According to a new article, “Louis Pouzin, Robert Kahn, Vint Cerf, Tim Berners-Lee, [and] Marc Andreessen are the joint winners of the first Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. They have been awarded the prize for the ground-breaking work, starting in the 1970s, which led to the internet and worldwide web. The internet and worldwide web initiated a communications revolution which has changed the world.” Read more

The Internet of Things is coming, but it needs a semantic backbone to flourish. With some 25 billion devices expected to be connected to the Internet by 2015 and 50 billion by 2020, providing interoperability among the things on the IoT “is one of the most fundamental requirements to support object addressing, tracking, and discovery as well as information representation, storage, and exchange.” So write the authors of Semantics for the Internet of Things: Early Progress and Back to the Future, Payam Barnaghi and Wei Wang, Centre for Communication Systems Research, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK and Cory Henson, Kno.e.sis – Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge-enabled Computing.

Applying semantic technologies to IoT, however, has several research challenges, the authors note, pointing out that IoT and using semantics in IoT is still in its early days. Being in on the ground floor of this movement is undeniably exciting to the research community, including people such as Konstantinos Kotis, Senior Research Scientist at University of the Aegean, and IT Manager in the regional division of the Samos and Ikaria islands at North Aegean Regional Administration Authority.

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At the recent SemTech conference in NYC, The Semantic Web Blog had an opportunity to ask some leaders in the field about where semantic technology has been, and where it’s going.

David Wood, CTO, 3RoundStones:

The short take: Hiring has been on in a big way at semantic tech players as enterprises are moving in greater numbers to buy semantic software, recognizing their traditional vendors won’t solve their interoperability issues. Sem tech vendors should have a happy 2013 as semantics continues going mainstream.

The full take:

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In December, a group of Semantic thought leaders from around the globe met with their host and colleague, Eric Franzon, for the latest installment of the Semantic Link, a monthly podcast covering the world of Semantic Technologies. This episode includes a discussion about the newly launched Open Data Institute (ODI) in the UK, and “the Linkers” were joined by a special guest: Nigel Shadbolt, Chairman and Co-Founder of the ODI. You can learn more about the ODI here.
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Lee Feigenbaum of Cambridge Semantics recently interviewed (on CMS Wire) the BBC regarding the company’s adoption of semantic web technologies. Feigenbaum writes, “The BBC’s website for the 2010 World Cup was notable for the raw amount of rich information that it contained. Every player on every team in every group had their own web page, and the ease with which you could navigate from one piece of content to the next was remarkable. Within the Semantic Web community, the website was notable for one more reason: it was made possible by the BBC’s embrace of Semantic Web technologies.” Read more

The founder of DoubleClick.com, purchased by Google in 2007 for around $3.7 billion,  Kevin O’Connor, spoke with me about his newest venture FindTheBest.com. Founded in 2009, FindTheBest.com makes recommendations and comparisons for just about anything of interest on the web.  Kevin tells us all about FindTheBest.com, recommendation engines, and future plans for his company.

If you would like your company to be considered for an interview please email editor[ at ]semanticweb[ dot ]com.

Sean: Hi Kevin, after leaving DoubleClick, which was sold to Google, what made you decide to start another company?

Kevin: I resigned as the CEO of DoubleClick in 2000, although I did remain the Chairman until the company was sold in 2005. I had spent 17 years working 80-hour weeks—and loved it—but ultimately decided I wanted more balance in my life; that meant spending more time with my family.

My passion for tech, however, never faded. I wanted to find a way get back into the tech world, but still have time for all the other important things in life. So I decided to start my own venture capital firm—O’Connor Ventures—and began investing in promising startups like Surfline, Meet-Up, Procore and Travidia.

I honestly didn’t think I would get back into the tech world as a founder, but I was becoming more and more frustrated by the chaos of the Web and I wanted to find a way to organize it.

 Sean:  What inspired you to start FindTheBest.com? What problem where you trying to solve?

Kevin: FindTheBest was founded out of three fundamental problems I saw with the Web:

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Bill Culifer of WebProfessionals.com recently shared an audio interview with web expert Manu Sporny. Culifer writes, “In this fourteen minute interview with Manu Sporny Founder, CEO of Digital Bazaar a leader in the democratization of finance and payments on the Web we learn about Linked Data and why Web professionals should care.” The interview covers: “The history of Linked Data; Tim Berners Lee vision for Linked Data. How data is locked in silos; How Linked Data aims to free the data; How Linked Data differs from the Semantic Web; Examples of Linked Data; Benefits of Linked Data and why Web professionals should care; Recommendations for Web Professionals and how to get started; Linked data plugins and tools; Linked Data resources and best practices; The importance of education and advocacy.” Read more

On Friday, October 12, 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 two special guests: Hadley Beeman, expert in Government Linked Data and Open Data; and Joel Natividad, CEO & Co-Founder, Ontodia.
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Bart van Leeuwen, software executive (netage.nl) and firefighter (Amsterdam Fire Department), has a story of practical application of Semantic Web technologies that we have covered before here at SemanticWeb.com and in our Semantic Technology & Business Conference series. Below, we offer the video of the keynote address he delivered in June at the San Francisco event.

His, like many of the most successful Semantic Web case studies, is a story of iterative growth and agile development, a mixing of technical and cultural challenges and solutions. Even since Bart’s keynote at the recent London SemTechBiz conference, there have been developments, and we caught up with him to hear the latest (video after the jump).

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If you would like your company to be considered for an interview please email editor[ at ]semanticweb[ dot ]com.

In this segment of our “Innovation Spotlight” we spoke with Andreas Blumauer, the CEO of  Semantic Web Company. Semantic Web Company is headquartered in Vienna, Austria and their software extracts meaning from big data using linked data technologies. In this interview Andreas describes some of the their core products to us in more detail.

Sean: Hi Andreas. Can you give us a little background on your company? When did you get started in the Semantic Web?

Andreas: As an offspring of a ‘typical’ web agency from the early days of the internet, we became a specialized provider in 2004: The ‘Semantic Web School’ focused on research, consulting and training in the area of the semantic web. We learned quickly how the idea of a ‘semantic web’ was able to trigger a lot of great project visions but also, that most of the tools from the early days of the semantic web were rather scary for enterprises. In 2007 we experienced that information professionals began to search for grown-up semantic web solutions to improve their information infrastructure. We were excited that ‘our’ main topics obviously began to play a role in the development of IT-strategies in many organizations. We refocused on the development of software and renamed our company.

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