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Some People Will Never Support the Semantic Web
2007-09-14 00:17:00
This entry is a response to I will never support the Semantic Web by Brian of d'bug. I'm getting tired of reading about how the Semantic Web is some kind of pipe dream that will never be realized. The Semantic Web is completely and entirely within our technological reach. People may have been given the impression that we cannot create the Semantic Web because of its complexity, the number of years it has been in development, or even the unanswered questions that still exist for certain problems we will face. These are valid reasons to doubt our progress, but progress is certainly what we are making. I've read Brian's blog before and find most of what he writes to be interesting. However I'm singling out his post because I feel it may be particularly damaging to the credibility of the Semantic Web to users who don't know enough about it to form an educated opinion. I am also calling him out because he said that he is not a pessimist, but rather a realist who has "done the r...
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Flickr Photos Now Linked to DBpedia Concepts
2007-09-12 17:19:00
DBpedia concepts with corresponding photo collections from Christian Becker's Flick r Wrappr are now accessable by following the dbpedia:hasPictureCollection property. This means an additional 30-50 million photos are accessible through DBpedia. For each of the 1.95 million DBpedia concepts, Flickr Wrappr generates a collection of Flickr photos that depict the concept. The DBpedia project never ceases to amaze me! Check out their entry for examples and more information.Did you enjoy this post? Join the discussion!
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Semantic Web Camp Conference Coming to Los Angeles Area
2007-09-12 00:29:00
Coming soon to the Los Angeles , CA area is Semantic Web Camp , an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment on the Semantic Web Initiative. I'm glad to see that it's being held about an hour and a half from where I live. Since this conference is being held so close to my home am going to see how I can contribute. The conference is still in its infancy and only about a month and half away. The schedule is still blank but it will fill up soon I imagine as more people become aware of the event. In fact, the conference requires planners, volunteers, participants, and of course sponsors. This is a good opportunity for burgeoning Semantic Web companies and researchers to establish a name for themselves among their peers. I am not sure how I want to contribute yet, whether it be holding a talk or joining on as a sponsor of the event. How will you contribute?Did you enjoy this post? Join the discussion!
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Semantic Weltbild 2.0 Returns from Triple-I 2007 Conference
2007-09-11 21:14:00
Semantic Welt build 2.0 posted a wrap-up of the Triple -I 2007 conference at Stadthalle Graz in Austria. He posted some pictures, talks about a few interesting keynotes, and went over some of the things he did while he was there. I really wish I could have been there! For those of you unfamiliar with the Triple-I conference here is a little snippet from their about page: The TRIPLE-I Conference series is a joint venture of the conferences I-KNOW, I-MEDIA and I-SEMANTICS. 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.Did you enjoy this post? Join the discussion!

W3C Releases GRDDL as a Recommendation!
2007-09-11 21:10:00
Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages, or GRDDL enables us to automatically extract information from structured Web pages, creating a bridge between XHTML/Microformats and RDF, and the current Web and the Semantic Web. 2007-09-11: The World Wide Web Consortium today released GRDDL and GRDDL Test Cases as Recommendation s. GRDDL enables authors to extract data from their documents automatically, enabling them to reuse their data and enrich it by connecting to the Semantic Web. Give the W3C GRDDL Service a try! Read the GRDDL Primer, the press release and testimonials, and about the Semantic Web. Danny Ayers and AlphaGalileo have some nice write-ups on GRDDL becoming a W3C recommendation.Did you enjoy this post? Join the discussion!
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Semantic Web Strategies Conference (Fall 2007)
2007-09-10 19:35:00
The Semantic Web Strategies conference is coming to San Jose, CA September 30 to October 2, 2007. The conference is being held by Jupitermedia and registration ranges from $50 for an exhibits-only pass and $1,795 for full conference options (if you register before the 12th of September you get a discount). The conference passport is the most expensive but you get the following good stuff: Pre-conference Tutorials: Sunday September 30, 1:00-5:00pm All Conference Sessions: October 1-2 Access to exhibit area in the ballroom foyer Conference Breakfasts, Lunches and Networking Events Conference Bag and take-home specialty items Access to online conference proceedings If you can't afford the conference passport, you may want to go after the one day pass which is priced at $795. You won't get the pre-conference tutorials, but at least you're there. Speakers for the conference include: Eric Miller President, Zepheira LLC Nova Spivack CEO, Radar Networks Bob DuCharme...
