Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren!

Nach vernichtenden Kritiken rund um das Berliner Web 2.0 Summit scheint die heiße Luft rund um Web 2.0 nun endgültig verflogen. Selbst Namensgeber Tim O'Reilly sieht das Ende des Hypes erreicht.

Die Internet-Marktbereinigung 2.0 ist im vollen Gange. Und obwohl der Marketingbegriff seinen Zauber verloren hat, so hat er uns doch eine weitere Perspektive auf das Web eröffnet, die Platz macht für neue Entwicklungen.

Mit freundlichen Grüßen,

Ihre Semantic Web Company

Ein unscheinbares Phänomen macht am Web Furore: Tagging. Marion Fugléwicz-Bren (SWC) sprach anlässlich eines ExpertInnenworkshops „Social Tagging in der Wissensorganisation“ mit Stefanie Panke über Perspektiven und Potenziale des „freien Verschlagwortens“. Der Workshop findet am 21./22. Februar 2008 am Institut für Wissensmedien in Tübingen statt.

Job Announcement: Two Research Assistant/Doctoral Positions @ Institute for Computer Science University of Munich

The research assistants will contribute in the areas of reasoning, rule-based query languages and reason maintenance to the research project KIWI, short for "Knowledge in a Wiki". The project's final agreement by the European Commission is still pending. The positions will be filled provided that this agreement is given. The project is expected to start on 1st March 2008 and will last for three years. It will provide with doctoral training and joint work with industry on issues of high relevance for both academia and industry.

The Hunt for Semantic Talent

IT professionals need to think about how the development of the semantic web will affect their careers. At the same time, business leaders need to think about how they're going to get the pros with semantic technology skills on board their teams, or otherwise get access to that talent, whether for enterprise integration needs or to build consumer-oriented services.

Wink, the web's largest people search engine, has partnered with ZoomInfo, a business information search engine used to quickly find information about industries, companies, people and products, to incorporate ZoomInfo's 38 million business people profiles into Wink's search results. This will deliver more relevant results to Wink users searching for business people by name on wink.com.

AskWiki: Wikipedia Knows What You're Thinking

AskWiki is a new partnership between AskMeNow and the Wikimedia Foundation, which integrates some of the semantic web and natural language features of AskMeNow into Wikipedia searches. The AskWiki engine is able to parse natural language statements and returns specific answers rather than just relevant articles.

James Simmons posted a blog entry on the Semantic Focus blog that outlines his thoughts on the differentiation between Microformats and RDF as they relate to the semantic web, and Johannes la Poutré replied on the Squio blog replied with his own interpretation. While they both agree that RDF and Microformats are very different, they have a very different take on how that impacts their respective relevance to the semantic web. James started by pointing out that Microformats intentionally keep out of scope some core aspects of RDF.

The online knowledge management service ties together social networking, wikis, and blogging with RDF, OWL, SPARQL, and XSL technologies. Startup Radar Networks has launched in private beta an online knowledge management system that's among the first to use computer-driving semantic Web technologies to find and organize information for people.

Interoperability of IT systems and services is essential in improving the management of natural disasters. International standards are the key enabler to achieve this goal. The European research project ORCHESTRA has now reached an important milestone: The ORCHESTRA architecture has got Best Practice status at OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium). This status means that OGC recognizes and supports the good use of its standards carried out in ORCHESTRA with the final goal of enabling interoperability.

Talking about that Semantic Web thing

Opinion, to put it mildly, is somewhat divided on the whole Semantic Web thing. Is it the same as ‘Web 3.0‘? Or is it simply close enough for the distinction to pale into insignificance amongst those who don’t see counting angels on the heads of pins as a worthwhile pastime?

NewsCloud writes "Since last December, Facebook has grown from 12 to 47 million users and third-party developers have launched more than 6,000 applications with its API. While privacy advocates have been concerned about Google for the past several years, most of us are just beginning to comprehend Facebook's growing impact on who, when, what and how we connect with friends.

After the last post about "web of agents", I received a few questions about the "web of data." A few readers mistook my argument to be opposite of a web of data. Don't get me wrong, I have never been opposed to the presentation of a "web of data." I only emphasize that the web-of-data presentation is short of describing the human-web relationship in the Semantic Web. To encourage the engagement of more ordinary people to the grand vision of the Semantic Web, we need a more user-oriented presentation, i.e. a web of agents.