Archives: December 2008

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).

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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.

Paul Miller
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

In the November/December edition of the Semantic Web Gang we discuss the recent launch of Glue from AdaptiveBlue, and look back at the Semantic Web highlights of 2008.

AdaptiveBlue’s Alex Iskold is a regular member of the Gang, and shares some of the rationale behind the approach adopted with Glue.

Listen, too, to hear Gang members’ perspectives on the events, trends and companies that excelled in 2008… and those with work still to do.

Listen Now

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

ZoomInfo, the source of business information on people and companies, last week launched ZoomInfo Lists. The company calls it a powerful direct marketing tool that provides email, phone, and print direct marketers with the ability to create targeted marketing campaigns from a CAN-SPAM compliant database, updated daily, of millions of heavily indexed people and companies.

Among the features of the new service are the ability for marketers to email targets as many times as they want over the course of a year; the option to focus campaigns to specific audiences based on its 24 categories of information; and in-depth profiles of prospects including their career history, education, and memberships on boards or trade organizations.

What’s behind the new service is ZoomInfo’s semantic search engine and artificial intelligence and natural language algorithms, which CTO William Wechtenhiser says are the force multipliers in helping marketers target their campaigns to those who are likely to be most interested in their offerings, most likely to respond to it — and indeed most likely to want to be found by the marketer.

“We’ve got 50 million people who are very heavily indexed, associated with companies, and we have a lot of information on those companies themselves. So to slice and dice this on semantic principles that are interesting to your business is pretty cool,” he says. Even when this results in smaller lists of prospects, the value is they are the prospects they actually want to contact.

At a very high level, ZoomInfo takes unstructured or semi-structured content off the web and alters it into structured data that can be semantically searched, Wechtenhiser explains. There’s a lot of sloppy stuff on the web, so the challenge is keeping its data complete and accurate. Semantic and natural language technologies such as sentence-based extraction and information unification enables ZoomInfo to make sense out of two different profiles of a person named Tom Smith, for example, so that it can conclude whether they might be the same person.

“There is lots of data on the web that contradicts each other, either because something is old or false or it was a typo,” or for other reasons, Smith says. “At the end of the day we get our best guess of who this person is, or who the company is,” so that marketers — or other searchers — are able to get results that correctly correlate that information based on the criteria they set. ZoomInfo looks at hundreds of millions of web pages and gets tens of billions of facts from them. For example, it can see a sentence in a press release that says something like John Smith left Company A and joined Company B, and has a new title, and use that information to update its records so that the existing John Smith’s data is updated rather than duplicated.

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Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

This month marks the conclusion of Nepomuk, the Social Semantic Desktop Project. The three-year project, which was focused on personal information management and sharing desktop data, wraps up having met its goals, which included:

Building the architecture, defining the ontologies (accessible at http://www.semanticdesktop.org/ontologies), and bringing the concept to fruition, as well as enabling integration of the technology with a number of existing desktop applications;

The APERTURE development framework for getting data and metadata from many common file formats, and creating RDF data;

A KDE Linux desktop implementation of Nepomuk’s core concepts; and

Four case studies in areas including bioscience, enterprise, and the Linux community to show how the technology can help information management in particular scenarios. For example, a case study was undertaken with the research department of software vendor SAP that revolved around using the technology to support work processes.

Ansgar Bernardi, deputy head of the Knowledge Management Department at Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz (DFKI, or the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence) and Nepomuk’s coordinator, explains the problems Nepomuk aimed to solve. The information people have on their personal computers is stored in a variety of ways, in different file types, as part of different applications, in email folders and browser bookmarks, and so on. To make sense out of that and bring the data you need together is hard.

“We want to give you the possibility to explicitly describe such relations, to interlink between information across different applications and different file formats, first of all to represent your information and to allow for automated services to help you in your information management,” Bernardi says.

To this end of building the personal semantic web, the project employed existing Semantic Web standards as far as possible, starting with RDF as the data repository and database technology format, continuing with the idea of ontologies for representing the concepts in which users want to express themselves, and then employing communications protocols to allow interconnections between services.

“So you get the possibility to connect and interlink information on your computer regardless of application, file format and data structure,” he says. But as they say, no man is an island. So to share such information, as well as the metadata created on these personal semantic desktop, requires the social semantic desktop, where peer to peer connections enabled by distributed storage and indexing lets users find information across different workplaces and personal computers, to exchange data and metadata as they see fit.

“You have access only to things that have been explicitly shared,” Bernardi says. “So, if you install Nepomuk, you have the possiblity to say that for a particular file for a particular concept, share this, and you can even specify with whom to share and no one else will have access.” This works through the use of a public key encryption system.

As of the middle of November there were more than 10,000 downloads for the Nepomuk tools. The Nepomuk project website, a wiki that contains pointers to numerous information such as public deliverables and publications, is http://nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org, and the prototype for download, technical documentation, source code, and a bug tracker facility is available in the NEPOMUK developer website at http://dev.nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org. Community-specific activities maintain websites of their own; all of them are liked to from the NEPOMUK project website. The KDE developments, for example, can be found at http://nepomuk.kde.org. There is also a Nepomuk-Mozilla and Nepomuk-Eclipse implementation of the project underway.

Life after the Nepomuk project also includes expectations of sustained development within the KDE environment. Bernardi also notes that some of the project partners already have dedicated resources to accompany development beyond the duration of the project in the KDE area, including DERI (Digital Enterprise Research Institute) at the National University of Ireland, Galway.

Number two on the list is the creation of a dedicated spin-off company which will sell a new PIM tool product and consulting services based on this work; the company is currently being funded, and Bernardi says DFKI has an excellent track record on this front, having spun off more than 50 companies in the past.
The third activity, he says, is the creation and long term maintenance of a kind of legal body to serve as the communications axis and organizer for meetings and other events associated with the project, targeting industrial customers who want to know about the possibilities of the technology based on the Nepomuk project’s experiences.

Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

As companies and others get onboard the Semantic MediaWiki bandwagon, the number of start-ups offering to host these wikis is on the rise. Major wiki hosting provider Wikia in March began offering Semantic MediaWiki to all of its wiki sites upon request back in March, for example, and in July Referata also began offering hosting for SMW-based semantic wikis that also offers the usage of Semantic Forms, Semantic Drilldown, Semantic Calendar, Semantic Google Maps, and some of the other related extensions such as Widgets and Header Tabs.

What is Semantic MediaWiki? It is GPL-licensed software that is an extension to MediaWiki — the software that runs Wikipedia – which allows for the encoding of semantic data within wiki pages; it provides a basis for managing large amounts of data in MediaWiki, supporting wiki-based data creation, semantic search, and data export.

Yaron Koren, a founder of Discourse DB — billed as the user-powered database of political commentary and a freelance SMW consultant — is the creator of Referata, which manages the system administration work around its customers’ sites.

“Businesses really are starting to use wikis on a large scale,” says Koren, primarily for managing organizations and their people, locations, projects and document. He’s hopeful that the momentum may shift to companies leapfrogging over traditional Wikis in favor of the semantic kind. “I actually think they are easier to use than regular wikis. The nice thing about the MediaWiki suite extensions is that they provide things like forms, so that in addition to providing meaning to data they have to provide structure to data.” So, if a company wants to add information about new employees, for example, they can just do that via forms rather than figuring out wiki markup and what data they have to put in. “The hope is that the whole semantic Wiki concept in practice is a lot less esoteric than it sounds on paper,” Koren says.

In his experience, he’s heard from parties who see SMW as an alternative even to offerings such as Microsoft Sharepoint for managing data collaboratively.

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