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The Calm Before the Semantic Web Storm
2007-09-06 19:50:00
Richard McManus of Read/Write Web just posted an insightful list of future web trends. I like this list for three reasons: The Semantic Web is listed as the #1 future Web trend Richard is a huge player in Camp Web 2.0 I agree with every item on the list (though not necessarily what was said about them) I'm not surprised to see the Semantic Web as the #1 future Web trend, simply because I feel it's a natural and necessary step in Web evolution. I'm happy to see this kind of enthusiasm and promotion coming from someone from the other team, and I think it just goes to show that a comparison between the two camps is unnecessary because the Semantic Web will supersede all current embodiments of the Web. Richard states that the Semantic Web has been the next big thing for a long time, having attained an almost mythical status. It's true in a way, at least for people not working on creating the Semantic Web. We live in a pretty tight bubble, but we're finally breaking back t...
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A Conversation with Yihong Ding on Spring Node
2007-09-06 12:25:00
Tao, author of the Spring Node blog, shares with us a short conversation between Yihong and himself. Tao asks Yihong about his thoughts on Semantic Web Services. Check it out!Did you enjoy this post? Join the discussion!
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Search and Blogging Trends for the Semantic Web
2007-08-30 15:52:00
Yesterday I was using Google Trends to get a rough idea of what people were searching for, especially searches related to the Semantic Web . Today I've gathered a few of the graphs I created using Google Trends and BlogPulse Trends to give you an idea of the search and blogging volume for the Semantic Web, as well as how it compares to Web 2.0's buzz on the Web. Search Trends Figure 1 represents all search volume on Google for the term "semantic web" from 2004 to present. You can see that the search volume of the Semantic Web was at its peak in 2004 (as far as this graph shows) and has slowed down since. I don't think that this is due to lack of interest in the Semantic Web, rather I think that the Semantic Web movement has been churning at a slow pace for a few years because people have needed to digest what has been developed so far. I see a lot progress being made daily as a direct result of more people getting involved with the Semantic Web. Figure 1 In Figure 2 ...
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Some Truth about the Semantic Web
2007-08-29 23:55:00
More and more people are starting to discuss the Semantic Web , but few truly understand how it is different from the traditional World Wide Web. Though the Semantic Web will be realized as a layer upon the current Web, some of their basic philosophies are going to be updated significantly. This post tries to list some truth about the Semantic Web that is critical but often overlooked. A semantic web must simultaneously be a proactive web, while the traditional Web is a reactive web. Personally, I claim the emergence of proactive web nodes to be the first identity of the Semantic Web. Misconceptions about the Semantic Web As we know, the Web is a network of human-created web nodes. Generally, standard web nodes are considered to be reactive individuals, whose basic behavior is reacting to remote requests. Traditionally the Web is a reactive web. There is a common bias about realizing the Semantic Web from the current Web: by adding machine-processable semantics into web conten...
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Mapping between Web Evolution and Human Growth
2007-08-24 22:34:00
Yihong Ding (contributing author of this blog) has posted the fourth installment to his thought provocing series A View of Web Evolution . In this installment Yihong states that there exist natural mappings between the stages of web evolution and the stages on human growth. He goes on to describe the life stages of web nodes beginning with Web 1.0 nodes as newborn babies, Web 2.0 nodes as pre-school kids, and Semantic Web nodes as educated children. The entire series is an engaging read and I suggest to everyone that hasn't already read it to do so!Did you enjoy this post? Join the discussion!
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Camp Semantic Web vs. Camp Web 2.0
2007-08-22 22:32:00
This may just be my own personal way of quantifying and categorizing everything, but I see myself as part of a growing group of people who are working towards creating the Semantic Web . The Semantic Web movement is still relatively small in comparison to other movements ("camps") seen on the Web and that may contribute to my feelings of us vs. them. There is another big camp out there, bigger than ours, which is currently dominating the techscape. That camp is called Web 2.0 . Let me just get this out in the open: I ador Web 2.0. I love the design style (good riddance 19-friggin-94) and I can't help but enjoy the usability features that have become associated with Web 2.0 (tag clouds, Digg-it style buttons, AJAX galore, etc). Perhaps the greatest thing to emerge from Web 2.0 has been its so called read/write nature. The Wisdom of Crowds (even though people usually use that term incorrectly) has been a primary ideal of the Web 2.0 movement since very early on in its lifetime. Thi...
