Photo Courtesy: Flickr/Lars Plougmann

In recent blogs we’ve discussed where semantic technologies have gone in 2012, and a bit about where they will go this year (see here, here and here).

Here are some final thoughts from our panel of semantic web experts on what to expect to see as the New Year rings in:

John Breslin,lecturer at NUI Galway, researcher and unit leader at DERI, creator of SIOC, and co-founder of Technology Voice and StreamGlider

Broader deployment of the schema.org terms is likely. In the study by Muehlisen and Bizer in July this year, we saw Open Graph Protocol, DC, FOAF, RSS, SIOC and Creative Commons still topping the ranks of top semantic vocabularies being used. In 2013 and beyond, I expect to see schema.org jump to the top of that list.

Christine Connors, Chief Ontologist, Knowledgent:

I think we will see an uptick in the job market for semantic technologists in the enterprise; primarily in the Fortune 2000. I expect to see some M&A activity as well from systems providers and integrators who recognize the desire to have a semantic component in their product suite. (No, I have no direct knowledge; it is my hunch!)

We will see increased competition from data analytics vendors who try to add RDF, OWL or graphstores to their existing platforms. I anticipate saying, at the end of 2013, that many of these immature deployments will leave some project teams disappointed. The mature vendors will need to put resources into sales and business development, with the right partners for consulting and systems integration, to be ready to respond to calls for proposals and assistance.

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Courtesy: Flickr/LadyDragonflyCC <3

Yesterday we began our look back at the year in semantic technology here. Today we continue with more expert commentary on the year in review:

Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead:

I would mention two things (among many, of course).

•  Schema.org had an important effect on semantic technologies. Of course, it is controversial (role of one major vocabulary and its relations to others, the community discussions on the syntax, etc.), but I would rather concentrate on the positive aspects. A few years ago the topic of discussion was whether having ‘structured data’, as it is referred to (I would simply say having RDF in some syntax or other), as part of a Web page makes sense or not. There were fairly passionate discussions about this and many were convinced that doing that would not make any sense, there is no use case for it, authors would not use it and could not deal with it, etc. Well, this discussion is over. Structured data in Web sites is here to stay, it is important, and has become part of the Web landscape. Schema.org’s contribution in this respect is very important; the discussions and disagreements I referred to are minor and transient compared to the success. And 2012 was the year when this issue was finally closed.
•  On a very different aspect (and motivated by my own personal interest) I see exciting moves in the library and the digital publishing world. Many libraries recognize the power of linked data as adopted by libraries, of the value of standard cataloging techniques well adapted to linked data, of the role of metadata, in the form of linked data, adopted by journals and soon by electronic books… All these will have a profound influence bringing a huge amount of very valuable data onto the Web of Data, linking to sources of accumulated human knowledge. I have witnessed different aspects of this evolution coming to the fore in 2012, and I think this will become very important in the years to come.

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Bottlenose has released several new features based on client feedback. According to the company, “We’ve redesigned the way you can post messages in Bottlenose. You can easily select a list of your many accounts or Facebook pages and post an update (This also works for reposts and replies). Also, we now autocomplete usernames on Twitter so you can easily mention, reply or DM someone.” There is good news for Bitly users as well: “You can now add your Bitly account, which enables you to use your own custom URL shortener when publishing messages. That way you can track clicks and demographics for each update.” Read more

According to a new article out of FinSMEs, “Bottlenose, a Los Angeles, CA- and Amsterdam, Netherlands-based discovery engine for the social web, has received funding from ff Venture Capital and Prosper Capital. The new investors have joined the company’s seed financing round, which now totals just under $1m. Previous investors include Gil Elbaz, Andy Dunn, Rick Wittenbraker and Andy Jenks, Mark Lewis, John Hartnett, Nicholas White, etc. The company intends to use the new funds to develop its solutions.” Read more

Last week we reported here on the progress that Nova Spivack’s #OccupyTwitter petition was making in terms of attracting signatures, and on the petition’s request that Twitter clarify just what its intentions for the developer community are around its API. Many semantic and sentiment analysis applications, of course, depend heavily on the Twitter API.

