By Oliver Marks
ZDNET Collaboration 2.0 Blog

Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle discussed their vision and nomenclature for the next iteration of the web in a webinar last Thursday: I believe the recording will be available online sometime this week, slides are above.

With the term ‘Web 2.0′ enjoying its fifth birthday (and supposedly entering dictionaries as the millionth phrase in the English language) the web cognoscenti need new terminology to help define what’s coming up next. Since O’Reilly and his company popularized the term Web 2.0, which has been around since 1999. Surprisingly the various techarazzi sites such as techcrunch, which made its name blogging web 2.0 stories (and investing in some of the startups) have not been very vocal about this next generation vision statement.

October’s always excellent Web 2.0 Summit conference, a Battelle/O’Reilly feast of futurism and commentary from various diverse luminaries (Al Gore spoke last year for example), will clearly hinge on the new ‘squared’ paradigm.

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Announcing Semantic Tech & Business Conference - San Francisco 2012

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Better text mining makes it possible to connect information in a variety of sources. The technology can connect information in CRM databases with consumer e-mails and help desk reports to provide a more complete view of the customer. Text mining can also be used in national security applications to better identify terrorists and security threats; it can assist in marketing to mine reviews for feedback on products such as movies, books and music. It can help in scientific research by providing a way to better connect scientific articles.

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By Ajbadd
Notes on Web Evolution

The “Semantic Web” is a broad term that denotes the annotation of data on the Internet and the operations these annotations will allow. The annotations better describe an object and relationships between objects.

1) Idealistic, pie in the sky take

All data on the Internet will be annotated. Computer programs will be able to trawl the net, drawing inferences and producing new knowledge.

Why is that a big deal? Consider the case where you have a web page about Sam; it says Sam has a son Max and Max has a daughter called Zoe. All computers knows to do is display this information, so you can read it. A traditional search engine will not display any information from this page if you queried “Sam’s grand-daughter”. Now consider the case when the same page is semantically enabled.

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Ron Miller
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Semanti is a new tool that adds a semantic layer to your Google, Bing or Yahoo search. Instead of trying to be a new go-to search engine, Semanti is a Firefox browser plug-in that operates within your existing search engine, letting you select the context of your search, select results that you consider the best and share your results with friends through a Facebook connection to bring a social aspect to the tool. (See below for an image of what the browser button looks like.)

Finding the Right Words

One of the classic semantic search scenarios is finding the meaning of a word that has multiple contexts. In their demo video (click here to watch it on YouTube), Semanti uses the example of entering the search “apple.” Do you mean the computer, the record company, the fruit or Gwyneth Paltro’s daughter? By building a layer on top of the search engine, as you type the Semanti tool offers you a series of possible results based on their pre-built ontology. If you meant apple, the fruit, you select that, and the results you get should filter to show the fruit-related ones first. And the next time you search, it remembers that you were searching for fruit and places that option at the top of the search box, no matter which search engine you use (because it’s linked to the browser, not the search tool).

“Human beings trump machines when it comes to classifying,” says Bruce Johnson, CEO at Semanti. “When you ask a simple question of a search engine, there are limits that the search engine couldn’t possibly understand,” he says.

Johnson is careful to point out that Semanti is not replacing the search engines, but augmenting them. Semanti may filter some results to show only the ones relevant to your search, but you can always see the filtered results at the bottom of your search results window.

Controlling the Results

Semanti, not only filters the results, it also provides a tool to mark the pages from your results, that you think are the best ones. That way, when you conduct that search again, the results you like best show up at the top of the search results page in the Semanti section.

When you find a site you like, you click the Semanti button in your toolbar and it saves it so it appears in the list of favored results the next time you make a search.

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Analyzing online content with openamplify NetworkWorld.com That’s the problem the concept of the Semantic Web is intended to address: Adding implicit structure to Web content so that its meaning and intent are clear … and more »

Berlin Semantic Web Day at Freie Universitaet Berlin Targetwire (press release) The first Berlin Semantic Web Day, recently held at the Freie Universitaet Berlin, attracted about 60 participants from industry and research. … and more »

Manu Sporny
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

By Manu Sporny
President and CEO, Digital Bazaar

You don’t need to be a web developer, technology expert, or blogger to understand this short YouTube intro.

YouTube Video

By John Kennedy
Siliconrepublic.com, Ireland’s Technology News Service

A new way to enhance web content for the semantic web — called Common Tag — has been developed at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) in NUI Galway in collaboration with major internet firms.

The collaboration involved major internet portal Yahoo, as well as AdaptiveBlue, Faviki, Freebase, Zemanta and Zigtag.

Over 100 researchers at DERI focus on the semantic web, which is the next incarnation of the internet and is expected to be more intuitive because data will be defined and linked.

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Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

The recording industry, once an Internet laggard, isn’t about to be put in that position again. And semantic web technology is helping on that score.

The technology is helping firms — including Interscope Records (Universal), Independent Label Group (WMG), RCA Music Group (Sony) and entertainment services company The Orchard — take a proactive role in understanding music activity across the web and use that information to better market artists and their work.

“I think that at this stage in the game the idea that major labels are laggards and don’t get this [web] stuff is not accurate at all,” says Jim Lucchese, CEO of The Echo Nest, which is providing the Fanalytics platform to these companies. “Every major label has really smart, empowered digital groups now who understand the music world as well as anyone on the web.”

One thing those groups understand — which has made it possible to sell them on The Echo Nest’s service — is that the old ways of promoting to radio networks and their established formats don’t work in the world of the Internet. In contrast to the more stable radio industry, where formats don’t change overnight, on the web new music blogs and writers pop up every day.

With two years — and counting — of web crawling in its background, Fanalytics applies semantic technology to extract meaningful descriptive terms from unstructured data about artists and tracks being written about: That, for example, a new blog post applies ‘”funky” as an important term for James Brown; such a descriptive is then used to culturally understand something about how the music world is described, and is pulled out of thousands of reviews a day. Similarly, Fanalytics essentially “reads” every music writer on the web today and then builds a case profile that extracts entities descriptive of the posters’ interests.

“We don’t just understand keywords but their musical tastes,” says Lucchese.

In the same way that Fanalytics can match up artists and cluster music tastes based on the data about the descriptives applied to them and their genre, it can pull data from its thousands of writer profiles that help recording companies discover those most likely to respond to campaigns about particular artists. That way, Lucchese says, companies can really target their message and engage with the blogger, rather than just sending out hundreds of hit or miss blasts.

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Web Squared: Web 2.0′s Successor? ZDNet Blogs … than linked data accessed from triple stores..not sure about this but for information shadows around unstructured ‘things’ I’ll accept the point. … and more »