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60+ Semantic Web Blogs (List)
2007-08-21 00:51:00
I've rounded up over 60 Semantic Web blogs for your reading and subscribing pleasure! These blogs are just a portion of the sources being indexed regularly by the soon-to-be-launched Planet Semantic Focus. Enjoy! Primarily about the Semantic Web The Semantic Web and related topics is the primary subject matter of these blogs. These are the best to subsribe to if all you're interested in is Semantic Web information. AI3::Adaptive Information About the social Semantic Web bnode by Benjamin Nowack Dan Connolly Danny Ayers DOAP Project Ebiquity research group UMBC FOAF Project Frederick Giasson Geospatial Semantic Web Journalblog by Dave Beckett Lee Feigenbaum Metiquette ~ Metadata Etiquette RDFa Richard Cyganiak se.m.edia Semantic DataBase Semantic Focus You are here :) Semantic Nodix by Denny Vrandecic Semantic Web at Opera Tales of a Semantic Web Consultancy by Clark and Parsia Thinking Space Mostly about the Semantic Web These blogs mostly talk abou...
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Update on Planet Semantic Focus
2007-08-20 21:55:00
I've been steadily churning out code for the Planet Semantic Focus aggregator and interface, and I'm happy to say that it's nearing completion. Believe me, I can't wait to release that site! The aggregator uses SimplePie to process various feed types and I have to say it's been a pleasure to work with! It has made getting a feed aggregator off the ground a much simpler task. I've written some code to parse through the content of a blog entry and extract tags marked with rel="tag". The aggregator also counts the categories for an entry in a feed as tags (this may change, but I see the usefulness). Registered users will be able to interact with the content in the usual ways: Commenting Tagging Burying content for being off-topic Promoting content you find excellent Categorizing uncategorized (or poorly categorized) content I should also mention that the site will have English and non-English language content. I will make it so that all non-English content will not ...
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Launching Soon: Planet Semantic Focus
2007-08-12 01:11:00
Since day one my goal for Semantic Focus has been to create a central hub for Semantic Web talk and activity. To help reach that goal I've been hard at work on a new feature for Semantic Focus! Planet Semantic Focus is an aggregator of Semantic Web buzz, capturing talk about the Semantic Web from hundreds of sources including: Semantic Web blogs Technorati Del.icio.us Corportate blogs and press releases Digg Slashdot Ma.gnolia ...and any source that tracks or reports Semantic Web activity So far the aggregator has gathered roughly 800 blog entries related to the Semantic Web and that is using a small subset of the actual list of sources as a seed for testing. I started working on Planet Semantic Focus because there isn't a single place you can go right now to read all the latest Semantic Web news. It's my goal to bring the Semantic Web to fruition and one way to do that is to help everyone working on the Semantic Web stay in touch with what's goin...
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Misrepresenting the Semantic Web
2007-08-02 21:05:00
Jim Rapoza at eWeek has an opinion about gaming the Semantic Web regarding companies and developers that are using the Semantic Web label inappropriately. He makes a good point worth mentioning: When an innovative new idea comes along and gets popular enough it is commonplace to see vendors and companies take some of the concepts and strategies of the idea and try to adapt them, but are often not true to the idea's core principals (either purposely or accidentally). In a recent interview between Jim and Tim Berners-Lee, Tim said for a product to really be a Semantic Web product, it must support key standards such as RDF. Berners-Lee is the inventor of the Semantic Web and both he and the W3C are in the best position to make the rules. So what is being falsely labeled as Semantic Web? He never mentions any specific companies, people, or products. I'm actually going to go out on a limb here and name a service from ClearForest called Semantic Web Service. It's essentially a Web ...
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Semantic Building: Starting a Revolution
2007-08-01 09:15:00
The Semantic Web has been discussed and debated by academics for years, and really, we are not getting anywhere fast. This post will discuss how to start building semantics into your website from the ground up. While doing this won't create the create the great Semantic Web straight away, it will provide an underground layer of accessible data which applications can start processing and using. Semantic Tagging I wrote a brief guide on Semantic Markup so that would be a good place to start. The main idea behind this is to start putting meaning into your web documents. I imagine most sites in three layers: the content, the presentation and the behaviour. The behaviour represents client side scripting e.g. Javascript, the presentation layer is provided by CSS. The content layer should be clean from anything except markup, if this markup is semantic it means that any application can get a good understanding of the makeup of the document e.g. An application could extract code...