Well, the end of last week saw a blog post from Michael Sippey of Twitter that provided some more information on the API issue. He wrote:

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This week saw a tweet from @bottlenoseapp that the petition to keep the Twitter ecosystem open has moved past the 500-signature goal. Bottlenose, the service co-founded by Nova Spivack, who created the petition and tweeted the same, uses natural language processing, semantic classification, sentiment analytics and trend detection to give users insight into the social stream in real-time (see this story for news on its most recent update).

Bottlenose integrates with Twitter via its API, just as do many other services and apps that need to post data to and get data from Twitter – whether they are semantic in nature or not. So, Twitter’s move earlier this summer that appeared to be imposing restrictions on how third party developers use its API, in the name of delivering a more consistent Twitter consumption experience, is an understandable concern.

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Bottlenose is entering its next phase of helping people discover trends in the social networking world in real-time, and in a smarter way. As co-founder Nova Spivack describes it, “Bottlenose shows what is important on social networks, the next generation of the Internet. It’s not about the web anymore but about messages and change happening in social networks.” With its real-time discovery engine, Bottlenose “curates the collective consciousness,” he says.

The social media dashboard for surfing the social stream in a unified way remains in place, with the Sonar technology for detecting talk around topics personalized to users’ interests and letting people track topics over time. On average, Spivack says, users are spending 90 minutes a day with that part of the service. The second step in the app’s strategy hones in on measuring the crowd in real-time, and what is getting attention on the global network (as compared to the personal one) to pinpoint trending news, pictures and links.

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Marisa Peacock reports that the new release of Bottlenose introduces reader and newspaper modules. She writes, “With Bottlenose 3, more than 30 new features work to improve the way users can connect with more types of social accounts, discover and respond to more than 140 kind of messages, and interact through more user friendly interfaces. Most, if not all of these new and improved features were the result of feedback from Bottlenose’s more than 50,000 beta testers, who have spent an average of 60 minutes a day using Bottlenose. Still in Beta, Bottlenose has released two completely new apps, ‘Reader’ and ‘Newspaper,’ as well as an improved version of Sonar, powered by Bottlenose’s platform, called StreamOS.” Read more

The latest version of the StreamGlider iPad news reader app for providing consumers with topic-oriented streams of information debuted this week. It brought with it the capability to limit hashtag or keyword searches in a Twitter, YouTube, or Flickr frame to a local area and turn on geo-awareness at the user’s request. But the bigger and more semantic event will be StreamGlider’s upcoming move to the enterprise, with the consumer app serving as a showcase to those potential customers.

StreamGlider CEO Bill McDaniel – also CEO of SemantiStar, which developed the application that The Semantic Web Blog first covered here and here – says to expect in the enterprise edition a very interesting semantic search/semantic relations engine in the background for correlating up to three data sets of semi-structured, unstructured and structured data. The company already is working with one client on a specific application of the generic technology for its custom needs, and talking to a second customer about a pilot around the idea.

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There’s a new version of Bottlenose – Beta 2 is up and about today. The service for driving real-time understanding and surfacing of personally relevant content from your social streams, launched back in December (see story here).

One of the things most apparent to existing users of Nova Spivack’s new service is the refreshed look, with a three-pane layout so that you can see your folders, your stream, and Sonar in a single view at the same time. Viewing Sonar – which gives you the ability to visually wade through a stream in real-time from trending topic to trending topic and to drill into conversations with a click  – in the larger context is more convenient and helpful.

The update, according to Bottlenose, also improves authoring and sharing. You can post messages to your networks right from the service, and now at any length with its auto-shortening capabilities for Twittering. Bottlenose also reports that it’s improved auto-tagging for posts.

Other embellishments include the addition of rich embedded previews into messages so that you can view photos, videos and web previews as you read. There also are improved user profiles that include individuals’ influence and follower stats. The service also is letting in more users, starting today.

For more details, read the blog posting here.