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Semantic Web Company Newsletter 15 October, 2008 EDITORIAL Towards a Semantic Web Industry Dear reader! According to a report recently published by Semantic Web entrepreneur and former Associate at TopQuadrant, David Provost, not the Semantic Web but the Semantic Web industry is now "on the Cusp", i.e. on the verge of becoming a reality. In this report, he profiles 17 vendors, aiming to sustain his argument that the "Semantic Web is proving itself as a commercially competitive technology" (p. 3). Paul Miller, in a podcast interview with Provost, at one point challenged the idea of "Semantic Technology companies" itself: "We shouldn't be selling semantics and semantic technology, we should be selling solutions to problems, to which semantics may be part of the solution." Seth Grimes, looking at the company profiles, argued that "some of the profiled products" were "more for semantic data integration than for powering a semantic Web." Also missing semantic mark-up in the report itself (which was published as a PDF), he finds that the semantic web is "perhaps not so on the cusp." Provost certainly deserves credit for spreading the gospel of the Semantic Web to the industry, as well as for avoiding community jargon and cryptic acronyms irrelevant to strategic decision makers. At the same time, his notion of a "Semantic Web industry" seems reductionist, as he mainly analyses the commercial availability of technology provided by vendors, getting stuck in a supply driven view. As a follow-up to Provost's report, it would be interesting to investigate commercialization strategies for semantic web technologies and its capitalization logic as a network good. Whether we look at the future as the future of a "Semantic Web industry", or as the future of a "Knowledge industry that is powered by Semantics": Awareness and knowledgeability of the potential of the Semantic Web and semantic technologies among decision makers in the industry is going to be key. So don't forget to register: The Web of Data Practitioners Days - taking place next week in Vienna - are a good chance to catch up with the current state of the Semantic Web (a.ka. Web of Data) and learn about strategies to make existing data fit for the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web Company is proud to be a sponsor of the event - it would be great to meet you on Oct 22/23 here in Vienna! With best regards, The Semantic Web Company
VOICES Danny Ayers: "The Semantic Web is the path of least resistance"
SWC UPDATE New book available: "Social Semantic Web"
SWC UPDATE First KiWi project milestones achieved
SWC UPDATE SWC sponsors Web of Data Practitioners Days
MARKET SCAN A Global Review of the Semantic Web Industry
MARKET SCAN Semantic Integration Can Help Companies
MARKET SCAN Ask.com's new look - and answer technology
TECHNOLOGY SCAN LODR: Expanding the Semantic Web, Tag by Tag
TECHNOLOGY SCAN Swirrl - wiki plus structured data
TECHNOLOGY SCAN RSS feeds for Google Alerts
BLOG SCAN Web Standards: The Three Circles of Hell?
BLOG SCAN Wisdom of Crowds not the Answer
BLOG SCAN Need for a Policy Aware Web?
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Recent
Publications 
This volume, edited by Andreas Blumauer and Tassilo Pellegrini (Semantic Web Company) 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 a nd to utilize them for the benefit of their company or institution (publication in German).
Event Tip WOD-PD 2008 | Web of Data Practitioners Days WED, 22 OCT - THU, 23 OCT 2008, Vienna, Austria The Web of Data Practitioners Days is a new application-oriented event for Semantic Web practitioners and interested newcomers. In a cooperative effort, four major Austrian institutions, which have actively been conducting research in that area throughout the past years, will set the stage for this event.
Event Tip ISWC 2008 SUN 26 - THU 30 OCT 2008, Karlsruhe, Germany The International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) is a major international forum where visionary and state-of-the-art research of all aspects of the Semantic Web are presented.
Event Tip FOIS 2008 FR, 31 OCT - MON, 03 NOV 2008, Saarbrücken, Germany FOIS is intended to be a forum in which to explore this interplay between the theoretical insights of formal ontology and their application to information systems and emerging semantic technologies.
Event Tip USAB 08 - Usability & HCI for Education and Work THU, 20 NOV - FRI, 21 NOV 2008, Graz, Austria The 4th Usability Symposium of the Austrian HCI "UE Group in Graz (Austria) seeks to promote closer collaboration between engineers, researchers and teaching professionals.
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A book, in particular one about the Social Semantic Web, is not
the type of publication that is written and published in a week.
After months of hard work, we are proud to finally announce the
'birth of our newest baby': 
As a mediator between the industry and the world of academia, the
Semantic Web Company is proud to be a sponsor of the 
Here is the report that generated the buzz: David Provost's 
Loraine Lawson from ITBusiness Edge spoke with Vickie Farrell, Neoview
Product Management, of Hewlett-Packard’s Business Information Optimization
about the business potential of semantic technology. Farrell about
the benefits of semantic integration: "You've got people using
the same term for different things and different terms for the same
things. How do you reconcile all of that? That's really what semantic
integration is about."
A new contender for Google's throne? The fact that Ask.com's users
can now choose between different skins for their search engine is
nice - but what's more intriguing is their new Q&A Tab: As most
of us have already adapted to the Googlesque hacking in of keywords,
asking a good question sometimes seems hard - but Ask.com now offers
questions and answers that match the entered
keyword. Try, for instance, 
LODR aims to make tagging compliant with the Semantic Web: LODR
first aggregates data from social web sources such as Flickr, delicious,
Bibsonomy, Twitter and Slideshare. In a next step, LODR retags the content,
using URIs of Semantic Web resources or concepts, thus making it a part
of the Semantic Web itself. LODR is entirely
RDF-based - the biggest drawback at the moment is that it requires the
installation of a local client. 
Swirrl advertises itself as "a web application that allows your
team to store, share, edit and analyze information. It's like a
wiki, but better." Wiki here means collaborative editing of text
pages with a WYSIWYG-editor, but other than your average wiki, it
also supports tags and structured data. Exporting data as RDF is
said to be coming soon. Oh, and they have a business model: For
up to 100 pages, 5 datasets and 500 data cells, Swirrl may be used
for free. 
Google Alerts automatically tracks new articles on the web that
match previously defined keywords and creates an email alert. As
the last major search engine to also offer RSS for web search results,
Google now confirmed in a response to Search Engine Land that RSS
alerts will be available soon. 
Molly E. Holzschlag offers her take on the current state of web
standards and the "three circles of hell" cast around web standards
in 2008. To her mind, these circles are "the W3C", "independent
working groups" and "proprietary technologies". Read and take it
with a pinch of salt. 
Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins looks at social networks and why some of them
"aren't doing their job", i.e. fail to create scenarios where crowds
actually produce wisdom. A way out of the dilemma? "I think
the best thing that can be done to solve the problem is for a more
thorough understanding of crowd wisdom to be kept in mind by those
who design these systems in the first place."
Tassilo Pellegrini about a recent study which claims that time required for
reading online privacy policies
produces a total loss in productivity and time equalling $365 billion a year.
Pellegrini: "But - bluntly speaking - as 'noone' reads privacy statements anyway, this is not a real economic loss."
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