Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Hot off the presses is Project 10X’s Web 3.0 manifesto, billed as a report about how semantic technologies will drive product and service opportunities in the next stage of the Internet.

Mills Davis, founder and managing director of Project10X and the author of the report, breaks things down into opportunity areas, key trends, examples, and terms, including mapping four value perspectives.

According to the report, user experience, social computing, smart software and things, and the semantic ecosystem are the main perspectives of value innovation in the Web 3.0 world, which the author defines as being about representing meanings, connecting knowledge, and putting these to work in ways that make the Internet experience of internet more relevant and pleasant.

The role that semantic technologies play in tapping new sources of value, the report says, is in providing the capabilities and building blocks of product, service, and business innovation, as the web experience shifts to a knowledge-centric rather than data- and procedure-centric realm. They reduce the time, risk and cost to develop and evolve services by achieving “added development economies” that include the use of shared knowledge models as building blocks, autonomic software techniques, and end-user, do-it-yourself development methodologies. By adding intelligence to the user interface, applications, and infrastructure — for example, tailoring the presentation of information and tasks to their preferences — can produce ten-fold gains in communication effectiveness, service delivery, and user productivity and satisfaction, Davis writes.

Akin to that, machine learning that enables systems to acquire new knowledge from past cases, experience, exploration, and user input, become more valuable as they are continually used and continually grow their knowledge base. That, Davis says, “may improve system life cycle economics by (a) requiring less frequent upgrading or replacement of core software components, and (b) enabling new incremental extensions to revenue models through add-on knowledgeware and software-as-a-service.”

The fourth way to tap value is via the entire semantic ecosystem, which solve the otherwise “intractable at Web scale” problems around the economics of mobility, scale, complexity, security, interoperability, and dynamic change across networks, systems, and information sources, the report contends.

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Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

AdaptiveBlue is all about the glue.

The company is changing the name of Blue Organizer, its browser add-on, which leverages personalization and semantics, to Glue. The name change reflects the fact that this is a pretty substantial upgrade, with a more straightforward user interface and user experience, the company says, while maintaining backwards compatibility with the previous version, such as contextual shortcuts.

Glue, as founder and CEO Alex Iskold describes it, is a contextual distribution network that utilizes semantic technologies to automatically connect people around things (music, movies, books, wine and other consumer interests) online, removing what he describes as the frictions of connecting around social networks. That friction comes in the form of the fact that it’s not easy for an Amazon book buyer, for example, to find out what their friends may have thought of a particular book — maybe, for example, they post their comments only to Goodreads, and you don’t belong to that network.

“Glue is completely decentralized,” says Iskold. “It’s distributed across popular sites. It’s an inversion of the network, where the network comes to the site instead of you having to go out of your way into the network. Most networks of today are silos. And it erases the time and spatial dimension — it doesn’t matter where or when people visit things. Glue automatically connects them.”

Here’s how it works: Say you are reading about the movie Ironman on Wikipedia (or one of the hundreds of popular sites, based on Alexa and Google rankings that are hard-wired into the system, or that implements AdaptiveBlue’s AB Meta markup format . A Glue bar appears at the top of the page, showing which of your friends and other recent people have looked into this movie anywhere on the web; you can mouse over them to find out where they visited the movie, how they learned about it, if they liked it, and if they made a comment about it. Similarly, if you were to look up the same movie on Fandango, you’d get the same information via the Glue Bar.

“Our semantic technology makes this possible, because we recognize in our system that we can uniquely identify this movie around the web, and so we collapse these pages into a single node in our system and then connect people around it,” says Iskold. “Glue would not be possible without our semantic technologies, because there is no way to meaningfully connect people around things without understanding and parsing out what things are. The fact that we have a giant database of objects on the back end that lets us correlate different pages and web sites is what makes Glue possible and powerful.”

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Paul Miller
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

With continuing investment in (and acquisition of) companies for whom semantic technologies are a key part of their proposition, we explore the extent to which investors are interested in “semantic technology” per se, and look at recent investments from Union Square Ventures to illustrate the wider discussion. A number of entrants to this year’s TechCrunch 50 event feature a semantic technology focus, and we also look at these with the help of Union Square’s Brad Burnham, TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld, and VentureBeat’s Chris Morrison.

