Back in May we published the Semantic Web 100, our list of the people tweeting interesting stuff about the Semantic Web.

That’s a lot of people to follow and a fair amount of noise obscuring the signal – lots of tweets about the World Cup or where to eat/meet/drink as well as useful but repetitive retweets.

We look through a lot of tweets so you don’t have to. But we keep that job almost manageable by restricting our tweet-cruising to people in the SemanticWeb100.

By interesting we mean a) relevant to the Semantic Web b) something original, not simply a copy of some other content.

We did this via old-fashioned “curation” (ahem, its called “editing” to ye olde publishers). We read the tweets to identify the ones that look interesting to us. Call it Filter # 1. You can do your own Filter # 2 (what we used to call “reading”) after the break.

Read more

The old rules of innovations were:

1. basic R&D funded in academia

2. first non-grant revenue from defense

3. first commercialization from either finance or healthcare

4 a looong time later, trickle down innovation to consumer.

That flow changed during the social media era.

The old rules of innovations were:

1. basic R&D funded in academia

2. first non-grant revenue from defense

3. first commercialization from either finance or healthcare

4 a looong time later, trickle down innovation to consumer.

That flow changed during the social media era.

Read more

This is Part Three in a Six Part Series. Here Parts 1 and 2.

Semantic Maps can be very useful in defining the words and phrases that can increase the semantic relevance of your web site content. Semantic Mapping is a combination of data discovery and a visual representation of that data to show the keywords and phrases that have direct relationships to your target search term. Direct relationships are key to Google Semantics since Google applies a higher ranking factor to those relationships than to more distant ones.

This is Part Three in a Six Part Series. Here Parts 1 and 2.

Semantic Maps can be very useful in defining the words and phrases that can increase the semantic relevance of your web site content. Semantic Mapping is a combination of data discovery and a visual representation of that data to show the keywords and phrases that have direct relationships to your target search term. Direct relationships are key to Google Semantics since Google applies a higher ranking factor to those relationships than to more distant ones.

Read more

Yolink has been around for awhile, as a browser add-on that lets you search better within search results. It mines the hyperlinks of returned results, navigating through the data within those pages and online documents, to bring you right back to the block of text in the content that fits the context of your keyword search.

But that’s not where the action is going to be – an API for search is, it thinks. So this Tuesday sees the formal launch of the Yolink API, which will let others apply its ability to, on the fly, look at content behind links and surface the key information behind keyword searches. The greatest value will be for multi-task, multi-step searches that go beyond the casual user’s quests – research purposes, for example. The decision to go the API route, says Brian Cheek, director of business development at parent company TigerLogic (30 years in the information management trade), took into account the fast-moving conditions around semantic search.

Read more

We now turn to the Healthcare business in our Creative Destruction 7 Act Play series.

Healthcare accounts for about 15% of GDP in America. This is very, very big business. We have also seen that Healthcare is one market that is spending serious money on Ontology development; so it matters in our Semantic Web world. Healthcare also matters to all of the 6 billion people on this planet. So, this is a big subject. It is hard to do it justice, but I will try!

Lots of money does not equate to outcomes as this chart from National Geographic shows:

That line way up to the left that is literally “off the charts” is how much America spends. And we live about as long as everybody else. So that chart really introduces this series by emphasizing;

• 1. There is a lot of money at stake.

• 2. More importantly, healthcare determines how long you will live a healthy life.

• 3. 1 & 2 are not as well correlated as they should be – “could do better”.

• 4. Better knowledge dissemination could impact the healthcare outcome (ie how long we will live a healthy life) and Semantic Web is certainly going to play a big part in knowledge dissemination.

We now turn to the Healthcare business in our Creative Destruction 7 Act Play series.

Healthcare accounts for about 15% of GDP in America. This is very, very big business. We have also seen that Healthcare is one market that is spending serious money on Ontology development; so it matters in our Semantic Web world. Healthcare also matters to all of the 6 billion people on this planet. So, this is a big subject. It is hard to do it justice, but I will try!

Lots of money does not equate to outcomes as this chart from National Geographic shows:

That line way up to the left that is literally “off the charts” is how much America spends. And we live about as long as everybody else. So that chart really introduces this series by emphasizing;

• 1. There is a lot of money at stake.

• 2. More importantly, healthcare determines how long you will live a healthy life.

• 3. 1 & 2 are not as well correlated as they should be – “could do better”.

