Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

It isn’t a Semantic Web application in the capital sense of the words, but Google gained the nod as the Product of the Year in this year’s Intranet Journal award in the semantic web category.

So, how does Google qualify to win in the semantics category? Well, a Google spokesperson, Eitan Bencuya of Google Corporate Communications, points out that it has always been in the business of extracting semantics from the web — understanding words and phrases and the relations between them; understanding relations between pages and sites; and understanding a user’s needs as expressed in a query or a sequence of queries. The company continues to build semantic resources by extracting information from the web, and using those resources to do a better job of search, ad-matching, and other tasks, Bencuya says.

Additionally, Bencuya points to R.V. Guha’s patent of Google’s “programmable search engine.” Guha was the originator of the RDF protocol, one of the first and most important semantic web representation frameworks, while he was at Netscape. At Google, he built these ideas into what the company calls the Google Custom Search Engine (CSE).

CSE makes it possible for a user to customize an existing search engine to give results that the user thinks are most relevant to a topic, as long as the results are already part of Google’s index. The customization features range from basic things, such as editing colors, to more complex things, such as choosing the most relevant sites, and providing a menu of search refinements to guide the user through unfamiliar territory.

As for semantic web standards, Bencuya says it wholeheartedly embraces and encourages open standards, including RDF and OWL, but he notes that they have not yet had a significant impact on the web. The search engine vendor sees the technology as applicable for smaller-scale, collaborative, like-minded communities, such as scientists working on bioinformatics. Of course, some other emerging search companies see larger-scale applicability, to which Google responds that it welcomes the competition in the highly competitive industry as a driver of innovation and for providing users with more choices.

Google, Bencuya says, is continuously working to develop robust and scalable features that improve the search experience for its users, and conducting research in all promising areas of search technology.

The runner-up in the category was a Semantic Web application, in capitals: Metaweb Technology’s Freebase, whose goal is to become an open, shared database of the world’s knowledge.

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Lars Ludwig
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

I have been developing, testing, and researching an innovative semantic
knowledge management system called ArtificialMemory
for more than 5 years.

ArtificialMemory is a personal and enterprise knowledge management system integrating wikis, personal information, blogs, and document management systems.

Here are (the
first) 5 of the important lessons learned. These lessons often contradict common
opinions on Semantic Web technology and usage stemming from the
dominant artificial intelligence and knowledge representation
research tradition.

1. Simple ontologies are as important as complex ones

The foundation of any Semantic Web application is at least one
ontology scheme. An ontology scheme can be defined more or less
rigidly. A
thesaurus
would be a simple form of ontology, an OWL scheme would be a
more refined
kind allowing for some logical inference of new knowledge. A
well-structured
/ rigid ontology definition forces or tempts one to more often
work on the
ontology scheme instead of inserting data thus preventing one
from getting
things done fast. In my experience, combining simple ontologies
such as
thesauri with more complex ones such as RDFS or OWL is the way
to go. It
is
important to be able to just enter a keyword / tag to denote or
relate to
another word or object instance as well as to be able to create and
instantiate a well-defined object class.

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2. Full-text search is far less, entity search is far more
important in Semantic Webs than in Document Webs

When one starts storing one’s knowledge in highly interrelated
sub-document
information chunks like semantic webs, full text search becomes
obsolete. Knowledge refers to object instances.

In semantic
knowledge webs,
information is related to object instances and thus can be
easily found.
Searching most times merely consists of jumping to an instance
of interest
and identifying the relevant statements / information. What is
important in
Semantic Webs is a sophisticated auto-completion (that is fast)
search box
for instance names (relevant entities).

3. Adding information to Semantic Webs has to be as easy
as in
natural
language notes

Examining the current Semantic Web applications, one will find
that they
tend to either make it very simple to add information by more or
less automatic data imports, or very difficult by forcing users
to annotate
manually using a
multi-step process or complex meta-language (RDF, OWL). The
first solution
will soon create an information pool not reflecting the user’s
memory and
thus adding irrelevant information that endangers use and usability of the
ontology data store (it’s like getting a huge dictionary instead of the
vocabulary you already know and want to relate to).

