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Semantic Web Company Newsletter 18 May, 2009 EDITORIAL Google goes Semantic Web & TimBL's 404 Dear Subscriber ! Finally, Google made a big step towards (officially) integrating Semantic Web technologies and making use of semantic markups for the enrichment of their search results. This is somehow surprising, as in the past Google tended to downplay the importance of the Semantic Web. However, after Yahoo! has pioneered the integration of Semantic Web standards with their SearchMonkey application, the following of Google might be interpreted as a proof of concept - at least when it comes to RDFa. In this respect we would like to congratulate Sir Tim Berners-Lee to be elected the 404th foreign associate to the US National Academy of Science. May the succesful request be with him! With best regards, The Semantic Web Company
VOICES David Huynh: “The user interface design must inform the back-end design”
SWC UPDATE New Semantic Web seminars available!
SWC UPDATE Berlin: Semantic Web Training Day for Industry
SWC UPDATE Triplification Challenge 2009 - Call for Participation
MARKET SCAN Taking the Economy’s Temperature—Via Newspapers
MARKET SCAN 3 Models of Value in the Real Time Web
MARKET SCAN EU patent research prepares for commercialization
TECHNOLOGY SCAN Google Announces Support for Microformats and RDFa
TECHNOLOGY SCAN Microsoft's new search - Built on open-source
TECHNOLOGY SCAN NetBase Offers Powerful Semantic Indexing Platform That Reads The Web
BLOG SCAN On Semantic Web: What It Is, And What It Will Never Be
BLOG SCAN How will Google monetize the "meaning" of a search?
BLOG SCAN Journalism's 3.0 Business Model(s)
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Recent
Publications 
Thinking on the Web: Berners-Lee, Godel and Turing (2009) This book makes you think about thinking or at least the thinking process as it relates to instilling the Web with enough artificial intelligence (AI) to make it capable of thinking. I learned from this book that the Web, as it is currently structured, it not really very intelligent at all and there are many enhancements that have to be made to bring the Web to its full potential. Those who are in any way interested in the Web achieving its full potential will be well served by reading this book.
Event Tip ESWC2009: 6th Annual European Semantic Web Conference Sunday, 31. May - Thursday, 04. June 2009, Heraklion, Greece The vision of the Semantic Web is to enhance today's Web by exploiting machine-processable metadata. The explicit representation of the semantics of data, enriched with domain theories (ontologies), will enable a web that provides a qualitatively new level of service. It will weave together a large network of human knowledge and makes this knowledge machine-processable. Various automated services will help the users to achieve their goals by accessing and processing information in machine-understandable form. This network of knowledge systems will ultimately lead to truly intelligent systems, which will be employed for various complex decision-making tasks.
Event Tip Berlin Semantic Web Meetup Friday, 19. June 2009, Berlin/Germany The 2nd Berlin Semantic Web Meetup will be opened with an impulse keynote by Duane Nickull from Adobe Systems.
Event Tip Vocamp Thursday, 18. June - Friday, 19. June 2009, Sunnyvale/California Following the success of VoCamp Ibiza, we are organizing another similar event at Yahoo, but this time in the US, where VoCamps are now also taking hold. (VoCampDC will be organized at the end of May and has already reached it’s full capacity!) This VoCamp will take place in Sunnyvale, directly after the SemTech 2009 conference.
Event Tip I-Know: 10th Int. Conference on Knowledge Technologies Wednesday, 02. September - Friday, 04. September 2009, Graz/Austria I-KNOW '09, which is co-located with I-SEMANTICS, brings together a continuously growing community of researchers and practitioneers in knowledge management and knowledge technologies. I-KNOW ‘09 offers a forum to share innovative ideas, to learn from each other and to jointly find promising ways ahead for the future. The topics of I-KNOW ‘09 will cover most relevant aspects of knowledge management and knowledge technologies.
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Linked Data is evolving fast. A huge amount of RDF data is available
and ready for exciting new applications. Unfortunately, the bottleneck
is still the availability of Semantic Web user front-ends which
demonstrate the power of linked data. To a certain degree BBC Music
beta is the first commercial platform which makes heavy use of linked
data. With Parallax David Huynh has shown that one of the most interesting
semantic web applications can be built around browse and search
applications which offer tools for doing complex search queries.
Andreas Blumauer from Semantic Web Company (SWC) talked with David
Huynh, “Interaction Scientist” at Metaweb, the company
which developed Freebase, an “open, shared database of the
world’s knowledge”.
On June 24 & 25, 2009 we offer new seminars for Semantic Web
newbies. The seminars are designed for people who search for a compact
and comprehensive entry into the topics Web 2.0, Social Web and
Semantic Web. A strong emphasis will be on the corporate use of
social software and semantic web technologies.
