Interviews

On Friday, October 14, 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 schema.org. The Semantic Link panel was joined by special guest, Ramanathan V. Guha, Google Fellow, and one of the principal people behind schema.org.

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Yesterday, we ran Part I of our conversation with Manu Sporny, CEO of Digital Bazaar, about Payswarm, a new type of micropayment standard for the web. Today, we dive a bit deeper into the process of how Payswarm is being developed as a Semantic Web based standard rather than a proprietary technology.

SW: Tell us a bit about the choice to create PaySwarm as a standards project.
MS: The answer lies somewhere in a lack of open, patent- and royalty-free standards for online payments. Filling out your credit card information on every site you want to support is not the answer. Neither is signing up to a proprietary payment service. What we need are open standards for payment on the Web – once that is in place, we can look forward to an explosion in innovative start-ups centered around finance and crowd-sourced funding. We can also look forward to more individuals being enabled to make a living via the Web which, given this incredibly deep recession, will have a very positive impact on a number of people’s lives.

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Manu Sporny, Founder/CEO of Digital Bazaar, Inc., sat down with SemanticWeb.com to discuss Payswarm, a new standard that he is working on through a W3C Community Group. This article is Part 1 of 2.

SemanticWeb.com: What is PaySwarm?
Manu Sporny: It is a universal payment standard designed specifically for the Web. Think “an open source PayPal on steroids” – an open, patent and royalty free specification for Web Payments. The goal of PaySwarm is to make crowd-funding, world-changing ideas, buying and selling online as easy as sending an e-mail or an instant message. We want payment to be baked into the core of the Web so that exciting new companies can be launched on top of this truly open payment platform.

We want to enable anybody in the world to launch a PayPal, KickStarter, or Kiva. Think of what the Web did for companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo. We think PaySwarm can do that for the next generation of start-ups that want to transform the way we reward each other on the Web. Improving the way we organize financial resources to enhance our personal lives and pursue endeavors that improve upon the human condition is at the core of what we’re doing.
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We sat down with Mike Tung, CEO of Diffbot to learn more about this innovative technology that takes a different approach to deriving meaning from web pages.

SemanticWeb.com: What is Diffbot?
Mike Tung: Diffbot is a technology that allows software applications to interpret web pages the way human beings do–visually.  We offer an API to developers that lets them visually extract semantic information from web pages depending on the page type.  We’ve observed that the entire web can be classified into roughly 30 structural page types and have trained our visual extraction algorithm on two of those page types so far–frontpage and article pages.

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On Friday, September 9, 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 the latest document around the RDF 1.1 standard (a Working Draft). The Semantic Link panel was joined by special guest, David Wood, Co-Chair of the RDF Working Group at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

David Wood, 3 Roundstones

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“Attune is my favorite kind of semantic app: the kind where users can’t see the semtech, but it’s making life easier and better for them, and the developers, by being smart and flexible. We’re proud that Pancake has built Attune using Stardog as its RDF database.” – Kendall Clark, Clark & Parsia

Yesterday, in Part I of this two-part series, we learned about the new productivity application, Attune. Here in Part II, Robert Butler, president of Pancake Technology, tells us about the technology under the hood and why he chose to build Attune from the ground-up on top of Semantic Technologies.

SemanticWeb.com: What Semantic Tech are you using?
Robert Butler: Attune was built on top of Stardog, Clark & Parsia’s new RDF database. All of the data, therefore, is stored as RDF data and we use Stardog’s intuitive native interface to update or create data. Queries are run using SPARQL. We have built OWL 2 ontologies for Attune, currently targeted at the QL profile. We plan to increase our use of ontology expressability, eventually using either EL or RL.

SW: Why did you choose Semantic Technologies rather than other options?
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An interview with Makx Dekkers of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative covers DCMI’s development with Dekkers as Managing Director over the last ten years and looks ahead to what could happen under the new director, Stuart Sutton. When asked how the organization has changed over the last decade, Dekkers replied, “Around the time when I arrived in 2001, DCMI was exploring its future direction. Our technical experts and people interested in interoperability on a wider scale were participating in the early development of the Semantic Web, and finding ways of incorporating Dublin Core metadata in Linked Data. A lot of work has been done in the past few years in that direction, and now Dublin Core is recognized as one of the core vocabularies for the Semantic Web.” Read more

Pancake Technology, LLC has released a new productivity application called Attune and we caught up with Robert Butler, the company’s president (“The president of Pancake” — now there’s a job title I’m envious of!) to learn more about Attune and the semantic platform under its hood. In part one of this two-part interview, we learn about what users of Attune can experience now and what they can look forward to as the product matures.

Q: What is Attune?
A: Attune is a flexible and powerful personal productivity application, built to overcome limitations in current productivity tools. Attune allows you to create lists, notes, tasks and projects and relate them to each other.

Q: With a lot of productivity applications out there, what’s different here? Why did you create Attune?
A: I have long been frustrated by the inflexibility of existing productivity tools. They almost always seem overly rigid and unable to capture the complexity of my thoughts and projects. My brain doesn’t always operate in terms of tasks and projects, which is why I often resort to note taking to capture my thoughts and why I like products like Evernote. If you are going to build a tool that can capture and remember the vast majority of information in the world, you need text and images. On the other hand, the goal of all the free-form text and images out there is to actually use it to get something done, which brings you back to the structure of tasks and projects. To our knowledge, there isn’t a tool out there that handles this duality well.

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Recently, a new resource appeared on the Web to help developers navigate the waters around various approaches to adding semantic markup to websites and applications. We caught up with the creators of the newly launched  structured-data.org, to learn more about this project.  They are:

Stéphane Corlosquet, OpenSpring.net

Gregg Kellogg, Principal, Kellogg Associates

Manu Sporny, Founder/CEO, Digital Bazaar, Inc.

Q: What is “Structured Data on the Web” (the site and the concept)?

GK: We wanted to provide a place for people to learn about the different ways in which publishers can add semantic information to their web sites and applications. There is confusion in the marketplace, partly due to the introduction of schema.org, which has raised the awareness of structured data with web developers. structured-data.org is a one-stop-shop to learn about the different mechanisms available to developers to take advantage of this.
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[UPDATED: 4:10pm ET]
Last week, our own Jennifer Zaino spoke to Zite CEO, Mark Johnson about the startup, Zite.  One of the topics was the speculation around a rumoured acquisition by CNN. Zite is an iPad app that leverages deeper technology to provide an individually personalized experience. Zite surfaces content to users that they will find most interesting from a variety of sources across the Web by learning users’ preferences and getting smarter as it’s used. Today, news broke that, indeed, Zite has sold to CNN.
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