Courtesy: Flickr/prusakolep

What’s on the horizon for the semantic web? It was a question pondered by expert panelists last week at the Semantic Technology and Business Conference in San Francisco.

Siri – and its possible clones and descendents – came up as a signpost on the road ahead, pushing the notion of personal assistance ever forward.  “Siri made a huge splash. It opened eyes to the idea of not just using semantics to move information around but using a natural language system with some semantic interpretation to perform actions, like putting reminders on your phone,” noted Mark Greaves, director of knowledge systems at Vulcan.

Read more

Personally, I believe that the Semantic Web will become mainstream in the next few years (I actually have a bet on this with some college friends). I know that this is a strong statement, but I am confident that it will happen. Mainstream is defined in Wikipedia as “the common current of thought of the majority.” Furthermore it states that something is mainstream if it “is available to the general public” and it “has ties to corporate or commercial entities.” However, how do you evaluate if something is on the verge of becoming mainstream? I propose the following metric:  inclusion at the South by South West (SXSW) Conference!

Read more

World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee declared the Semantic Web ‘open for business’ in 2008, celebrating the ratification of the SPARQL query specification by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C); the organisation of which he is Director. “I think we’ve got all the pieces to be able to go ahead and do pretty much everything,” he stated in an interview. “You should be able to implement a huge amount of the dream, we should be able to get huge benefits from interoperability using what we’ve got. So, people are realising it’s time to just go do it.”

Read more