The second
approach slows down the process of adding information to such a
degree that less
statements and instances will be created and more information is
stored in
a
traditional documents invalidating the Semantic
Web. The information added to a (personal) knowledge store has
to be
inserted consciously using a limited set of natural language
expressions creating structured information fast and easy.

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Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

There are many exciting applications of semantic web technology — not least among them the possibility of improving the web experience for visually impaired users.

That’s an area that Sean Bechhofer and Simon Harper, researchers at the School of Computer Science, University of Manchester, are exploring. Currently, most visually impaired users rely solely on screen readers that read the content of web pages to them. But that leaves something to be desired, as screen readers generally read a page from top to bottom, regardless of where the main content is, and they can’t differentiate presentation details — colors, images, font size, placement, etc. — that give clues about what information on the page stands for or is most important or current to sighted users.

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Semantic web technologies can help, by providing better machine-readable descriptors of the roles elements play in a page, in order to do something on behalf of visually impaired users. One example is a menu, which generally runs down the left hand side of a page, and is often in a different color text, or otherwise distinguishes itself from the rest of the web copy.

“The obvious fact that it’s a menu is not obvious for someone using a screen reader,” says Bechhofer. “But often there is information implicitly encoded in the page to tell me this.”

For example, cascading style sheet information that is often used to format pages implicitly contains lots of this information, through its classification of elements by names such as “menu” or “navbar.”

“If you can expose that to a [screen reading] application, that this is a menu, the application can do something on behalf of the user,” Bechhofer says. Using a transcoder tool he developed called SADIe (Structural-Semantics for Accessibility and Device Independence), the team at the University of Manchester can apply semantic transcoding to capture the meaning of the elements within a web page, in conjunction with cascading style sheets, to tell an application how an element on a page is to be dealt with, and using that information as a basis for transformation. For example, one output might be to reorder elements to push the menu to the top of the page so that it is the first thing a user encounters, without forcing readers to wade through header information.

“The semantic web notion is built on the idea that we can annotate one another’s content,” he says. “What we have here is a semantic web approach because we are attempting to take information that is implicit, but not in machine-readable form, and expose it in some machine-readable way so that an agent can do something on behalf of the user to improve the user experience.”

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I recently completed a high-profile deliverable for a major client. While I feel satisfaction for meeting the explicit goals of the project, I’m even happier that I’ve finally met goals that reflect some of my core motivations for working with information technology. To illustrate what I’ve done – and why – I’m going to use a specific event that happened over three years ago.

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So I’m researching an article on semantic technologies for web publishers, for which I’ll probably be paid about one percent of my usual consulting rate. But, the perks can’t be beat – I get to talk to really cool people who want to spend time explaining their stuff.
Right now I’m trying to find out who exactly is using semantic technologies outside of the semweb world. I want to find a bureaucrat, a small business owner, a non-software engineer, who can tell me what is great about some semantic-enabled application. Or at least one concrete benefit that is there today.

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Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Radar Networks, the creator of the semantic web application Twine, used for sharing, organizing, and finding information, has secured $13 million in funding from Velocity Interactive Group.

According to CEO Nova Spivack, that’s enough to run the business for about a year and a half, including hiring more employees and scaling up its data center a bit as it moves toward a mass consumer audience. Just 1,000 people were in the first beta test, but 30,000 people are on the waiting list.

Of the deal, Spivack says, “This amount was exactly the amount I had targeted to raise. This was the deal we were looking for. Possibly we’ll raise more in the future from strategic partners and others. But we couldn’t spend more right now, so why raise more? You pay a very high price to do that.”

