recently articulated concerns about open data processing, particularly the divide between data professionals who have the skills to do so and those who do not. Di Maio writes, “Over the last four years open government and open data have been at the forefront of the debate on how governments can become more transparent, participative and efficient. The theory is well known: rather than (or alongside) providing the government’s interpretation or packaging of public data, this data should be made available in raw, open format for people to build their own views and applications… The downside is a deluge of data. People can easily drown in raw open data that is either too much or simply meaningless unless some processing takes place.” Read more

On Friday, May 11, a group of Semantic Technology 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 Semantics in the Financial Services Industry, and “the Linkers” were joined by special guest, Lee Feigenbaum, VP Marketing & Technology at Cambridge Semantics. Lee shared insights gained over many years working in the semantic technology field and with numerous customers in the financial services industry.
Read more

A New Framework for Querying Semantic Networks, a paper that was presented at Museums and the Web 2012, is now available online. The paper was written by Katerina Tzompanaki, Martin Doerr Institute of Computer Science, F.O.R.T.H. Crete–Greece. The abstract states, “The upcoming large-scale metadata repositories, semantic networks of Resource Description Framework triples integrating large amounts of cultural–historical data, are not easily accessible to global query paradigms, such as ‘query by example’ or keyword search. ISO21127 (CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model) is an adequate global schema for such systems, but querying individually hundreds of different kinds of properties leaves a huge recall gap compared to text retrieval, whereas a global restriction to ‘core metadata,’ such as Dublin Core, deprives the systems of any more advanced integration and reasoning capability.” Read more

The schema.org official blog has announced support for enumerated lists. Adding this support allows developers using schema.org to use selected externally maintained vocabularies in their schema.org markup. According to the W3C-hosted schema.org WebSchemas wiki, “This is in addition to the existing extension mechanisms we support, and the general ability to include whatever markup you like in your pages. The focus here is on external vocabularies which can be thought of as ‘supported’ (or anticipated) in some sense by schema.org.”

In other words, “Schema.org markup uses links into well-known authority lists to clarify which particular instance of a schema.org type (eg. Country) is being mentioned.”

For example, consider a list of countries of the world. A developer could use this URI from Wikipedia to reference the USA or this one from the UN FAO, or this one from GeoNames.

Read more

Steven Rosenbaum of Forbes recently posed the question, is there too much information out there? He writes, “If anyone knows anything about the web, where it’s been and where it’s going, it’s David Weinberger.  As a co-author of the seminal Clue Train Manifesto, Weinberger gave a generation of web innovators a clue as to how the web would evolve. In Too Big To Know Weinberger sets out to argue that the very nature of information and ideas is changing, even as you flip the pages of his book.”

Rosenbaum continues, “The world was, almost since the beginning of time, built around the concept of triangular knowledge. At the bottom of  the triangle is data. Raw and unstructured.  The Knowledge Triangle presented first in 1988 by Russel Akkoff presented DIKW (Data, Information,  Knowledge, Wisdom) as the basis for our information ecology.  Weinberger says our Information Age was built on this pyramid – creating an elaborate filtering system to sort Wisdom from Data.”

Read more here.

Image: Courtesy David Weinberger

Rob Gonzalez of Cambridge Semantics recently commented on a LinkedIn thread started by Michael Uschold. Uschold asked the question, “How is semantic technology more flexible than relational technology?” One commenter stated, “If you ‘mess up’ your choice of initial vocabulary, then semantic systems have similar sorts of problems to relational systems, in that you may have to restructure the vocabulary at a later date (just like you have to restructure relational schemas), and hence restructure the data. My experience suggests that such restructuring happens (far?) less often with semantic systems than with relational systems, and that the restructuring is easier, since you can always treat your data as one big list of triples.” Read more