Two posts here on SemanticWeb.com over the past few days resonated with themes to which I seem to return with increasing frequency. First, Angela Guess pointed to a GigaOM interview with fellow Semantic Link podcaster Andraž Tori, then Jennifer Zaino picked up on the Global Futures Forecast‘s [PDF] enthusiasm for ‘the Semantic Web.’

Andraž is CTO of Zemanta, a company that began life in the small European country of Slovenia before spreading its wings to London and the US. Ever since I first met Andraž and became aware of Zemanta’s usefulness, it has been one of a very small number of tools that — to me — epitomise the real power and usefulness of semantic technologies. There are, of course, plenty of semantic technologies that are better at handling formal classification of data. There are plenty that cope an awful lot better at scale. There are plenty, even, that do a better job of seamlessly and flexibly knitting together facts and assertions from across the web. But Zemanta (and TripIt, my other perennial favourite) don’t make a big issue of their semantic smarts. They don’t — really —make you change your behaviour very much in order to derive benefit. They just help you get something done, quicker, easier, and better than you would have done it without them. TripIt, for example, gets travel arrangements into my calendar (where I need them), faster than I could type them in myself. But that’s just an ancillary benefit of all the other stuff that the site is doing to my travel details on my behalf.

Read more

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 !

“There’s our SPARQL endpoint.” Or “Just view the page in Tabulator.” I have lost count of the number of times that either of these have been the only response to an innocent request to see what some new piece of semantic wizardry can do. For a developer seeking to integrate one semantics-rich data set with another, SPARQL may very well be the tool for the job. And for someone (probably a developer, again) who wants to track the way that data is pulled together to build a page, Tabulator has a lot going for it. But as a shop window for the power of semantics? As a demonstration of what’s possible? Seriously, is it possible to pick worse ways to show off to the world?

In January’s episode of the Semantic Link, we were joined by serial entrepreneur Nova Spivack (perhaps best known to readers as the Founder and CEO of Twine) for a discussion about the importance of delivering a good user experience. In the time available, we only scratched the surface, and I’m sure it’s a topic to which we’ll return. Read more

The holy grail of the Semantic Web is to have intelligent agents that will be able to do all types of stuff for us, similar to what Siri is starting to do. Imagine my Semantic Web agent knows that I’ll be traveling to Bonn, Germany and will make a reservation at a restaurant that it thinks that I would like and that a friend has recommended. Theoretically, this is possible if all the data on the Web was published as Linked Data. Just imagine TripIt data linked to Facebook and to DBpedia which in turn is linked to Yelp and OpenTable. My Semantic Web agent would be able to query all of this data together and pull it off. Technically, the technology exists to allow this to happen. The only things that are missing are:

1. data published as Linked Data on the Web, including links between data from different sources, and
2. a way to query everything together. I’m personally excited about the second issue: querying the Web as if it were a gigantic database.

Read more

You’ve probably read a couple of hundred remembrances and memorials to Steve Jobs in the last day. Don’t worry – this little blog isn’t going to rehash each of his amazing achievements.

Rather, perhaps the sad news of his passing might provide an opportunity to reflect on what it means to innovate, and what it means to be an innovator. Apple’s well-known mantra – Jobs’ coaxing of his fans to “think different” – isn’t just something we’ve seen played out in the design of that company’s products, or in the sheer genius Jobs had for tapping into the zeitgeist, turning it around, and building a business model out of it.

Certainly those are the most obvious fruits to most people. But the work the Semantic Web community is doing exemplifies the “think different” attitude every day. That’s true of products like Apple’s Siri that bring some (now) in-house semantic smarts to Jobs’ creations, as well as a host of others whose creators hope to harness new opportunities from Jobs’ tablet revolution.

Read more

Semantic Technologies have much to offer today’s successful business, with regulatory, operational and economic forces combining to require that timely and accurate data from across the enterprise be available on demand and at the point of need. Clear benefits are often disguised, though, by obscure language, serious misconceptions about what ‘the Semantic Web’ could or should be, and an unfortunate tendency to advocate ‘semantic technology’ per se rather than specific solutions to tangible business problems.

Read more