The next beta version of Twine launches March 5, and new users will gradually be invited in. Among the first group of self-selected and very motivated users are a group at a graduate school, systems integrators, companies, librarians, market researchers, analysts, and the like, many of whom are using Twine “many, many times a day.” Spivack wonders how the nature and quality of information in the service will change as the next beta, and beyond, opens Twine up to a wider audience. “Now you have extremely good information, since these are very knowledgeable people in the beta [phase], who don’t do things like spam,” he says. But it will be no different for Twine to have to deal with those challenges than it has been for other web-based services, he says.

So far, Radar has been interested to see the ways in which users are adapting the service to their needs — and they’re not necessarily what the company would have expected.

“We’re just learning from user behavior a bit to understand what our users want us to focus on,” says Spivack. “There are certain advanced things we thought were important, but that users thought were less important than some of the basic things.”

While there are a lot of authoring tools in Twine, for example, Spivack says Radar is finding that a lot of users are using it for more simple things, such as tracking, collecting, and keeping up with their interests. “We expected more authoring, and got more bookmarking,” he says, indicating that there are some basic management needs that remain unmet even in the age of services like del.icio.us.

In terms of applying some of the new funds to data center scale-up, Radar has ideas about the number of users that will migrate to Twine, Spivack but wants more data to base an accurate statistical projection on before making any public statements.

“Without specific numbers, we see a conversion and adoption rates that are many times the industry average, and we will see how that continues as Twine grows,” he say. He notes that the high-quality nature of the first round of users means it shouldn’t be surprising that rates have been very high. But, he notes, Twine is designed to be “an extremely viral application,” and he says users should expect to see new ways they can invite people to join, through email. “We will see some interesting things about that beyond the ways social networks might spread, related to e-mail,” though he declines to provide more details at this point. He also notes that users can expect at some point to see integration with Facebook.

Radar is currently in discussion with lots of potential partners, including organizations that might want to use it internally or to communicate with customers. There won’t be any announcements on that front for about six months, but, he notes, some of them have multi-million user audiences, “and to support that we do need to scale and test.”

Working with semantic technology within the US Department Of Defense has been good for my ego. It’s easy to appear to be the smartest guy in the room when you’re discussing ideas and technology that barely exist outside of academia – a key selling point to a military culture that has seen their technological uniqueness suffer as the open market consistently produces more sophisticated solutions at a fraction of the cost.

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I was talking to a reporter about the Semantic Web and its benefits the other day. Since the Semantic Web, among other things, is about making the Web into a web of data, one of the main design issues behind it is the notion of federated data.

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Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Thetus Corp., the developer of Thetus Publisher, a knowledge modeling tool that uses semantic technologies as a foundation to do complex system modeling, has plans to move up the stack, so to speak. This quarter it will be bringing to market a resource modeling application aimed at the energy sector.

“Historically, Thetus has been in the business of providing infrastructure software,” says Philip Pridmore-Brown, vice president of marketing and product services, in which customers generally employ system integrators to help them codify ontologies and formulate conceptual knowledge models for a particular domain, and then expose information to end users via portal environments. With the upcoming offering, Thetus will be building in the ontology models, the workflow components, and user interfaces, so that people have an out-of-the-box working application.

The resource modeling application is designed for examining models in a large context — the interaction of, say, a physical infrastructure with legislation, social trends, and softer goals.

“The users using this system are looking at it in terms of, if I make a change in a particular area, what might that affect, how are different goals related to one another?” Pridmore-Brown explains. For example, one goal may be to reduce the impact of trees on power lines by cutting down a specific number of trees per year, while an equally critical goal may be to reduce storm water runoff by 25% in the next year — and trees are critical to mitigating storm water runoff.

“So we model a system where people can describe these goals, understand how they hang together, and interact with them as a cohesive model vs. a siloed set of objects and data,” Pridmore-Brown says.

Why target the upcoming application at the energy sector, which hasn’t been a prime market for semantic technology?