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For further Talking with Talis podcasts on the emerging Web of Data, click here.

At Talis, Paul Miller is active in raising awareness of new trends and possibilities arising from wider adoption of the Semantic Web.

Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

As the CEO detailed last week in a keynote at Web 3.0 Expo, Amiad Solomon finds interesting prospects for his company in the current economic slowdown.

His company, startup Peer39, uses proprietary semantic technology to help advertisers and publishers more closely match ads to web page content, based on being able to understand the meaning of the content on the page, including its sentiment (whether it’s a positive or negative citation about a company, for example).

Solomon defines Web 3.0 like this: Whereas Web 1.0 was all about the excitement of just being able to create a static site, Web 2.0 brought interactivity to the picture. Web 3.0 is about taking the information that’s out there, creating algorithms so that machines can understand what that content actually means, and then use that knowledge to monetize that content.

What makes that so special to advertisers in these fiscally challenged times? In an interview, Solomon began by pointing out a personal example. When his company was recognized by MIT as one of the top startups to watch in an article that discussed the technology in the context of emerging trends like social networks, there was, within that article, an insertion ad for Intel. Clearly, though, the ad was related to the vendor and computer networking technology, not social networks.

“So Intel spent a lot of money on that one keyword, ‘networks,’” says Solomon, but the ad’s appearance in the context of that story wasn’t likely to generate the click-throughs Intel would have like to see, because the audience reading that piece was interested in social networks. “There are billions of those on the Internet on every page. The same mistakes. When you don’t understand the content of things you miss again on the context of stuff.”

In a down economy, advertisers are thinking hard about how to spend their budgets more wisely. “There’s a big shift of dollars moving into better targeting, and semantics will definitely play in that category, based on what we are seeing,” says Solomon. “It’s a well-known fact that every network and advertiser wants more targeted ads now. Everyone.”

Solomon says his company expects a very strong quarter in Q4 and next quarter, thanks to this trend and in spite of the economy.

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Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

The much-discussed Twine, from Nova Spivack’s semantic web startup Radar Networks, comes out of beta today. At its formal 1.0 release, expect to see improvements mostly suggested by the user community during its seven-month beta stint. These are primarily usability-related features, including a:

Revamped interface

New, more intuitive navigation system

All-new interest feed

Public content within Twine is now indexed by search engines

Batch bookmark import from Delicious, Digg, and browsers

Improved recommendation engine

Ability to invite people to Twine from online email address books

New and improved semantic search.

On the way: a Digg-like rating system and the ability to automatically get the linked pages related to an article you bookmark. Another thing Twine learned from its beat users: “Be clear on one thing Twine is for,” says Spivack. The “interest networking” service does a lot of things, including letting users author content and create groups, but the tagline it’s going by now, Spivack says, is that, “Twine is a smarter way to keep track of all your interests,” letting users collect and share bookmarks, notes, video and other content, and using its semantic magic to learn more about the user as that user’s profile of interests expands.

According to Spivack, 500,000 unique visitors were invited to the beta. About 50,000 are now active, repeat users. Those 50,000 have created about 20,000 Twines — little sites about topics– and have contributed about 1 million different items to Twine so far.

“But I’m most proud that they spend about 6 minutes on average per session — that’s a very high level of user engagement. Six minutes gets us in the direction of some of the social networks that have high levels of engagement but the site is like a tracking and discovery site,” ala Digg, says Spivack. And sites like Dig and del.i.cious have smaller audiences than social networks and much lower levels of engagement. On the other hand, social networks don’t monetize as well because they are not focused around discovery but around communication.

So, why does this all matter to Twine?

“We are a site where people go to discover stuff, but the level of engagement is more like a social network. That combination should monetize well with our new form of direct marketing,” Spivack says.

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David Needle
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — The industry may be coming to grips with the idea of Web 2.0, but some insiders are already looking ahead to the new technologies and new monetization strategies that they see as part of Web 3.0.