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The Pragmatic Semantic Web and Web Evolution
2007-07-29 02:09:00
Lately we've been talking a bit about Web evolution, and right now we're tossing back and forth the idea of grassroots vs. ivory towers. In that entry I described the belief Yihong and I have that the grassroots (developers) will need to take the reins so to speak from the ivory towers (W3C, purely academic research, etc) in order to ensure its adoption. On that note, I've noticed that just about every Semantic Web related project I see is nestled in the realm of academia instead of being more consumer-oriented and practical to the everyday user. Is this because we don't know enough about how these new technologies and standards being developed for the Semantic Web can be applied to social and commercial systems (i.e. the current Web)? It's hard to say, but I imagine it has to do with the lack of developers working towards the pragmatic Semantic Web.
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5 Must-Read Semantic Web Sites
2007-07-27 20:11:00
Here are five interesting sites to checkout. The first four are recommended reading (good Semantic Web material). The last link is to the LinkingOpenData project. On there you can find links to projects working towards the Semantic Web, as well as datasets and links to other resources (and more). Enjoy! Thinking Space Semantic DataBase Geospatial Semantic Web Blog About the social Semantic Web LinkingOpenData
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Weaving the Thread-Driven Semantic Web
2007-07-25 07:40:00
This post is a complement to the grassroots vs. ivory towers discussion. In the previous post, James mentioned two trends of realizing the dream of the Semantic Web . While the grassroots way encourages the wider adoption of the Semantic Web, the ivory-tower way stimulates the construction of Semantic Web standards. Besides all of these, these two sides indeed play different roles in weaving the Web — the destiny of web evolution. Weaving the Web In 1999 Tim Berners-Lee published a book called Weaving the Web. In this book Berners-Lee introduced a brief history of the World Wide Web from its inventor's view. Despite the details of the book, the term "weave" is what we want to address here. By weaving, we place two threads running perpendicular to one another. As the result, it produces a web of all the threads that are weaved. Web weaving is a little bit different from standard weaving due to the lack of pre-existing threads. In contrast, on the Web we first produce indiv...
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Moving Towards the Semantic Web: Grassroots vs. Ivory Towers
2007-07-04 03:13:00
The most pertinent issue surrounding the Semantic Web is why it has not yet gained strong traction from the development community. First, when I say grassroots I'm referring to the initiative of people like you and I to create the Semantic Web from the bottom-up. The ivory towers is the W3C and their initiative to create the Semantic Web. Both groups are pivotal to the acceptance and adoption of new standards and technologies. Without grassroots initiatives we would not have adoption and without the W3C we would not have standards (which we all have learned the Web most certainly requires). The Semantic Web is in a sticky place right now. There are people like us (grassroots) that have invested great interest in the Semantic Web and some (myself included) believe it to be the natural evolution of the Web. Aside from human nature the problem is that there really aren't that many of us when compared to the adoption of more wildly popular development paradigms such as Web 2.0. The...
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The Semantic Web is not Impossible to Reach
2007-06-22 21:03:00
The Semantic Web is a thing of data purity and interconnectedness the likes of which we have not seen. However, people are selfish. On top of that, people are lazy and fallible. All of these qualities in humans form a road block that we must get past if we hope to create the Semantic Web. We need to both satisfy the selfishness of man and overcome our error-prone nature if we are to reach our goal. As Yihong said, it is impossible to beat the nature of selfishness, we have to follow it. The success of realizing the Semantic Web relies on whether we can persuade normal users into believing that they are contributing primarily to themselves. This is the key to sparking the ignition. Although it may be hopeless to try overriding human nature, there may be ways we can step around it. The Semantic Web relies heavily on the availability of metadata. One way we can meet this requirement and step around the three human qualities I listed above is to design CMS software and other Web app...
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Satisfying the Nature of Selfishness: The Key to Initiate the Semantic Web
2007-06-21 17:37:00
There is a contradiction. The dream of the Semantic Web is beautiful, but few people are willing to realize it initiatively. The reason is primarily due to the pitiful nature of the selfishness of mankind; we prefer to enjoy contributions from others rather than contributing to others in the first hand. Some pessimistic ones of us, such as Stephen Downs and Mor Naaman, had even sentenced the Semantic Web to death due to this reason. Others of us, however, also cannot avoid but only try to solve this contradiction, actively and optimistically. Since it is impossible to beat the nature of selfishness, we have to follow it. In other words, the success of realizing the Semantic Web relies on whether we can persuade normal users into believing that they are contributing primarily to themselves. When the World Wide Web was originally invented, a web page was primarily a self-show; it satisfied the nature of selfishness. When the Web evolved to be 2.0, a blog was primarily a self-centric ...