“They’re dealing with very high value data and complex environments. And they have a lot on the line,” says Pridmore-Brown. “If you look at some of the different metrics for energy, getting the most value out of their data and being able to capture user knowledge is one of the key things, and semantic technology is a perfect fit for that. Whoever can get the most value out of their data, and really understand the system, is going to have a competitive advantage.”

Thetus Publisher, which provides a platform for people to capture what they know about complex systems and evolve them as they learn more about their domains, has a presence in the government sector. This month, for example, Thetus announced that release 2.6 of the software would be integrated into ManTech MBI’s (MMBI) government-funded project to develop a web-based force protection assessment system.

Because of the nature of the project, Thetus is limited in the details it can disclose. But force protection basically means providing military personnel with a complete picture of what’s going on around them, and what potential threats might lurk when they go to an area. “You need to be able to abstract what the information is in that data and model it in a way that a user can interact with higher-level concepts, models that represent risks and opportunities, and interact at that abstracted level vs. being tied to a specific data set,” says Pridmore-Brown.

But as its work on the new resource modeling application indicates, Thetus is looking out to making its abstraction and modeling vision something that the average enterprise user can easily interact with.

“We’re looking at what the user experience is, how you can communicate those benefits to the users, and how to make this type of modeling approach as mainstream as some of the business intelligence applications are today,” says Pridmore-Brown. “We’d like to see a lot of movement in terms of letting people really understand the impact of their actions over time, and how their goals can be realized.”

Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

In the relatively new semantic web world, at least one company has a long heritage in the field — for forty years, U.K.-based Talis has been providing its enterprise-level library management suite to academic and public institutions, claiming one-quarter of such U.K. institutions as its clients.

The company’s drive toward the semantic web is of more recent vintage but fits with its self-described passion to create and be part of a wider set of open communities engaged in realizing the potential of shared innovation. Its Talis Platform uses semantic web technologies, advanced indexing, and fast searching to enable the management of any type of unstructured or semi-structured data for sharing, remixing, and reuse.

Semanticweb.com recently spoke with two Talis executives, technology evangelist Paul Miller and CTO Ian Davis, about the importance of open data as it relates to the semantic web, and meeting some of the challenges around that idea.

Semanticweb.com: Tell us a little about Talis’ history, and what it envisions as its future.

Miller: We are a software company with two core areas of business. The first reaches back into our heritage, which is delivering enterprise-level software for universities and government agencies. The second area of our business is focused upon building an open semantic web platform that allows others and ourselves to build new and rich applications on top of it. There are synergies between the two, we are developing our new generation of applications on our platform, and applying semantic technologies in universities and government today.

We’re building on a tradition of managing rich structured data, and by pulling in talent from across the software and technology space, bringing them in and harnessing their skills, we are building out the technology platform to enhance our own applications, but also to deliver a sound semantic web basis upon which any other business can build applications of their own.

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Semanticweb.com: Is this opening opportunities beyond your traditional customer base?

Miller: Our existing customers are definitely customers of this new opportunity moving forward. … But the sorts of conversations we are having around the platform itself go beyond our traditional audience base, geographically and in terms of the things they do.

There are a lot of opportunities for the Talis Platform that are not bound by a particular sector. There are individual developers, commercial or non-commercial organizations that can build powerful semantic web applications and services on our platform. There are also organizations that require help in managing and opening up large quantities of data.

Some domains are readier for the conversation, some are more aware of the importance and potential for [managing] large bodies of data. The biggest interest and early opportunities are within market sectors that understand the value of opening data up and linking to information from other places. Some of the bigger enterprises have been far more insular in their view of data, with a greater focus on protecting data.

There’s a longer-term conversation to have there. The semantic web is useful to them, but in other ways until they get the linked data web argument. That won’t go down well with a bank at the moment. They want to protect their data, not link it.

Semanticweb.com: Speaking of opening up access to data, you recently announced the release of the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence. Tell us more about the impetus behind that and your expectations of where this will lead. (For more on this, check Open Standards for Data Formats, and Open Data.

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