Silk is launching in open beta today (May 10). The service for applying semantics to create more powerful web sites, which we last discussed here, moves out of a private beta stage that the company says saw more than 10,000 users.

“A lot of the sites during the private beta were, well… private, so we can’t go into details about those,” says Sander Koppelaar, head of operations. Countries of the World, with all United Nations member state information, is one public Silk-powered demo web site for those who’d like to explore one. Generally speaking, he says there’s been a wide variety of use cases, ranging from professional publishers and data journalists to businesses and even personal use. “Publishers have used Silk to interpret data sets such as deadly traffic accidents, house sales and MBA rankings.

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SemTechBiz is Less Than 3 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 !

These days, it’s not just the traditional publishing community that has reason for leveraging the content syndication model. As more and more companies across vertical sectors themselves become content providers, syndication makes sense for them, too.

NewsCred has a new – and semantic – take on content syndication, with content partners ranging from Reuters to The Guardian to The Economist. Recently-added customers that leverage the service’s fully licensed text, image and video content include traditional publishers such as the New York Daily News (and NewsCred is in talks with it about becoming a content provider, too). But other recent customers point to the importance of quality content to the consumer and corporate brand market:  For example, insurance provider Zurich recently signed on. NewsCred also just closed a deal with Johnson & Johnson to be a subscriber of its syndication services for content related to the health care products and pharmaceuticals space.

Brands, says NewsCred CEO Shafqat Islam, are responding to consumers getting smarter and more demanding. “They have so much access to information that brands are starting to realize they can’t just sell products or services anymore,” he says. “They need more authentic, engaging conversations with their customers and the best way to build these authentic relationships is with highly-engaging, trusted, high-quality content.”

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Remember the days before Wikipedia had all the answers? We looked things up in libraries, referring to shelf-filling encyclopaedias. We bought CD-ROMs (remember them?) full of facts and pictures and video clips. We asked people. Sometimes, school home work actually required some work more strenuous than a cut and paste. We went about our business without remembering that New Coke briefly entered our lives on this day in 1985.

Wikipedia is far from perfect, and some of the concern around its role in a wider dumbing down of thought and argument may be justified. But, despite that, it’s a remarkable achievement and a wonderful resource. Those who argued that it would never work have clearly been proven wrong. Carefully maintained processes and the core principle of the neutral point of view mostly serve contributors well.

With Wikimedia Deutschland‘s recent announcement of Wikidata, many of the early concerns about Wikipedia itself have resurfaced once again. Read more

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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Comparison engine FindTheBest recently released a widget that can help online content creators integrate its data-driven topic comparisons into their pages. An author writing a story about the accounting profession, for instance, can add a widget that provides a single or multiple-product data view of accounting software, or a ratings chart, with customizable data fields via a widget that can be embedded from its site or an integration with WordPress.

It’s part of the service’s continuing strategy to drive deeper distribution relationships for its curated topic-search engine that recently added more social and more semantic-like capabilities in the way of crowd-sourcing and soft joins of its data sets (see story here). “We help you with suggestions,” says CEO Kevin O’Connor, co-founder of DoubleClick. “Then we add some different info-graphics” – maybe a scatter-gram of all screen sizes vs. price or screen sizes vs. battery life for smart phones, for instance, in a story about, say, Apple’s latest iPhone plans. “That lets you pull in industry wide information very quickly into interesting graphics.”

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Want web sites to run as smooth as silk? So do the developers behind Silk, who’ve been working the last couple of years to make it easy to apply semantics to create more powerful web sites, with information that can be used more effectively.

Silk, which The Semantic Web Blog previously has covered here and here, now is in the process of testing its WYSIWYG Silk Editor with a select user set, and is slowly inviting more interested parties to get involved. It expects to release it publicly soon. The simplicity of the Silk Editor, says Sander Koppelaar, head of business development, is that it looks very much like familiar environments – think a graphical Wiki – while supporting tagging information on a page, such as the population or capital of Amsterdam, if that were the subject.

“That way you first create pages that are very handy for users because they are built for humans, containing text and images you’d see on a normal web site,” he says. “But more or less without noticing it you build on your data model and can start to use that to create the great overviews and answer actual questions about the data.”

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It cannot be denied that Stephen Wolfram knows data. As the person behind Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha, he has been working with data — and the computation of that data — for a long time. As he said in his blog yesterday, “In building Wolfram|Alpha, we’ve absorbed an immense amount of data, across a huge number of domains.  But—perhaps surprisingly—almost none of it has come in any direct way from the visible internet. Instead, it’s mostly from a complicated patchwork of data files and feeds and database dumps.”

The main topic of Wolfram’s post is a proposal about the form and placement of raw data on the internet. In the post, he proposes that .data be created as a new generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) to hold data in a “parallel construct.”

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To accompany our recent podcast looking back on 2011, we’ve accumulated some additional perspectives from thought leaders in the next-wave Web space on the year that’s quickly passing us by.

Some highlights follow. You’ll see respondents hit on some common themes throughout, such as Big Data, sentiment analytics, specific vertical industry adoption, and the standards space:

 

• SKOS has become an increasingly popular entry point for organizations that want to use semantic technology in practical applications without worrying about the more complicated aspects of semantic web technology. – Bob  DuCharme, solutions architect, TopQuadrant

 

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A new article reports that “Pingar, a leading provider of unstructured data management solutions today announced a new tool for enterprises to quickly capture data and business intelligence stored in documents and use that data for business advantage and operational efficiency. Invoice Analyzer extends Pingar’s proven ability to apply text analytics and natural language processing research, to capture, sort and analyze data in unstructured documents to include semi-structured data.” Read more

A room full of interested parties gathered in Microsoft’s Silicon Valley Campus yesterday to discuss Schema.org, its implications on existing vocabularies, syntaxes, and projects, and how best to move forward with what has admittedly been a bumpy road.

Schema.org, you may recall, is the vocabulary for structured data markup that was released by Google, Microsoft, and Bing on June 2 of this year.  The schema.org website states, “A shared markup vocabulary makes easier for webmasters to decide on a markup schema and get the maximum benefit for their efforts. So, in the spirit of sitemaps.org, Bing, Google and Yahoo! have come together to provide a shared collection of schemas that webmasters can use.”  (For more history about the roll-out and initial reactions to it, here’s a summary.)

Yesterday was the first time since the Semantic Technology & Business Conference in San Francisco that community members have gathered face-to-face to discuss Schema.org in an open forum. It was a full agenda with plenty of opportunity for debate and discussion.

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