• 4. Better knowledge dissemination could impact the healthcare outcome (ie how long we will live a healthy life) and Semantic Web is certainly going to play a big part in knowledge dissemination.

Read more

In September 2009, the W3C elevated the Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER) artifacts to a Recommendation.  POWDER is a great bonus to the Semantic Web and to the larger Internet in general.  But what is the specification all about?  And why don’t we seem to hear more about it along with RDF and OWL?  This article will get you up-to-speed with what you need to know about POWDER.

Read more

OpenCalais is great if you can connect via the API. But how do you find out how good the service is before doing that?

Their Viewer makes this easy. You just get a text box, paste in your text and hit submit. I pasted in a draft post, and then I could see the RDF auto-created (you just click on “show RDF”).

The results are not perfect. But amazing that it gets as good as it does. Read on to see how it parsed my post.

Read more

Photo Courtesy Flickr/ Gábor Hojtsy

Now 10,000 sites strong, Acquia’s hosted version of Drupal – Drupal Gardens, which debuted in January – is positioned not only to eliminate barriers to adoption of the open source content management system to a crowd that would rather be hands-off on the hosting, configuration, security and upgrade front. It also is positioned potentially to help push the Semantic Web ahead, bringing technologies such as RDF to the attention of a new swath of users if it successfully surfs the wave behind Drupal.

Think about that passionate community behind Drupal. Some half million sites already have been built in the Drupal do-it-yourself mode, and about 6,000 modules contributed to it. (Whenever this blog has done a story that mentions Drupal, by the way, the response to it is usually significant.) Acquia, the company co-founded by Drupal creator Dries Buytaert to provide software, tools and support for Drupal social publishing sites, has expanded to about 65 employees over the last two years – a growth spurt that was in part responsible for Buytaert’s recent relocation to Boston from his native Belgium. Making Drupal more accessible via a hosted version can stoke those fires – especially as Buytaert moves ahead with plans he disclosed to The Semantic Web blog about building a commercial ecosystem around Drupal Gardens.

Read more

The momentum for XBRL increases. We could post a news item every day related to XBRL. This one looked interesting – but only if you know something about the devil in the details of how public companies report to investors.

Here is how Investopedia defines “corporate actions”:

“When a publicly-traded company issues a corporate action, it is initiating a process that will bring actual change to its stock. By understanding these different types of processes and their effects, an investor can have a clearer picture of what a corporate action indicates about a company’s financial affairs and how that action will influence the company’s share price and performance. This knowledge, in turn, will aid the investor in determining whether to buy or sell the stock in question.

Corporate actions are typically agreed upon by a company’s board of directors and authorized by the shareholders. Some examples are stock splits, dividends, mergers and acquisitions, rights issues and spin offs. Let’s take a closer look at these different examples of corporate actions.”

Sounds simple? Well, yes, until something goes wrong and then the amount of fix-it work is nasty and there is a lot of money at stake and a lot of stressed out folks. Why do the two biggest players in this area – DTCC and SWIFT – think XBRL is the answer. And who are DTCC and SWIFT? Read on for a glimpse into the dimly-lit back offices of the global capital markets.
The momentum for XBRL increases. We could post a news item every day related to XBRL. This one looked interesting – but only if you know something about the devil in the details of how public companies report to investors.

Here is how Investopedia defines “corporate actions”:

“When a publicly-traded company issues a corporate action, it is initiating a process that will bring actual change to its stock. By understanding these different types of processes and their effects, an investor can have a clearer picture of what a corporate action indicates about a company’s financial affairs and how that action will influence the company’s share price and performance. This knowledge, in turn, will aid the investor in determining whether to buy or sell the stock in question.

Corporate actions are typically agreed upon by a company’s board of directors and authorized by the shareholders. Some examples are stock splits, dividends, mergers and acquisitions, rights issues and spin offs. Let’s take a closer look at these different examples of corporate actions.”

Sounds simple? Well, yes, until something goes wrong and then the amount of fix-it work is nasty and there is a lot of money at stake and a lot of stressed out folks. Why do the two biggest players in this area – DTCC and SWIFT – think XBRL is the answer. And who are DTCC and SWIFT? Read on for a glimpse into the dimly-lit back offices of the global capital markets.

Read more

Just because the new iPhone arrived in stores today doesn't mean the rest of the technology world shut down. In fact, today in San Francisco the 2010 Semantic Technology Conference continued its week-long series of talks and sessions about the semantic Web – the ability to understand and intelligently interpret content from the Web…