Update: Yandex today (April 26th) reported that net income in the first three months of 2012 rose 53 percent from the same period last year to 1.26 billion rubles ($43 million) as text-based advertising revenue rose, according to Bloomberg. Sales gained 51 percent to 5.9 billion rubles.

In November Russian search engine Yandex joined Google, Microsoft Bing, and Yahoo! to collaborate on schema.org. The Semantic Web Blog recently caught up by email with Alexander Shubin, Yandex product manager and head of strategic direction, to discuss this and other developments.

The Semantic Web Blog: Can you update us about how Yandex is doing? We know it’s still leading search traffic in Russia, but do you see more competition there, and how have international expansion plans been proceeding?

Shubin: Yandex is the leader in Russia with 59 to 60 percent market share. Russia is one of the few countries where a local search engine keeps a leading position, in spite of international players’ expansion.

Last year Yandex was launched in Turkey, where we suggest 12 services (including web search) so far. According to our statistics, yandex.com.tr processes more than 1 million queries daily. Turkey is the first non-Russian speaking market for us and we have done a lot of work to deliver services that would be interesting for the local community.  The main target for Yandex in Turkey, where one search engine still keeps 90 percent of search market, is to become the Number 2 player and to deliver more local search results and services than our competitor does.

Turkey is more or less an experiment for us: If we meet our target there, we can potentially do the same on any other non-Russian speaking market. But it is too early to make any conclusions or announcements so far as we have worked in Turkey only half of year. Stay tuned!

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SemTechBiz is Less Than 2 Weeks Away

The Semantic Tech & Business Conference (SemTechBiz) is coming to San Francisco on June 3-7! Join us for case studies, innovative panels, tutorials, and keynotes that will provide you with practical advice, hands-on guidance, and breakthrough approaches to solving business problems with semantic technology. Passes go up $200 at the door. Sign up now and save !

A new article by Jesse Weaver corrects two misconceptions about the semantic web. The first is that the semantic web strives to create “one ontology to rule them all.” The article states, “To my knowledge, nobody has ever claimed that there should be ‘one ontology to rule them all.’ Instead, what is regularly promoted is ontology reuse and/or integration. For example, the FOAF ontology is widely used in the semantic web to describe persons; why create your own ontology when you can reuse a well-established one? Integration of ontologies allows for conciliation of perspectives, causing data that use these ontologies to become meaningfully related. Admittedly, there are some rather large, comprehensive ontologies out there, and there are some very popular and pervasive ones, too. However, there is no standard or recommendation that requires publishers of RDF data to comply with any particular ontology. You could even ignore the RDF vocabulary if you so please (yes, even rdf:type).” Read more

An experimental application from Safelayer, dubbed FOAF Manager, is intended to provide trust to the wealth of information on social networks – identity information in particular. Safelayer, a well-known name in the European ICT security market, develops technology for m anaging digital identification and trust in information and communication networks, with authentication, electronic signature and data protection solutions in its portfolio.

The Semantic Web Blog, which recently looked at the evolution of WebID for identity and login management, had a chance to exchange email with Helena Pujol, research project leader at Safelayer, on the company’s work in the trust arena:

Semantic Web Blog: How did the Semantic Web come to Safelayer’s attention around security/trust issues?

Pujol: Our success is based on investing heavily in R&D in order to bolster our strategy of differentiation through technology and innovation. One of our research focuses has been the Semantic Web, and in particular, how ontologies and semantic standards and tools can contribute to improve our products, conferring on them properties of intelligent inference, application interoperability and information integration.

FOAF Manager is one of the experimental applications resulting from these research activities.

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Looked into WebID lately? Maybe it’s time. The open standard for identity and login seems to be gaining more momentum following the spring W3C Workshop on Identity in the Browser. That’s when W3C WebID Incubator chair Henry Story presented a position case on the standard; that was followed up by the Berlin Social Web event that included an explanatory video of WebID that he created. Recently The Semantic Web Blog also has noticed some positive commentary in the Twittersphere about WebID’s progress, too.