While Web 2.0 delivered innovations in areas like social networking and user-generated content, its next incarnation, revolves around the potential benefits and real-world examples of Semantic Web technologies, according to companies here at the Web 3.0 Conference & Expo. The conference is a property of Jupitermedia, parent company of InternetNews.com.

According to them, Semantic Web technology can improve the user experience and offer a better payoff for advertisers.

“We’re all waiting for the killer app the Semantic Web is going to bring, but I don’t think it’s going to happen that way,” Tom Tague of Thomson Reuters told InternetNews.com. Tague is project lead for the publishing company’s Calais initiative designed to make all kinds of content — like news articles, blogs, novels, scientific journals — easily accessible from anywhere on the Web.

Rather than a “killer app,” Tague expects Semantic Web technology will add a layer of functionality that will enrich the accessibility and relevancy of content.

In a “Tales from the Trenches” panel session, Tague and others discussed their implementations of Semantic or Web 3.0 technologies. Tague said it’s a natural move for a publishing company like Thomson Reuters to want to engage technology that better enables the sharing of content. But that doesn’t mean it’s a slam dunk.

“I have this discussion with publishers, and they love how it sounds but they want to know how it’s going to get them more clicks. That’s our greatest barrier to acceptance,” he said.

Tague said Reuters, along with publishers including the New York Times and National Public Radio, are starting to make a set of Application Program Interfaces (APIs) available, thereby making a portion of their content openly available.

“It’s a first step,” Tague said. “Reuters isn’t going to open up a hundred years of content overnight. But two years ago, if you asked them to [freely] syndicate any of their content, they would have thought you were insane.”

(For photos of the Web 3.0 event, go to this Flickr page.)

And if making more content available sounds like something that will contribute to information overload, Tague is quick to dispel that notion. “Web 3.0 is a great tool for possibly solving the information overload problem,” he said.

He added that one of the main causes of infoglut today is that we’re “atomizing” content — breaking it down into shorter forms like blog posts and Twitter feeds. He said Web 3.0 is about having computers understand the content and provide users with only the most relevant information.

The advertising payoff

Google is best known as the world’s biggest search engine, but it wouldn’t have achieved anywhere near it’s level of success without its keyword advertising system that delivers relevant, contextual text ads next to search results, while providing a steady revenue stream. Amiad Solomon, CEO of Peer39, a developer of Semantic advertising services, said advertising will also be key to driving Web 3.0′s growth.

While a search engine can match ads to keywords results in a search, Solomon said the promise of Web 3.0 is that computers can understand all the content in a document and match it with a truly relevant ad.

For example, a nature article that includes mention of jaguars won’t mistakenly place an ad for a Jaguar car if Web 3.0 is correctly implemented.

“A badly targeted ad is bad for the user and it’s a bad for the advertiser,” he said. “Web 3.0 is the monetization of Web 2.0.”

Web 3.0 in action

Nick Grandy, CEO of Web 3.0 startup Wundrbar, said there is “a huge opportunity” with open APIs to make finding what you want simpler from any location. Wundrbar, currently in beta, offers a simple search bar interface to access your personal accounts, such as e-mail, Netflix, calendar and more.

“It’s an intelligent, adaptive interface that knows who you are,” Grandy told InternetNews.com. “You type in an address — it knows it’s an address. Or you type in “Cal add drinks 9 p.m.” and it adds that information to your calendar. The idea is have that functionality available from wherever you happen to be.”

The latest Wunderbr implementation is a Firefox browser plug-in. Grandy said the company is also working on an iPhone implementation.

SemantiNet, announced its first product at the Web 3.0 show. Headup is a new plug-in for Firefox that works with Windows and Mac OS X. The software displays relevant, personalized, real-time data, highlighted by a “+” symbol next to related content on a page.

For example, when browsing a music CD on Amazon, Headup can show a variety of related data, like how many of your Facebook friends like the band; a link to hear the band’s latest music streamed via Pandora Internet radio; how many of your friends are using Twitter or Friendfeed to discuss the upcoming concert; and even find tickets for the band in your city.

The two-day Web 3.0 conference wraps up Friday.

(This article first appeared on Internetnews.com.)