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Stochastic (statistical) search is on the way out
2007-06-17 08:54:00
There's a lot of talk about new search engines and the promising technologies behind them. One technology that has more or less recently been applied to Web search is natural language processing. NLP allows search engines such as Hakia and Powerset to return results based on the query's meaning rather than relying on keyword distribution as a means of identifying relevant Web documents. Stochastic search methods retrieve information containing one or more words that are specified by the user. Keywords are usually used from the text body of a document or from metadata such as title, author, etc. Stochastic searches frequently utilize Boolean search strategies to maximize the efficiency of the search and return the best results, or exclude results that the user knows to be unhelpful. Search es on the 3 major search engines are accomplished using some type of statistical method for calculating the relevancy of results. How does keyword search fall short? It falls short because the...

Semantic search has two legs
2007-06-15 18:15:00
The discussion of semantic search has gradually become popular. Just not long time ago, semantic search was thought to be barely a little bit more than a dream. At present, optimistic researchers have started to believe its possibility in the near future. Very recently at Read/WriteWeb, Dr. Riza C. Berkan, the CEO of Hakia (a company declared to perform "semantic search"), posted an article about semantic search that attracted much attention. Despite of agreeing with the post, here are more thoughts about semantic search. Semantic search has two legs: semantic understanding and proactive collaboration. Until now, however, most semantic search articles only have focused on the first one. Including Hakia, an "ideal" semantic search engine is popularly thought to be alike a "semantics-enhanced Google." This is, however, a narrowed thought. The intension of semantic search is more beyond "semantics + search." In order to better understand these two legs, we may watch a regular semanti...
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So much information, so little time for it all
2007-05-11 08:22:00
Right now there is more content being created than can be consumed. You might say "but all content gets consumed eventually, by someone." This is generally true and I completely agree. However, how much of that information is consumed by yourself? I will assert that it is a very small slice of the pie. Even if you focus on a single topic, there are simply too many publications. Try searching "Semantic Web" on Technorati or Bloglines to see just what I mean. It's a never ending flow of information. At the Web's current rate of expansion it will become harder and harder to keep up with it all. A large portion of the content being published is regurgitated information from other sources, either purposely (read something and then write about it) or naturally (only so much can be said on the topic of depression before there is overlapping). That's ok! That's how information spreads and evolves. We are better off having millions of bloggers creating content and their own variations...
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Vertical Search Engines are Domain Knowledge Silos
2007-04-14 01:05:00
It seems as though nothing short of a new buzzword can stop the burst of activity in the vertical search market, and who are we to complain? Vertical search engines differ from their horizontal brethren (who attempt to index the Web as a whole) by focusing on a single topic or niche about which to index information from the Web. Often, a VSE can deliver results with much greater relevancy and accuracy than major horizontal players like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. There is more to be gained from vertical search than meets the eye. Vertical search engines give us a more complete look into domain knowledge and can help in the creation of domain-specific ontologies, especially those domains that require dedicated and qualified domain experts to construct, which is usually both difficult and expensive. Therefore, we can look at vertical search engines as rich silos of domain knowledge that can be leveraged to produce domain-specific ontologies that would otherwise be too costly to d...
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Mini-roundup of links I think you need to check out
2007-03-19 09:11:00
I have 3 interesting links that you need to check out. The first two are products for discovering and storing metadata, natural language processing, and many more things. The third link goes to a post on Geospatial Semantic Web Blog which gives us an update on Metalink's ability to map its descriptions into RDF. Cyc Knowledge Server The Cyc Knowledge Server is a very large, multi-contextual knowledge base and inference engine developed by Cycorp. Cycorp's goal is to break the "software brittleness bottleneck" once and for all by constructing a foundation of basic "common sense" knowledge — a semantic substratum of terms, rules, and relations — that will enable a variety of knowledge-intensive products and services. Cypher: Natural Language Processing for the Semantic Web Cypher™ generates RDF and SeRQL query representation of natural language input, allowing users to speak naturally to update and query databases. With robust definition languages, Cypher's ...
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Extracting Information from White Paper Text
2007-03-11 22:41:00
For just about every area of research there exists documents online describing background information or techniques to accomplish a task in that domain of research. These documents are often referred to as white papers, provided their content is of technical or research orientation. The information held within white papers is essentially accessible by humans only because machines are not able to read and comprehend text in the same way humans can. If machines were able to read white papers and extract information in the same way humans can we would be able to store each fact and piece of knowledge from the documents. This method of indexing would facilitate much more detailed searches, allowing users to search by topic, theory, conclusion, methods, citations, references, etc. Unfortunately, extracting the kind of information described above requires the use of natural language processing which is still in its infancy. This isn't to say that the beginnings of the technology don't ...
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