It’s been a few years since Story hit upon the Subject Alternative Name field in x.509 certificates as an appropriate way to accommodate an owner’s WebID URL. (A URL to name things, says Story, webizes trust.) Since then work has been underway to ensure implementations work across browsers and web servers and different systems, and earlier this year the WebID Incubator Group was born to further advance the protocol. “The biggest part of the battle until now was just to get people to realize there is a way of solving these issues they’ve wanted to solve for a long time that was completely open, built into browsers, and could work,” says Story. “So now people are enthusiastic about the concept because it is so simple.”

The problem having been that, without the aid of the Semantic Web, using a client-side certificate will only work with one web site, making it not much more useful than relying on a user name and password at each one anyway. “So that gives a whole lot of hassle for nearly no value, until we discovered how when you merged this with the Semantic Web …you can use this technology people think of as centralized in a de-centralized way,” he says. “And suddenly it works because you use the web in a webbish way, and you distribute trust around the web.”

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How does a site like PeekYou, whose goal is to re-index the public web around people, intersect with the Semantic Web?

To hear CEO Michael Hussey tell it, it’s this: “The way I thought about the Semantic Web since Day One is that it’s about deriving meaning from pages,” says Hussey. “To have meaning you have to know who the person who writes this blog is or who is referenced in this article. That’s how humans think. When you meet someone, you ask where he is from, what he does. The personal layer is what drives the future of the semantic web.”

And the personal layer is very much where PeekYou is at.

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The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) recently released its agreement with the Friend of a Friend Project (FOAF). According to the summary, “This agreement outlines specific measures to be undertaken in cooperation between DCMI and the FOAF Project — measures aimed primarily at reinforcing the long-term viability of the FOAF Vocabulary by addressing the risks inherent with having a single point of failure. The two organizations also see this cooperation as an opportunity for better integrating their vocabularies with alignments — mutually declared mappings between semantically overlapping terms — and for promoting the documentation of best-practice usage patterns in which the two vocabularies are used in combination.” Read more

Karen Coyle, an authority on linked data in libraries whom we have recently reported on, shared her thoughts on visualizing linked data: “One of the questions I always get when talking about the Semantic Web is ‘What does it look like?’ This is kind of like asking what electricity looks like: it doesn’t so much look like anything, as it makes certain things possible. But I fully understand that people need to see something for this all to make sense, so when the webinar technology allows it I have started showing some web pages. When it doesn’t, I send people to links they can explore on their own. Since some of you may have this same question, here are a few illustrations using two sites that can present authors in a Semantic Web form.” Read more

The presence of presence as part of unified communications deployments increasingly is being felt by enterprise users. It’s paying off in better productivity, but it’s when presence gets semantic that the real magic can start to happen.

That’s something that DERI and Cisco, as part of the multi-party Lion2: Enabling Networked Knowledge project funded by Science Foundation Ireland, are exploring. The idea is to “bring more granularity and more meaning to presence than state,” says Cisco lead architect Keith Griffin – that is, an indication that you are available or away. After all, just because you’re sitting at your desk doesn’t necessarily mean you are fully or even partially available, and just because you are on the phone doesn’t necessarily mean you aren’t free to respond to instant messages. “The Semantic Web provides more intelligence to that.”

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[EDITOR'S NOTE: Recently, we reported on the creation of a semantic data wrapper for the GoogleArt project. At the time, the wrapper only offered data for individual paintings and there was no good way to access the full data set. In this deeply technical guest post by the wrapper's creator, Christophe Guéret, he outlines how to grab the full data set.

If you do something interesting with this data, we would love to hear about it! Leave a comment below.]

Some weeks ago, a first version of a wrapper for the GoogleArt project from Google was put online (see also this blog post).
This wrapper, initially offering semantic data only for individual paintings, has now been extended to museums. The front page of GoogleArt is also available as RDF, providing a machine-readible list of museums. This index page makes it possible, and easy, to download an entire snapshot of the data set so let’s see how to do that.

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On Tuesday in London, the Google Art Project was announced. The project includes artworks from 17 of the world’s leading institutions including New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Frick Collection; the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery of Art in Washington DC; London’s Tate Museum, and museums in Madrid, Moscow, Amsterdam and Florence, among others. The paintings are presented in High Definition, and the site has a wonderful User Interface for exploring the artworks.

Christophe Guéret noticed that there was something missing: machine-readable, semantic data. Read more