Jennifer Zaino , Tom Dunlap
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — What is the future of Web 3.0? And what is it, exactly? Hundreds of technologists, entrepreneurs, marketers, and journalists pondered those questions today at Jupitermedia’s Web 3.0 Conference & Expo at the Hyatt Regency Hotel here.

One of those technologists is Tom Hughes-Croucher, technical evangelist at Yahoo! Developer Network. The key message that characterizes Web 3.0 is that it is open, said Hughes-Croucher — a lot like Web 1.0.

(For photos of the Web 3.0 conference, go to this Flickr.com page.)

“If you go back to the foundations of the web, a lot of it was university research, people experimenting, no boundaries, no siloing off of what they were doing,” he said. “Yahoo has its roots in those times.”

Where user-generated content was the hallmark of Web 2.0., Web 3.0 will be defined by having open collaborations around sharing and using data, Hughes-Croucher said at the conference today. Many at the conference echoed his sentiments.

“Web 2.0 was easy for businesses to go that way, because for them it was enriching, they were using user data to enrich what they had. Now it’s more of a conceptual change,” Hughes-Croucher said.

But it’s a conceptual change, he suspects, that businesses are more open to than they might have been in the past. That’s because they’re better able these days to point to innovations and tangible benefits that arise based on open collaboration. Consider Yahoo’s open experience. It has had open search APIs for some years, but it’s only recently that a change in people’s perspectives has brought on the blossoming of mash-ups and other web collaborations.

If there’s anything that can present problems to Web 3.0′s future, it is something that hasn’t been quite realized yet.

“Things like identity management are still a massive issue,” Hughes-Croucher said. Companies like Yahoo and Google have been taking steps towards giving people the ability to manage their own data, but overall the movement is going slowly. People have been talking about identity management for years, but “the vast spectrum of identity management technologies were never quite happened. It’s never quite got to the point where users get full, complete control of their data, and that’s important. We are slowly building towards it but not 100 percent sure on how to execute it.”

Hughes-Croucher notes that the efforts behind identity management need to be very collaborative. “Data portability is all very well, but only really so if everyone supports it, because the average user doesn’t have the ability to manipulate XML or RDF to import and export and those kind of things. We still haven’t accomplished it. It’s a very important task to set ourselves, because if we don’t take care of this, the more we open up, the more risk we expose people to.”

Other challenges to meet may come in the way of people in the development community struggling with some of the Web 3.0 development concepts around microformats or RDFa, for instance.

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Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Matchmine is at the center of efforts to help users manage their own IDs in the open Web 3.0 world, says J. Trent Adams, founder and chief innovator of the startup and one of the speakers scheduled to discuss the business risks around this Internet evolution at the Jupitermedia Web 3.0 conference in Santa Clara, Calif., this week.

As an officer of the Data Portability Project, Adams is an advocate on the topic of abolishing the re-entry of data. The stated purpose of the Data Portability Project is to put existing technologies, techniques, policies and initiatives in context in order to facilitate translation, education, advocacy and ultimately implementation of data portability. Portability is defined as both physically moving data or simply porting the context in which the data is used.” At the session, panelists are expected to explain how easily transportable data helps brings companies closer to their users, and that in fact the risk companies take is in not working to this end, as it may limit their ability to reap competitive advantage.

“Matchmine is a poster child in its ability to leverage this,” Adams says. Matchmine is a media discovery network that identifies a person’s tastes and interests in specific media and then applies that to provide other media items they also probably would like to consume. What sets a discovery network apart from search or a recommendation engine, Adams says, is that it is the most passive of the three. “With discovery you go somewhere to do something and are enabled to also encounter discovered elements that may relate to what you are doing there,” he says. The service differentiates itself in two respects: one is its focus on specific media groups (film, music, blogs, podcasts, short form-factor Internet video) and the other is that it is a portable user-centric solution. “We give the consumer power over their experience and the ability to interact within our network; any partners within the network can be part of the dialogue and the consumer has control over that dialogue with partners.”

