Dear Ladies and Gentlemen!

The year kicks off with some breaking news:

Finally, Jimmy Wales' search engine Wikia Search has hit the public. Nice project, but the search results need (collaborative) improvement. So take your chance and start contributing!

The Data Portability Working Group is growing. Recently representatives from Google, Facebook and Plaxo have joined the club pondering about interoperability issues for the Social Web. Building on technologies like RSS, microformats and RDF some technological concepts of the Semantic Web have an important stake. For a first insight enjoy their video.

Today W3C has published the SPARQL standard for querying the Semantic Web and adds a crucial component to the Semantic Web Technology Stack.

And finally, due to our growing international impact the Semantic Web Company has switched its main language to English. We hope you will join us on this path.

With best regards,

The Semantic Web Company

Despite of impressive efforts and innovativeness of the open source community little attention has so far been paid to alternative financing models of software development. CoFundOs - a project from the University of Leipzig - addresses this problem. Tassilo Pellegrini (SWC) talked to project leader Sören Auer about the status quo and future prospects of community-funded open source software and its spiritual relation to a Social Semantic Web.

On the occasion of Matthias Samwald´s new engagement for the Semantic Web Company Marion Fugléwicz-Bren (SWC) talked with the biomedical research expert about some important key aspects. The easiest way to create revenue from Semantic Web technologies could lie in creating in-house solutions for corporate intranets. Also the potential for targeted advertising is huge.

From 27th of Mai to 4th of July 2008 the SWC curriculum will take place. A special focus will be on applications and solutions of semantic technologies to support social processes. Further details will be available soon.

Ten digital trends to watch out for in 2008

A new year wouldn’t be a new year without a vast number of websites making predictions about the future of the web, and 2008 proves to be no different. From a number of different sources, we have rounded up 10 key trends that we think are the ones to watch out for in 2008.

New Investment Will Drive Building of Semantic Advertising Platform and European Datacenter. According to Dr. Riza Berkan, founder and CEO of hakia, "We understand the responsibility of each investment and hakia.com's role in driving search to the next level. We are nearing the end of our first development stage and will use this investment to build our semantic advertising platform."

Powerset's 2008 Promise: A Wikipedia Seach Engine

Valleywag is reporting a rumor that Yahoo might purchase semantic search startup Powerset. We got our hands on a memo that details Powerset's 2008 outlook. Our verdict? Yahoo won't purchase Powerset unless it wants to explore the depths of Wikipedia, instead of the web.

W3C announced today the publication of SPARQL, the key standard for opening up data on the Semantic Web. With SPARQL query technology, pronounced "sparkle," people can focus on what they want to know rather than on the database technology or data format used behind the scenes to store the data. Because SPARQL queries express high-level goals, it is easier to extend them to unanticipated data sources, or even to port them to new applications.

Google Operating System points out something interesting in Google’s algorithm recently: a preference in favoring recent content. The example provided would seem to favor the conclusion; TCP/IP’s anniversary today has resulted in Google preferencing recent posts, including from Digg, over informative articles related to the search term such as Wikipedia who would have normally had the top or near to the top position.

Imagine writing an office system today, with no legacy to hold you back. You might build an Extensible Markup Language (XML) processor which can handle "unstructured" documents (which have lots of structure as long as you can recognise it) as XML documents and translate other structured formats (particularly SQL) into XML for processing. The equivalent of Microsoft Office would just fall out on the way, but you would have a lot more than Office.

All roads lead to the social Web

During a panel discussion at CES, Owen Van Natta, chief revenue officer at Facebook, said, “We believe that social network is not building a new niche or vertical but it will permeate everything on Web and unlock things we don’t do today.” All roads lead to the social Web.

The Semantic Web has been in the making for some time and people think it is nearing maturity. We have written about this trend extensively, with our two most notable posts being an analysis of the challenges of the classic bottom-up approach and the promise of the new top-down one. Regardless of how the Semantic Web will come about, for it to flourish it needs to hit the mainstream. There is no way that consumers will appreciate the elegance and mathematical soundness of RDF and OWL. People don't care about math, they care about utility and even more, about fun. What the Semantic Web needs, then, is a killer app.

Now let's consider the most-seen AJAX powered mashup: modifications of map sites, adding real estate pictures and locations to a map, for example. This sort of thing would be made a lot easier and accessible if the real estate agents published an RSS-like feed of properties, along with their GPS coordinates and prices. Even in this limited scope the possibilities are endless, a burger chain could publish the locations of its restaurants, or news bulletins could come attached with markers.