Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Got a question about the semantic web? There’s a new site that aims to help you answer it: SemanticOverflow launched this week. It follows the model of stackoverflow.com for asking programming-related questions, leveraging wiki, newsgroup, social media and reputation-ranking features to spur community involvement and good discussion.

Created by The Wandering Glitch blogger and programmer Andrew Matthews, the site aims to help both the technical and non-technical semantic web community pose questions on topics that run the gamut from development to broader explorations of where the field is going.

One of the interesting questions posted on the site is what web site would you use to show someone the power of the semantic web. Here are some of the answers SemanticWeb.com might provide, based on some of the sites (both in the upper- and lower-case versions of Semantic Web) we’ve noted in the past and a few new ones to add to the mix:

▏ DailyMe: DailyMe processes articles from hundreds of news sources, using OpenCalais’ semantic web technology to help power the categorization behind its personalized news web site and delivery service. It enables a more fine-grained understanding of content and the entities users have expressed interest in, from people to companies, through their reading habits, to enable continual and dynamic news personalization.

▏ BooRah: Spokane, Charlotte, and Honolulu have recently joined the list of metro areas whose restaurants are subject to the “Boos” and the “Rahs” of the users who visit and care to comment about them. The site applies semantic and patented natural language processing technology to map any entity on any web page it crawls and associate that with the correct local business, then extract sentiment terms around food, ambiance or service to contribute to overall ratings in those areas.

▏ Kosmix: A deep navigation engine for exploring the web, from tweets to news posts, in real time by topic, its semantic technology understands the relationship between search topics to deliver reviews, guides, videos, news and a whole bunch of related content that somehow connects to that search. The company recently acquired search start-up Cruxlux and its technology for mapping relationships between things that it will integrate with its categorization engine to add additional context to each topic page.

▏ Healthline: With flu season further enhanced by the H1N1 virus, traffic should be going gangbusters at Healthline, a semantic search engine for users to understand symptoms and their treatment. Its Semantic Taxonomy enables concept-based searches – HealthMap tools visually display diseases and conditions and related concepts, for example, while HealthLinks let users hyperlink from a health concept to any other relevant health content.

▏ Book of Odds: This site calculates the odds of everyday life and uses Cambridge Semantics’ Anzo middleware platform to build a semantic database linking content from a wide array of sources and formats in order to create the statistical reference tool. The site aims to keep expanding its semantic database to become an established reference source of probabilities.

There are plenty of others that can be added to this list, including some of the more well-known ones such as Glue and Twine. What would you add? Feel free to comment below.

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