Planeta Web Semántica

Google ha mejorado su sistema de traducciones online añadiendo la posibilidad de que le pidas lo que te quiere traducir y, desde el primer enlace, llevarte a un diccionario online especializado.

El modo de uso es pedirle al buscador Google que te traduzca una palabra del modo “translate entrepeneur to spanish” y te ofrece un enlace a sitio especializado, desde el primer enlace, desde el que hacer traducciones en varias direcciones, con sugerencias, incluso imágenes relacionadas.

Lamentablemente no se le puede “hablar” en español, sino solo desde el inglés, y hacia unos cuantos idiomas: Francés, Alemán, Español, Italiano, Portugués, Chino, Coreano e Indi. Tampoco hay una dirección específica para ir directamente al diccionario, pero siempre puedes guardar la URL de un resultado y desde ahí usarlo para traducir otras expresiones en cualquier momento.

Vía

We hope to meet as many members of the OpenCalais community as possible.  Toward that end, here is a list of the September events where we are presenting and/or holding workshops. 

We would love to see you there, so let us know if you can make it!

1. SDFORUM - Wednesday, September 3rd - 6:30 p.m. PT - Palo Alto, CA
2. PAWS MEETUP - Thursday, September 4th - 6 p.m. PT - San Francisco, CA
3. MESH SUMMER SCHOOL ON MULTIMEDIA SEMANTICS - September 1 - 5, Crete
4. ONLINE NEWS ASSOCIATION (ONA) - September 11 - 13, Washington, DC
5. MIT's EMTECH '08 - September 23 - 25, Cambridge, MA

Please find details (and some special Calais discounts) below. 

SDFORUM - Wednesday, September 3rd - 6:30 p.m. PT - Palo Alto, CA 

We're holding an interactive session on the Calais Web service at the SDForum Semantic Web SIG in a session titled "Emerging Semantic Ad Platforms". 

Tom will focus on how Calais can be used to produce computable semantics from any text and feed them into any new search service, Semantic Web application or semantic ad platform. 

All are welcome, and the fee for non-SDForum members is $15 at the door.  There is no charge for members, and no pre-registration is required.

PAWS MEETUP - Thursday, September 4th - 6 p.m. PT - San Francisco, CA 

Tom will provide a look at Calais' underlying technology, and offer insight into the Calais roadmap going forward, in a special 'field trip' Meetup of the Palo Alto Semantic Web (PAWS) group.

The Calais team is hosting the event at Thomson Reuters downtown San Francisco office at 425 Market Street.  There are only 12 spots left for this free Meetup, so sign up today.

MESH SUMMER SCHOOL ON MULTIMEDIA SEMANTICS - September 1 - 5, Crete

On Thursday, September 4th, Barak Pridor, ClearForest CEO, will offer an overview of the Calais initiative and discuss the value it brings to publishers and journalists. 

ONLINE NEWS ASSOCIATION (ONA) - September 11 - 13, Washington, DC 

On Friday, September 12th, Tom will participate in the "Hello! Semantic Web!" panel alongside Tristan Harris, CEO of Apture, and Tiffany Shackelford, Semantic Marketer and consultant.

MIT's EMTECH '08 - September 23 - 25, Cambridge, MA 

The Calais team will be out in force at the Emerging Technologies Conference @ MIT, with a booth, a developer luncheon, and discounted conference pricing for members of the OpenCalais community. 

The luncheon takes place Thursday, September 25th, from 12:30 - 1:50 p.m. ET.  Tom will share "Five Easy Ways to Add Value with Calais" to provide developers with helpful tips and ideas to kick-start their efforts.

Click on the OpenCalais community discounts page from MIT to register.  The options are as follows:

1.  $49 if you want to enter the conference solely to attend the Calais developer luncheon on Thursday.
2. 15% off on a one-day pass if you want to come for a full day of conference sessions on either Wednesday or Thursday.
3. 15% off on the full conference pass.

We hope to see you there!

…will be the 1st September. I sincerely apologise for the delay; due to technical difficulties (we needed a signup mechanism in place), my holidays during the first two weeks of August, and settling into the new job.

