Yesterday, we announced RDFa.info, a new site devoted to helping developers add RDFa (Resource Description Framework-in-attributes) to HTML.

Building on that work, the team behind RDFa.info is announcing today the release of “PLAY,” a live RDFa editor and visualization tool. This release marks a significant step in providing tools for web developers that are easy to use, even for those unaccustomed to working with RDFa.

“Play” is an effort that serves several purposes. It is an authoring environment and markup debugger for RDFa that also serves as a teaching and education tool for Web Developers. As Alex Milowski, one of the core RDFa.info team, said, “It can be used for purposes of experimentation, documentation (e.g. crafting an example that produces certain triples), and testing. If you want to know what markup will produce what kind of properties (triples), this tool is going to be great for understanding how you should be structuring your own data.”

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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 !

Today, May 9, 2012 is Global Accessibility Awareness Day (#GAAD). What started with a simple blog-post by Los Angeles Web Developer, Joe Devon, has grown to include events around the world designed to increase awareness about web accessibility issues. To read more about the day and these various activities, see the official GAAD Website and Facebook page.

According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Today, about 50 million Americans, or 1 in 5 people, are living with at least one disability, and most Americans will experience a disability some time during the course of their lives.” In other parts of the world, this number may be significantly higher.

In the interest of full disclosure, Joe Devon is a personal friend of mine, and I must admit that if he were not, I likely wouldn’t have seen his blog post or explored the issues of accessibility as deeply as I have in recent weeks. But I have been exploring, and I’ve been surprised at what I’ve found. In my opinion, Semantic Technology and Assistive Technology are a natural fit for one another, but there seems to be very little discussion or work around the intersection of the two. I have looked, but have not found much collaboration between the two communities. I have also found few individuals who possess much knowledge about both Semantic Tech and Assistive Tech. Of course, if I’ve missed something, please let me know in the comments!

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This year was the 5th version of the Linked Data on the Web Workshop co-located at the World Wide Web Conference going on in Lyon, France.

At this workshop, seven issues caught my attention:

1) Media: Yunja Li presented on Synote: Weaving Media Fragments and Linked Data. This is interesting for those who not only want to link to an entire video, but want to link to a part of a video at a specific interval of time, and also add metadata information about that.

2) NLP to Linked Data: How can we relate the results of different named entity extraction tools to Linked Data. Giuseppe Rizzo introduced their project, NERD, which is working on this area.

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NOTE: This post is provided by guest author, Mr. Dennis E. Wisnosky, Chief Technical Officer and Chief Architect, Business Mission Area, U.S. Department of Defense. Dennis will be delivering a Special Presentation, “The Enterprise Information Web: Analytics, Efficiency and Security” at the June SemTechBiz Conference.

Semantic Technology brings a number of unique capabilities to data stores and applications.  These capabilities evidence themselves both at the user interaction level, in what users can do with and expect from Semantic technologies; and at the system level, in terms of things applications can do internally without rework or recoding.  Semantic Technology, based upon W3C standards, provides capabilities significantly beyond those of proprietary approaches based on technologies that were founded a half century earlier.

1. User Interaction Capabilities

Access to Meaning

Semantic Technology is based upon the development of the ontology of a particular domain.   That is, “what do I need to know to have an unambiguous understanding of a particular thing, organization, subject, etc.?”  This knowing is based upon precise understanding of the meaning of words used in the domain.  A Semantic-Technology-based application depends on and provides a user with access to the defined meaning of the terms—the vocabulary, the words—used in the application.  This means access to a human-only readable definition, such as one found in a dictionary, and access to the formalized definition found in the ontology that frames the system which executes the application.  Such access should be presented in a human consumable form, and is one of the areas in which various formalisms such as Controlled Natural Language (CNL) are useful for translating technical forms of ontologies, such as the Web Ontology Language (OWL) , a W3C standard, to provide a human consumable form.

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“There’s our SPARQL endpoint.” Or “Just view the page in Tabulator.” I have lost count of the number of times that either of these have been the only response to an innocent request to see what some new piece of semantic wizardry can do. For a developer seeking to integrate one semantics-rich data set with another, SPARQL may very well be the tool for the job. And for someone (probably a developer, again) who wants to track the way that data is pulled together to build a page, Tabulator has a lot going for it. But as a shop window for the power of semantics? As a demonstration of what’s possible? Seriously, is it possible to pick worse ways to show off to the world?

In January’s episode of the Semantic Link, we were joined by serial entrepreneur Nova Spivack (perhaps best known to readers as the Founder and CEO of Twine) for a discussion about the importance of delivering a good user experience. In the time available, we only scratched the surface, and I’m sure it’s a topic to which we’ll return. Read more

…and we want to hear from you.

After December’s episode of the Semantic Link, we asked for your thoughts on both the topics we should cover, and the ways in which you would like to interact with the podcast. You spoke, very clearly asking for an opportunity to pose questions for the team to answer during recordings. This is that opportunity.

January’s episode of the show will be recorded this Friday, 13 January, and we’re joined by a guest with much to contribute. I’m sure he needs no introduction for most of you. Nova Spivack was behind semantic technology startup Twine, and has subsequently turned his hand to supporting a range of semantically relevant offerings such as Bottlenose (our coverage) and StreamGlider (our coverage).

Drawing upon some of Nova’s experiences, and digging further into questions that we have touched upon before, we’re going to take a look at the following topic this month:

Is it important to hide semantic smarts behind a simple user experience/interface? If not, why not? If so, how are we beginning to see that manifested?

Siri‘s obviously one example that we’ve discussed before, but there have been other examples recently that also attempt to hide significant power behind UI simplicity. Read more

Kevin Fitchard recently asked the question, “Is Google scared of Siri? Is Yelp? Is Facebook? If they aren’t they should be, as should any mobile website, service or app that depends on advertising for revenues. Siri is just the beginning of a new wave of user interfaces (UIs) that will gradually shift our attention away from our phones’ screens, allowing us to interact with our devices in ways that don’t involve tapping keys and staring at pixels.” Read more

Seevl, the music discovery service built on Semantic Technology that I wrote about a few months ago, has released a significant update to their plugin for YouTube. The plugin is still only available for the Google Chrome browser, but other browser plugins are in the works. You can grab the Chrome plugin here.

Once the plugin is installed, the user has new options available when visiting YouTube. First, there’s a new search option next to the standard YouTube search bar.

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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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“Our mission is to make long form content as easy and relevant as social media.”
–Topicmarks website

With the increasing popularity of cloud-based services for personal workflows, there is a parallel need for ways to organize that information. As part of my everyday workflow and information management routine, I use Evernote, Google Reader, Google Docs, DropBox, and a good number of locally stored files. I email files and links to myself frequently.  Each of these services is great in its own right, and I use them for different purposes and on different devices.  I use them for both personal and work-related information.

By the very nature of this workflow, I have created several silos I need to go to when I am ready to access information, and honestly, it’s not always easy to remember which silo something resides in. I have topics that span content in those different eco-systems, and it would be incredibly useful to have a centralized view into “everything I have saved or tagged on the topic of RDFa,” for example.

Enter Topicmarks.

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