Dear subscriber!

Even though we know we should know better: How often do we actually take the time and read the terms of use of the webservices we utilize? From the very beginning I was wondering what Reuters was going to do with all the data generated by OpenCalais. So I sat down and examined their terms of use more closely and found these enlightening statements: "We may build a search capability in the future." And further: "We may build a syndication capability in the future." Does this have the smell of content reselling business? For the time being, I will keep reading.

With best regards,

The Semantic Web Company

Herbert Hrachovec, lecturer and deputy head at the Dept. for Philosophy at Vienna University, takes a look at the changes of the perception of semantic machines since the 1980s. His verdict: Today's global computer networks are much different from what calculating machines where once thought to be like - and are firmly established within social processes.
Interview by Marion Fugléwicz-Bren (German).

The Semantic Web Company's Web Expert Course Program is designed to gradually introduce participants to the core principles and advanced technologies of the Semantic Web up until they reach web expert level. The seminars take place between May 27 and July 4, 2008 in Vienna. The course is divided into 12 stand-alone seminars and workshops which can also be booked separateley.

Sweet Tools is now mirrored on the SWC website! In March, we started collaborating with Mike Bergman, aiming to further the use of his semantic tools collection and raise awareness for the scope of available tools in Europe. We are also going to contribute to the collection, hoping to eventually turn Sweet Tools into a repository maintained by the Semantic Web community.

Three news items in one: In mid May, SWC attended the kick-off meeting of the KiWi - Knowledge in a Wiki project, funded by the European Union, the aim of which is to merge the wiki method and semantic technology to develop a personalized knowlegde management system. The SWC blog had just launched days before, so we jumped at the occasion and covered the KiWi kick-off in a live blogging series that even CORDIS took note of.

Google's Schmidt on the web's future

"Nobody gives a shit about search engines." This isn't a quote from Microsoft's Steve Ballmer - those words ran through the mind of Google chief executive Eric Schmidt when he was approached to join the search company in 2001. In this interview with Australian IT, Schmidt talk about the past at Google and the future of the web.

Yahoo! oneSearch 2.0 is a new version of Yahoo's mobile search service which will allow users to initiate searches faster using text or voice. Yahoo! also plans to provide greater relevance through richer, more detailed search results and to make search instantly accessible on the idle screen of many phones.

'WWW of cancer research' exploits human genome map

The work of the mapping of the human genome, completed in 2003, was heavily dependent on advanced computing for the data-intensive task of mapping the sequence of 3 billion base gene pairs. The task of getting that genetic data into the hands of biomedical researchers was taken on by the US National Cancer Institute who created what is, in essence, a World Wide Web of cancer research.

Drupal is a powerful free open source CMS written in PHP. In March, the Austrian Drupal Community gathered to discuss the integration of semantic technology into Drupal as a module. A newly proposed schema describes Drupal data in RDF. Does Drupal, in combination with the RDF module, have the potential to become the CMS killer application?

First presented in Austria at a Klagenfurt Barcamp in January, Zemanta, a content suggestion engine for blogging, has now gone live. Zemanta is installed as a Firefox plugin and suggests tags, Wikipedia links, images and related articles to users of Wordpress, Blogger and Typepad. More platforms are to follow soon.

A new version of AKSW's web application plugin Triplify, which exposes structured data from relational databases as RDF, Linked Data and JSON, was released on April 8, 2008. Triplify 0.3 features, among other improvements, enhanced PHP4 compatibility and allows to add meta-data to your RDF.

On March 27, Yesterday, Yahoo! announced that it had begun using microformats on its European shopping search engine Kelkoo. Specifically, Yahoo! Europe pushed out the biggest deployment yet of the draft hListing format, which is a new format used for marking up classifieds listings. This happened just a couple of weeks after Yahoo! announced that it would begin indexing semantic markup language such as microformats and RDF in its search engine.

Semantic Web Patterns: A Guide to Semantic Technologies

ReadWriteWeb analyzes the trends and technologies that power the Semantic Web, identifies patterns that are beginning to emerge, classifies the different trends, and peak into what the future holds. Covered topics include annotation technologies, semantic APIs and databases, a discussion of bottom-up vs. top-down and much more.

Statistical analysis of links on the semantic web is important for various evaluation purposes such as quantifying an individual's scientific research output based on citation links. Norio Kobayashi and Tetsuro Toyoda extended SPARQL to a novel Resource Description Framework (RDF) query language termed GRASQL to generate inferences connecting semantic Boolean-based deduction and statistical evaluation of RDF resources.

Paul Miller comments on mainstream media technology journalists' obsession with locating some magic bullet with which to topple Google from its dominant position in today’s Web and asks: Can they just not handle the fact that a company is doing pretty well in the stock market whilst actually managing to deliver a valuable user experience?