Tom Dunlap
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Bing is Microsoft’s newest search engine, marketed as a “decision engine.” It’s designed to integrate searches to bring surfers better results than Google and Yahoo, and it’s getting some impressive press.

Microsoft launched a Bing media blitz, running several TV commercials about it (although I’ve seen better technology spots.) Tech writers, some of them pretty wowed, have written a lot about Bing, including SemanticWeb.com’s Ron Miller, who filed a nice video tour of the search engine yesterday.

But is it all just pie in the sky? Google’s Eric Schmidt recently slammed Bing, saying Microsoft does this about once a year. So my question is:

Have You Tried Bing?

To Vote in the Poll (it takes a couple steps, so I beg your indulgence):
1. Click Watch Now below.
2. Look for the small Vote Now link. Click it
3. A box pops up. Vote, and you’ll see your vote tally in real time
4. You can also post a comment

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Jeni’s Musings

There’s a big push within the UK government right now, helped along by the appointment of Tim Berners-Lee, to publish their data using Linked Data principles.

One of the challenges is how to publish Linked Data in a world that sometimes, even frequently, changes. Cool URIs don’t change, but departmental domain names do, as departments are split and merged and rebranded. So the URIs that are minted for things like schools and roads need to be detached from the departments that have responsibility for them, neutralised into general domains such as education.data.gov.uk and transport.data.gov.uk.

But that’s the least of the problems. Because schools and roads themselves don’t remain static either. They are split and merged and rebranded. They are resources that change over time. What should their URIs look like?

Complete story

By Scott Booher
CIOpedia

As IT leaders we often see opportunities for innovation in the technology assets developed and managed within our organizations. Such is the case for the following proposition around corporate web site search, which may be relevant considering the recent introductions of Bing, WolframAlpha and the word “semantic” back in the news again.

The magnitude of the Internet’s success is now matched by user frustration in sifting through endless unstructured web sites and billions of web pages for immediately relevant information.

Complete story

Richard MacManus
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

ReadWriteWeb:

Semantic technology company TopQuadrant announced today that NASA is using its semantic application platform, the TopBraid Suite, to “model, organize, integrate and exchange data” within the NASA Constellation Program. The goal of the NASA Constellation Program, announced in 2004, is to explore the solar system – starting with a return to the Moon and ultimately aiming to explore Mars and other destinations.

Part of the reason NASA is using TopQuadrant is to reduce operational costs and shorten development cycles.

Complete story

Tom Dunlap
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

I have a feeling we’re overreacting to this Swine Flu outbreak. At the risk of being callous, don’t a certain amount of people die from various strains of the flu every year? Nevertheless, the Web is driving new disease-tracking and prevention tools.

Complete story

By Nova Spivack

My Public Twine

“Stephen Wolfram is building something new — and it is really impressive and significant. In fact it may be as important for the Web (and the world) as Google, but for a different purpose. It’s not a “Google killer” — it does something different. It’s an “answer engine” rather than a search engine.

“Stephen was kind enough to spend two hours with me last week to demo his new online service — Wolfram Alpha (scheduled to open in May). In the course of our conversation we took a close look at Wolfram Alpha’s capabilities, discussed where it might go, and what it means for the Web, and even the Semantic Web.”

Complete story

Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Florida is once again a notch in Metatomix’ belt. The semantic web vendor’s platform powers its Judicial Inquiry System (JIS), and now the Sunshine State’s Lee County has extended the technology behind that system in its implementation of the platform for its Active Warrant Alert System.
The Active Warrant system identifies defendants appearing before the court who have open local, Florida, out-of-state or federal warrants.

In that capacity, the technology serves as the platform providing much-needed help for a county that didn’t have enough manpower to consistently and holistically check warrant information from sheriff’s departments and attorney’s offices across local, state and national information systems at every stage of the process, from first appearance through arraignments, docket appearances, and any other time a defendant shows up in court. Previously, with staffing being what it was, it wasn’t always possible for bailiffs to conduct full background checks for other warrants across more than a dozen databases, in multiple formats, at every turn beyond the first appearance, because the process was too-labor intensive, says Sheila Mann, court operations manager for communications.