Just as a technological revolution is blowing up newsrooms across
the country, Dow Jones has come up with an algorithm to prove that
yesterday's newspapers are useful for more than just fish wrap.
According to the publishing giant, you can plumb the language and
tone of newspapers to finger turning points in the economy. The
news, it seems, is a moderately reliable economic compass. And today,
Dow is quantifying that assertion with the release of its newly
minted Economic Sentiment Indicator, a monthly assessment of the
"tone" of content in 15 metropolitan dailies. 
The Real Time Web is coming so fast we've hardly had any time to
think about it yet. So let's do that, shall we? The two hottest
technologies online, Twitter and Facebook, are fast integrating
real-time delivery of activity streams to their users. Paul Buchheit,
the man who built the first versions of both Gmail and Adsense,
says the real time web is going to be the next big thing. Buchheit's
FriendFeed is a key point of innovation in real time. Social media
ping server Gnip promised to turn everything online into Instant
Messaging-style XMPP feeds, and though that's been put on hold in
favor of more immediately clear value - we've still got our fingers
crossed. Our investigation of companies like Bit.ly and OneRiot
this morning turned up even more big news that's right around the
corner for the Real Time Web.
European Union Member States are promoting the creation of an EU-wide
patenting system called 'Community Patent' that would allow individuals
and enterprises to obtain a unitary patent common to all. Backed
with 2.5 million euros in funding, the PatExpert ('Advanced patent
document processing techniques') project is targeted the development
of a functioning service and a change in the paradigm currently
being followed for patent processing. The project was financed through
the Information Society Technologies Thematic area of the Sixth
Framework Programme (FP6).
On Tuesday, Google introduced a feature called Rich Snippets which
provides users with a convenient summary of a search result at a
glance. They have been experimenting with microformats and RDFa,
and are officially introducing the feature and allowing more sites
to participate. While the Google announcement makes it clear that
this technology is being phased in over time making no guarantee
that your site's RDFa or microformats will be parsed, Google has
given us a glimpse of the future of indexing. Read this article
to find out about the underlying technology and how you can prepare
you own content to work with this emerging technology.
When Microsoft purchased Hotmail in December of 1997 for an estimated
$400m, it ran on FreeBSD. But Redmond ripped out the open source
OS and replaced it with Windows 2000. Or at least, it tried to.
More than a decade on, Microsoft still harbors some sort of deep-seated
urge to destroy the free software movement it once compared to cancer.
But unmitigated open-source antipathy has given way to a kind of
free software schizophrenia. In need of extra licensing dollars,
Microsoft may sue a Dutch GPS maker over its use of Linux. But in
its ongoing struggle to catch the un-catchable Google, Redmond has
no problem reversing its Hotmail-era attitudes.
NetBase has been around for a while. Originally called Accelovation,
it has raised $9 million in two rounds of venture funding over the
past four years, has 30 employees, and counts among its current
customers P&G, Caterpillar, 3M, BP, Kraft, BASF, and Goodyear.
It is now changing its name and offering its core semantic indexing
technology as a platform for other companies to build their own
products. Already, scientific publisher Elsevier uses NetBase to
power its Illumin8 research tool for searching scientific articles,
patents, and Websites.
Whenever there’s talk about a semantic search engine or the
semantic web in general, the term “semantic” is used
to describe two quite different, unrelated concepts. One concept
has to do with adding metadata to the structure of the web, which
should increase the overall organization of the bulk of data that
comprises the Internet, and help machines (search engines, for example)
find, share, and combine this data in a way that makes more sense
to humans. 
This year, there was a lot said about trying to understand the meaning
of user queries, which is a semantic analysis. Udi Manber, vice
president of core search, said it was Google’s responsibility
to understand what a searcher meant, and not what they typed. This
is all part of improving the “Is this what you meant?”
line that you often see at the top a page of search results. Mr
Manber said there was a considerable amount of “rocket science”
search technology involved behind the scenes. It’s a very
difficult computational problem.
Legacy media is on a serious decline. It's hard to argue with the
numbers. The often named champions of web 2.0 - Google, Facebook,
Twitter - these tools didn't destroy the foundation of a business
model which supported journalism and promoted a free, democratic,
and open society for decades. Instead, the real culprit is a fundamental
shift in how society communicates, collaborates, and disseminates
information. The Internet is no longer a network of connections,
linking various documents. Web 2.0 brought about a revolution in
content creation, granting the ability of self-publishing to anyone
with an Internet browser. Lines between consumer and producer blur
at an ever-increasing speed. And as web 3.0 looms ominously on the
proverbial horizon, these trends will multiply exponetially. | Unsubscribe | Contact |
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