Phillip Butler of Argophilia.com recently shared his opinions regarding semantic search as it relates to the travel industry, particularly with regard to Desti, a new travel search startup. Butler writes, “The other day Tnooz reported on Expedia testing their own variant of natural language search, now available in a Powerset-like sandbox called YourVisit. In that article Kevin May aptly points to other supposed ‘natural language search’ developments in travel, namely Evature and Hopper. The problem with this is, these systems are not AI nor true semantic search, in fact ‘natural language search’ is a buzz term actually used by Powerset to differentiate from hakia and Google semantic search experiments.” Read more

Rutrell Yasin recently wrote that a convergence of growing technologies, including semantic web technologies, will spur exciting Big Data projects in 2013. Yasin writes, “The maturity and convergence of four technologies will help government decision-makers derive more value from their big data projects in 2013, predicts Chris Biow, public sector CTO at MarkLogic, a developer of databases for big data applications. ‘Cloud computing, Hadoop and NoSQL databases are the three game-changing technologies that are being applied to big data,’ Biow said. ‘I think this is the year that government agencies get their hands around what each of them can and cannot do.’ Semantic technology is the fourth discipline to add to the equation, which can be used to extract facts from structured and unstructured data as well as handle relationships between data in a more flexible way than traditional relational databases, Biow said during an interview with GCN.” Read more

Benjamin J. Balter recently opined that WordPress needs to start better expressing content in a machine readable format. Balter begins with an explanation of REST: “The idea is simple: a URL should uniquely identify the underlying data it represents. If I have a URL, I shouldn’t need anything else to view or otherwise manipulate the information behind it. WordPress, for the most part, does this well. Each post is given a unique permalink (e.g., 2012-12-15-why-wordpress…) that always points to that post. The problem is, however, in WordPress’s sense, it points to the display of that content, not the content itself. Read more

Manu Sporny recently voiced his personal objection to the W3C microdata candidate recommendation. He writes, “The HTML Working Group at the W3C is currently trying to decide if they should transition the Microdata specification to the next stage in the standardization process. There has been a call for consensus to transition the spec to the Candidate Recommendation stage. From a standards perspective, this is a huge mistake and sends the wrong signal to Web developers everywhere. The problem is that we already have a set of specifications that are official W3C recommendations that do what Microdata does and more. RDFa 1.1 became an official W3C Recommendation last summer.”

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Emeline Paat-Dahlstrom has written an article for Forbes regarding the recent successful landing of the Mars rover Curiosity and what this step will mean for the future of robotics and AI. She writes, “Even though spacecraft travel at high speeds through the solar system, the travel times are long enough that software advances can be significant. The software has already been updated once during its 8 month flight. Beaming software is one way robots throughout the solar system can take advantage of exponential advances on Earth. In a few more years, the computing systems on interplanetary robots will be able to run extremely complex AI programs due to further advances in exponential technology. Perhaps advanced chips will be sent out to be fitted to older spacecraft, and extend the life of rovers like Curiosity.” Read more

Manu Sporny recently shared his insights regarding open web payment standards, a topic he has discussed here as well. Sporny writes, “The purpose of a value exchange system is to increase the efficacy of human efforts by allowing each person to contribute value in his or her own way. The Web is such a system for the exchange of value in the form of information. It now helps billions of people around the world communicate, become more educated, and collaborate to solve some of the hardest problems known to man. Given the Web’s enormous success, it is a good model to follow for designing a new system for the exchange of monetary value. The key to the Web’s success has been its dedication to open networks and open standards. While it may seem obvious to us now, this was not always the case.” Read more

[Editor's Note: This guest editorial is provided by Sean Golliher. He can be found on Twitter at @seangolliher]

Google announced they’re rolling out new enhancements to their search technology and they’re calling it the “Knowledge Graph.”  For those involved in the Semantic Web Google’s “Knowledge Graph” is nothing new. After watching the video, and reading through the announcements, the Google engineers are giving the impression, to those familiar with this field, that they have created something new and innovative.

While it ‘s commendable that Google is improving search it’s interesting to note the direct translations of Google’s “new language” to the existing semantic web vocabulary. Normally engineers and researchers quote, or at least reference, the original sources of their ideas. One can’t help but notice that the semantic web isn’t mentioned in any of Google’s announcements. After watching the different reactions from the semantic web community I found that many took notice of the language Google used and how the ideas from the semantic web were repackaged as “new” and discovered by Google.

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Rob Gonzalez of Cambridge Semantics recently commented on a LinkedIn thread started by Michael Uschold. Uschold asked the question, “How is semantic technology more flexible than relational technology?” One commenter stated, “If you ‘mess up’ your choice of initial vocabulary, then semantic systems have similar sorts of problems to relational systems, in that you may have to restructure the vocabulary at a later date (just like you have to restructure relational schemas), and hence restructure the data. My experience suggests that such restructuring happens (far?) less often with semantic systems than with relational systems, and that the restructuring is easier, since you can always treat your data as one big list of triples.” Read more

Rob Gonzalez has written a new online lesson discussing the two views of how to apply the semantic web. He explains, “Various authors and practitioners have radically different view on how best to apply Semantic Web technologies. Some see its potential best applied to artificial intelligence, while others feel that it would be better applied within the context of its flexible data model. This lesson aims to clarify these two distinct points of view and to consider a few of the advantages of each perspective.” Read more

Roy Tennant recently wrote an opinion piece declaring that microdata, not RDF, will power the semantic web. Needless to say, this stirred up some strong opinions in the comments. Tennant writes, “While RDF is complex, and designed to be implemented as a stand-alone depiction of metadata, it does have an implementation that is designed for embedding in web pages: RDFa. On the other hand, microdata is relatively simple and solely designed to be embedded in web pages. While the metadata cognoscenti are in the RDF camp, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! have thrown their lot in with microdata by launching the Schema.org effort. Were I a betting man, I wouldn’t be backing RDF at this point.”

As we reported in November, schema.org has indicated support for both microdata and RDFa. Read more