That was a problem, because if the defendant had been suspected of engaging in other criminal activity between first appearance and his formal charging at arraignment, or even at a docket sounding to check that everything is ready for trial, the fact that he was wanted on another charge might not be uncovered.

“If they walked into court, and we don’t know they had another warrant out on them, they might walk right back out,” says Mann. “If we knew a warrant was out we could arrest them at their arraignment or court dates.”

The Metatomix Semantic Platform that underlies the Active Warrant Alert System, developed by Metatomix in conjunction with the Florida Office of State Courts Administrator, connects data from multiple sources in real-time and presents active warrant information to the court’s calendar system and the Comprehensive Case Information System.

Lee County began testing the technology in October, going live in November with the implementation that cost around $150,000 as part of a joint effort with the Lee County Sheriff’s Department. Within the first eight days of going live, the Metatomix system ran through some 3,000 names and identified 141 warrants, Mann says. Metatomix notes that that led to 16 arrests. “Now we can see we are hitting things outside of our local area that weren’t picked up before – we just didn’t have manpower,” says Mann.

This is the first county in Florida to integrate the Active Warrant Alert System, but Mann notes that the Collier County’s sheriff’s department has signed on to use the technology as well.

“It goes through all of the databases, and highlights various information,” she says. “You can search through a limited part of databases or drill deeper.” What does she think about the semantic technology that makes all this possible? Mann cares only that it works, and works well. “I heard all the semantic stuff and I get that it is something really cool, but I’m just glad that we get these hits.”

Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

What is the future of the Internet? It’s a good question to ask as we head into the last year of the first decade of the 21st century — and it’s a question that the Pew Internet & American Life Project in fact asked Internet leaders, activists and analysts.

In its just-issued report, “The Future of the Internet III,” the survey delivers the perspective of these leading thinkers as it relates to how the Internet will have evolved by 2020.

Semanticweb.com readers won’t be surprised to hear that the semantic web is destined to play an important role in the Internet of tomorrow — but as has been discussed here before, we are talking about an evolution, not a revolution. Most of those surveyed by the Pew Internet & American Life Project envision that the original Internet architecture will still be in place in 2020 rather than replaced by a new “next-generation” system, but continually refined.

“Those who wrote extended elaborations to their answers projected the expectation that IPv6 (define) and the Semantic Web will be vital elements in the continuing development of the Internet over the next decade,” the report notes.

That harkens to the thoughts of Nova Spivack, CEO and founder of Radar Networks, who summed up the semantic web last year thusly: “I think that the semantic web is an evolution more than a revolution. At first it won’t be as radical a change as some people have hyped it. It will be an iterative, incremental, gradual improvement of all the information tools we use, and that will over time reach a tipping point. But that’s more than ten years away.”

The report also postulates that the Internet in 2020 will be a place of even greater transparency. It would be difficult to think that the Semantic Web — the web of linked data — isn’t going to have a major impact on information transparency, to whatever ends the transparency of people and organizations is put (the report concludes such transparency will not necessarily yield more personal integrity, social tolerance, or forgiveness).

Read more

Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Startup SemantiNet has extended its relationship with Yahoo since launching its Firefox browser plug-in that helps people discover content they are not actively looking for. That technology, dubbed headup since we reported it here (“SemantiNet Hits the Internet Stage“), is now enabled with Yahoo! Fire Eagle geolocation and BOSS (Build your Own Search
Service) support, adding to its support for Flickr, Upcoming and Delicious.

Of leveraging the FireEagle API, founder Tai Keinan says the geolocation abilities open up new avenues of interest for users.

“For example, if you are using Fire Eagle and you go to Flickr, [with headup technology] you can see a picture of a nearby place, because it knows your location,” and those images were geotagged with the same location, he says. “Or if you look at a band you can see which events are closest to where you are at. It’s a novel way of leveraging location-based services.”

Leveraging the BOSS open search web services platform API is more of a backend play that aids in SemantiNet’s own ability to produce relevant search results and analysis of content. BOSS gives start-ups like Semantinet access to Yahoo! crawling and indexing, ranking and relevancy algorithms, and infrastructure to build next-generation search solutions.