The ‘matchkey’ is the portable representation of a user’s taste and interests. When you walk into a system — say, the music site Fuzz.com — with a matchkey, you are providing your tastes and interests in a wide-ranging representation that leverages the system’s semantic technology. While you can create a matchkey at the matchmine.com site (either trained via your input of interests or just a baseline key), the portability angle comes from the fact that matchkeys can be automatically built with tastes and interests based on the accounts users may already hold with one of its partners (such as Fuzz.com or Blogged.com) or users may “feed” the key with information they may have with an off-network, non-partner service they subscribe to.

Here’s how the service works, as something of a nuanced version of a recommendation engine. You enter a new site cold with an abstract view of your interests and tastes. For example, you may not have any data in your matchkey related to music–maybe you just came from blogs.com and your tastes and interests are informed by the manner in which you have consumed blogs. But if you walk into Fuzz, Matchmine can leverage its understanding of your taste and interests according to media groups and inform your discovery experience at the new site.

“So when you bounce out of a silo and interact in a portable fashion in other systems, discovery becomes more prevalent, obvious and distinguishable,” says Adams. “So our system provides the ability to walk into a [user] data-poor environment and still provide a discovery experience before you reach critical mass. That helps both startup partners [in targeting to visitors] and it helps the user showing up at the site for the first time.” It’s always the user’s decision, though, about whether they want to use their matchkey in a portable cross-site way.

The semantics and natural language processing technology behind the service are basically this: As users move through a site, Matchmine collects telemetry events that tells it what kinds of interactions they are having on the site. It uses those events in its reasoning engine to apply to a map of understanding what those behavior patterns mean. Matchmine has 300 attributes of users’ tastes and interests across media; those interests may have overlapping attributes. So, to go back to the example of moving from blogs.com to Fuzz.com, it applies the differences of the patterns it’s identified on blogs.com and bubbles up from Fuzz’s catalogue attributes that map the blog experience to the music experience.

For example, your blog patterns may indicate you have been reading about politics, and it may combine that information with demographic data; then, as it detects further patterns, it may become obvious whether your political focus leaned to red or blue states, urban or rural, “and as you interact with these types of parameters that floats nicely into the music space,” Adams says. “Because types of music do vary in a measurable, detectable signal way. The urban to rural, north to south, these patterns do exist in generalized interests in music. So the technology narrows the universe of discourse for you.

If you walked into Fuzz without the blog experience, there are 360 degrees of options and you are like anyone else walking off the street,” Adams says. “But if you first bounce through blogs.com and then show up at Fuzz (matchkey at the ready), we essentially in a probabilistic way have narrowed the degrees of freedom from 360 oftentimes to 60 or 70 degrees.” Thus, it can better discover the information you may be most interested in.

If there’s no attribute overlap between the blogs and music sites, though, then the service won’t discover targeted and relevant data for you. “But if in your experience in blogs we do detect a pattern in media within the music space, then we will suss that pattern out and flavor your experience,” Adams says.

The company’s science is patent-pending, says CEO Mike Troiano.

“Helping partners present more relevant content enables us to deliver more targeted advertising, which raises CPM and creates new, off-site revenue streams – a share of which is paid back to participating network partners. It’s a behavioral targeting approach and business model, but with some unique data portability and privacy features for users (think TACODA + Pandora + OpenID),” Troiano says.

Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Anyone who’s been following Microsoft’s recent acquisition of Powerset will get to hear more about how the technology is evolving as the semantic search market itself evolves at Jupitermedia’s Web 3.0 conference in Santa Clara, Calif., this week. Scott Prevost, general manager and director of product at Powerset will be giving a keynote presentation, on “The Road to Semantic Search.”

Prevost chatted with Semanticweb.com about how search on the web has evolved from directories to keywords to semantic search, and about how Powerset aims to show how semantic search can improve relevance and change the user search experience.

Semanticweb.com: Why do we need to refine and improve the search experience?

