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Semantic Web Company Newsletter 15 July, 2008 EDITORIAL That's how you create a hype: Microsoft and Powerset Dear subscriber! If you are looking for a good example of what it means to create a hype, look no further than the latest acquistion of Microsoft: Powerset. Neither from a technological nor from an economic point of view does this deal reveal anything new or special about Microsoft's future search strategy. Of course, Powerset claims to be a kind of Semantic Search Engine. But is this really of central importance to the Microsoft guys, taking into account that it is (just) another search technology provider they have acquired? To me it seems obvious that, after Microsoft's dissappointing Yahoo! experience, they needed some comforting strokes from the media. And they got them all the way. While Microsoft gets all the attention, watch out for Yahoo!'s BOSS strategy: a clever open source business concept for building vertical search engines by integrating Yahoo!'s index. It seems as if Yahoo! is deeply aware of its strategic assets and how to capitalize them in a network economy. With best regards, The Semantic Web Company
VOICES Hermann Maurer : "What we will learn in the future"
SWC UPDATE Looking back at LinkedData Planet
SWC UPDATE SWC and KiWi in Prague
SWC UPDATE Matthias Samwald contributes to W3C notes
MARKET SCAN Microsoft signs agreement to buy Powerset
MARKET SCAN UK government opens data, looks to mashups
MARKET SCAN Semantic analysis to accelerate search for alternatives to animal testing
TECHNOLOGY SCAN Building Facebook apps and widgets with zembly
TECHNOLOGY SCAN Semantic Advertising with Peer39
TECHNOLOGY SCAN First draft of HTML5 aims at Semantic HTML
BLOG SCAN Yahoo!'s BOSS Program to attack Google?
BLOG SCAN WSO2 Registry and Semantic Technologies
BLOG SCAN Freebase now larger than Wikipedia
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Recent
Publications 
This volume introduces the technological, organizational and cultural changes that are associated with the Social Semantic Web. It puts decision makers and developers in a position where they are able to assess the implications of these technologies and to utilize them for the benefit of their company or institution (publication in German).
Event Tip TRIPLE-I 2008 WED, 03 SEP - FRI, 05 SEP 2008, Graz, Austria TRIPLE-I reflects the increasing importance and convergence of knowledge management, new media technologies and semantic systems. This unique concept aims at bridging the gaps between the various communities and their technology fields. TRIPLE-I is a joint venture of the conferences I-KNOW, I-MEDIA and I-SEMANTICS.
Event Tip Digitale Soziale Netze MON 8 - SAT 13 SEP 2008, Munich, Germany This workshop on digital social networks will have a look at new form of collaboration enabled by social software and examine issues such as privacy, data protection and identity, ubiquitous access, interoperability and data exchange, media presence in open and semi open forums and related sociological phenomena.
Event Tip KI 2008 THU, 23 SEP - FRI, 26 SEP 2008, Kaiserlautern, Germany KI 2008 brings together academic and industrial researchers from all areas of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The technological track of KI 2008 comprises paper and poster presentations and a variety of workshops and tutorials and is highlighted by a number of invited talks from different research areas.
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Prof
Hermann Maurer, computer pioneer, expert for knowledge management
and author of science fiction novels, talks about future scenarios
of learning in a networked world. One of his predictions: "Handwriting
will no longer be taught at schools." Learn more in the interview
by Bettina Geuenich for personal manager magazine (interview
in German).
SWC's
CEO Andreas Blumauer attended the LinkedData Planet conference in
June in New York, which featured the Semantic Web Company as an
association and analyst partner. The bottom-line of his blog report:
"A great community event with a broad range of participants
from industry and academia, and a good opportunity to learn the
latest about all things semantic, including UMBEL, DBpedia, TopBraid,
OpenCalais, Talis, and many more".
Rumour
has been having it for a while: Two weeks ago, Microsoft signed
an agreement to buy Powerset, a semantic search engine that seeks
to make more sense of Wikipedia searches. Powerset wrote on their
blog: "We believe that this is the fastest way to bring our technology
to market at a large scale." And Microsoft wrote on their LiveSearch
blog: "The shared vision is to take Search to the next level
by adding understanding of the intent and meaning behind the words
in searches and webpages." No further statements how this could
affect Microsoft's strategy are available at this point.
The UK government’s Power of Information Taskforce started its “Show Us a Better Way” competition in early July, asking for ideas for using and publishing the vast amount of information held in data repositories such as the Neighbourhood Statistics, the National Health Service (NHS), the Ordnance Survey, and many more. In other words: They are looking for mashups.
BASF
and Transinsight have agreed to cooperate in the area of semantic
analyses to search for alternatives to animal testing. The plan
is to expand the first specialized semantic search engine for this
research area, 
TechCrunch
takes a first look at Peer39 and its semantic advertising technology.
Peer39 uses a new form of contextual analysis which doesn't only
seek out key words, but looks at the entire page to derive its meaning
and its relevant categories. Its promises to advertisers: clickthrough-rate
improvements of four times of what they were getting before.
Builder*au
discusses the concern of Semantic HTML and examines to which extent
these concerns are already met by the first draft of HTML5: "HTML
5's new additions focus on Semantic HTML by allowing Web developers
to easily assign meaning to content via HTML tags."
ReadWriteWeb
wonders whether Yahoo!'s new webservice BOSS (Build your Own Search
Service) will indeed be able to "create a cadre of small search
engines that in aggregate will [...] leave Google with less than
50% of the search market." They also asked Yahoo's Bill Michels
whether anyone really cared about niche vertical search engines.
His answer: "Niche search engines often aren't very good because
they have access to a very limited index of content." Enter Yahoo!
BOSS.
Glen
Daniels, a director of Java Platforms at WSO2, an open-source SOA
company, responds to SearchSOA's report about WSO2's 'Semantic Web
initiative' fpr WSO2 Registry: "The important takeaway here
is that our extension model isn't entirely built on the triple system.
Triples are just one way you can use the Registry to build out a
network of behaviors and relationships that best reflects your particular
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