According to Keinan, since SemantiNet began utilizing BOSS, the quality of search results has improved significantly. “BOSS is a behind-the-scenes type of instrument,” he says. “It helps us understand key terms and things in different articles to improve our search.” Keinan notes that headup is now able to better distinguish between objects with the same name – Las Vegas, the city, and Las Vegas, the TV show, as an example. “This is considered a really difficult challenge and Yahoo BOSS has really simplified it,” he says.

Keinan also notes that headup is now taking advantage of Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Contacts. How might this work for users of SemantiNet’s service? A Yahoo Contacts user might, for instance, import his contact list to gain more information about leads or friends. Or you might, for instance, see a friend on Facebook and note she works for a particular public company, and from there discover how that company’s stock is doing or other relevant financial data and news articles about the firm (in case it’s time to alert your friend to start looking for a new job!).

“The idea of associated browsing is what we are e trying to promote,” he says. “So you are using headup to jump from one object or thing to another, from a person to a company they work for to their product or a similar product. When it’s working as it should, you create a seamless browsing experience where you are always focused on the thing or object that interests you.”

Towards that end, Keinan says that Yahoo is doing a tremendous job in terms of opening up its data sources to out-of-site consumption. “This is in line with the way we view the Web — make it easy to connect users to information without forcing them to go to specific sites.”

Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Last week saw the debut of Freebase’s Acre integrated application development and hosting environment. But it’s something more, too. Consider it the next step in developer Metaweb’s mission to build up its data and community (see Freebase Reaches Out.). It’s an investment that the company hopes will play a key role in building a community of applications off Freebase data and generating data contributions from their own daily information flows.

“We had developers who were coming and using Freebase as a platform previously, but what we observed were a number of different barriers [some] people were hitting,” says Mike Osborn, Metaweb VP of marketing. Often, they didn’t know where to start. They saw an incredibly data-rich environment. and had a vision for using that data to power some interesting applications, but to get up the Freebase learning curve is, he acknowledges, “non-trivial.”

Acre is one answer to Metaweb’s plans to bolster its efforts to have people read and write interesting data from Freebase. Among its features is the fact that all code is viewable, and it’s easy to clone or import code from other developers’ applications, as a way to help people collaborate. “The fact that we are hosting it and it’s a server side Java script– we believe these are fundamentally important to make it as easy as possible for people to start,” says Osborn.

Osborn points as an early example of Freebase’s collaborative zeitgeist a member’s creation of a Vancouver database, joined by a number of his friends, and the subsequent creation of a set of tools using Google Friend Connect to create a Vancouver Freebase social network to manage projects on the database. “As they load information relating to schools or podcasts [or other things] in Vancouver they have a social network that ties into Freebase and lets them mange their data projects,” he says, and related to that they’re using Google’s custom search application as a mashup to get remarkably clean search results focused on Vancouver.

The concept of writing data to Freebase through the medium of social networks also can be leveraged by larger partners.

“One of the most important constituencies in the Freebase ecosystem are the consumers who simply want to consume or contribute data in onesies and twosies, and we believed all along that the power of Freebase is going to be best enabled when it’s in context,” Osborn says. Say, for instance, a consumer wants to know all the names of all left-handed quarterbacks in NFL history — a consumer may discover that information harnessed from Freebase on a social network they frequent, and maybe they even will want to update it with a forgotten quarterback or two. “So there’s interest in small and large partners in having a tightly reconciled data application piece from Freebase exposed in their particular product flow, and those types of applications will be very compelling for the developers building them and those contributing back to Freebase through their own normal flows and ordinary consumption.”

Over the next year, as Metaweb sees people innovating and creating interesting applications, it plans to foster a more actively managed community that helps people connect and realize there is common work occurring.

“We need to make that a more explicit outbound approach, so people can learn from each other and shorten development cycles,” he says. And it will be looking overall at hardening the infrastructure as well. Freebase doesn’t have the usage to tax it in any meaningful way yet, Osborn says, but that’s something it expects will change as Acre makes its way into users’ consciousness.