Prevost: The reason why we should pay attention is because search isn’t a solved problem. A lot of queries just aren’t answered properly, users get a set of links that don’t get them what they want. … It’s hard for users to specify their intent clearly enough for a search engine to make use of it and understand what kind of information to present and how, because basically the user has to take what they need to say and then condense it into disconnected keywords. We let people express themselves more naturally, but the flip side of that is the hard work building a search engine that tries to understand what’s in the document — not just the words but how they fit together and form concepts and relationships and extract from users’ query to the meaning expressed in documents. Semantic search vastly improves relevance by having a search engine understand at some level what’s in the document. The nice thing is it doesn’t require 100% understanding to improve search. We can incrementally improve search over the next year, the next five and ten years, and even beyond that to continually get better and better. That’s one way for semantic search to change the search landscape.

It also enables new ways of summarizing information, aggregating information from multiple sources, presenting information and starting to explore that. In Powerset.com. you can see snippets of results that highlight the answer to your query so you don’t have to click through to the page — and it may be highlighted words that weren’t even in your query. Keyword search just puts in bold the word you put in the search box. We talk about highlighting the things you didn’t put in the search box. Or we can generate a list of answers: if I type into Wikipedia what causes cancer, I can find every sentence in Wikipedia that says that and give you a list. That is only possible with an understanding of what is on the page — not just picking pages by what words occur on them.

Semanticweb.com: Why does the advertising community need better search?

Prevost: We’re not as far along in terms of productizing the technology for that kind of thing. But it very much applies. So just as we would use sematnic techniques to match users’ queries to the meaning of what is in a document, we could do the same thing for advertising models. So now you are not bidding on particular keywords but on concepts people express in their queries.

Semanticweb.com: What would you say sets Powerset apart from many of the companies that seem to have jumped into the semantic web search space?

Prevost: There’s obviously a lot of different kinds of approaches that people are using in search. In a lot of the smaller search startups — and when I got into this a few years ago I was shocked to learn how many there were — most are doing small tweaks around the UI for search but that’s not the next big thing. Others do niche verticals — maybe focus on travel or health. Powerset is in a category with, maybe, Hakia, where we are really trying to change the game for how documents are indexed, and how search engines understand the documents it points you to, and that ‘s where we make a big impact. We’re throwing away the keyword model and replacing it with one that is far more robust because of much deeper analysis of documents.

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Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

At Jupitermedia’s Web 3.0 conference taking place this week in Santa Clara, Calif., one session will be devoted to the nature of data in the Web 3.0 world. Entitled “Death of the Relational Database,” the panel will feature as one of its participants Glenn MCDonald, senior product designer at ITA Software, the vendor that builds the airline fare searching backends behind sites like Orbitz and major American carriers.

McDonald is working on the one project at his company that is not related to airline software — a data acquisition and modeling and exploration and analysis system that involves a data store on the backend that does not leverage a relational database. It expects by the first half of next year to show something publicly.

Semanticweb.com caught up with him to ask him about that project, and how it ties into the idea of a world where the influence of relational databases may be on the wane.

Semanticweb.com: Tell us a little more about your project.

McDonald: We invented our own query language for asking questions of a graph of structured data sources where everything is interlinked. It will be a public web site sometime next year but I can’t say much more on that. The important thing is that it is a collection of a lot of data in any kind of structure, including a structure defined by the user of the system, so we needed a flexible way to store any kind of data, whether it’s many to one or one to one connections or anything else.

Imagine the structure behind the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) and now imagine generalizing the system without being told in advance that a movie has an actor and director and that kind of information. So our query language lets you ask questions that proceed through the data like you would if you were browsing through the IMDB. For example, if you want to know who are all the living directors who once directed Cary Grant. You could click on IMDB, search Cary Grant, get his movies, click on directors and see if there is a date of death and eventually you could find the answer, but it would be lot of clicking.

To answer queries like that in a relational database is hard and sometimes impractical because of self-joins. In a relational database your question has to include with it the way bits of data relate to each other — you can’t just say give me all directors of the movies Cary Grant was in. It’s cumbersome to ask complex questions and impossible to write them out in any simple way. We try to have the computer do what you would do manually, but faster and in bulk. So questions you could take an hour to figure out with notepaper, the computer has the information to answer for you in one third of a second, and in two seconds it should be able to answer that question of all — the list of living directors for every actor on the planet and then find out which actor has the most living directors.

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