To enter, you should sign up for a user account at data.sioc-project.org; we will ring to confirm your details; then after your account is enabled, you will be able to access the data sets from the 1st September. We will also have an entry submission system available from that date (in case you make something really cool on the first day)! You can make as many submissions as you wish, but use of the data sets is restricted to the duration of the competition and during the demonstration period in November…

The Calais team is heading to some great events this fall, including the Defrag Conference in Denver, Colorado, Nov. 3 - 4, 2008.

Time Sensitive Defrag Discount: The Defrag gang has kindly offered a special discount for the OpenCalais community.

The discounted rate -- $100 off the early bird registration fee (so $895.00) -- is only available through the end of this month.   

Sign-up this week if you want to get the best price.  You can register here by entering our discount code, "tr1" (t r and the number one).

What is Defrag all about?  Data!

Producer Eric Norlin says, "As online data is growing and fragmenting at an exponential pace, individuals, groups and organizations are struggling to discover, assemble, organize, act on and gather feedback from that data."

"In the largest sense, we're all looking to augment the pace at which we achieve insights on raw data - to accelerate the 'aha' moment."

We will have a booth there to share demos, and Calais lead Tom Tague will be speaking on the 'Next-level Discovery'  panel alongside Amit Kumar of Yahoo! Search.

Hope to see you there!

Cuando aún nos bombardean acerca de si es mejor Mac, PC o Linux parece ser que estas viejas discusiones son … eso, caducas y no son relevantes en la situación actual de la Web 2.0, y mucho menos lo serán en el futuro.

Todo apunta a que, por fin, nos dirigimos a  una situación de computación online, donde lo importante son los contenidos, y no el continente ni la aplicación que lo creó. Con las cada vez mas abundantes aplicaciones web es difícil encontrar situaciones en las que se justifique instalar una aplicación de escritorio en el ordenador.

(hay mas…)

Library 2.0 Gang Member and Ex Libris Chief Strategy Officer, Oren Beit-Arie joins Richard Wallis in conversation about the recently announced Ex Libris Open Platform Strategy.

In the first part of this Talking with Talis conversation, they discuss the ramifications of the recent change of ownership when Francisco Partners sold their investment in Ex Libris to Leeds Equity Partners.   This sets the background for he rest of the podcast in which they go on to discus the motivation behind, and the details of the Open Platform Strategy.

In this revealing interview Oren describes how the strategy will influence the way Ex Libris develops and delivers its products in the future.

To accompany this podcast, we have made available a transcript of the interview.

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Creative Commons has published a member submission by W3C: "ccREL: The Creative Commons Rights Expression Language". The document introduces the Creative Commons Rights Expression Language (ccREL), the vocabulary recommended by Creative Commons for machine-readable expression of copyright licensing terms and related information. The language is based on RDF and the document also includes recommendations on how to encode ccRel information in different formats.

Martin Marlmsten is from the LIBRIS department of the Royal Library of Sweden – LIBRIS being the discovery interface for the library.

Since joining as a software developer has been absorbed in to the world of library search and discovery.  He played a major part in the build and launch of the latest LIBRIS search interface which has introduced under the surface some Semantic Web and Linked Data features.

We discuss his career, the use of User Centered Design & Iterative Development methodologies, the Semantic Web techniques and technologies he used, and their future applicability to the library domain.

Items discussed in our conversation:

•  LIBRIS
• User-centered design and the next generation OPAC – a perfect match?
• RDF / Linked Data representations of cataloged data via LIBRIS:
  • URI for the Royal Library - http://libris.kb.se/resource/library/S
  • URI for the subject heading "Mödrar" (Mothers in English) - http://libris.kb.se/resource/auth/154863
  • URI for August Strindberg - http://libris.kb.se/resource/auth/94541
  • URI for the book "The difference Engine" - http://libris.kb.se/resource/bib/5060570
  • The book "The difference Engine" in OpenLink RDF browser - http://demo.openlinksw.com/DAV/JS/rdfbrowser/index.html?uri=http%3A%2F%2Flibris.kb.se%2Fresource%2Fbib%2F5060570
• Cool URIs for the Semantic Web

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W3C’s Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER) Working Group has published five Working Drafts. The purpose of the Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER) is to provide a means for individuals or organizations to describe a group of resources through the publication of machine-readable metadata. The following documents have been published:

• Description Resources (Last Call); which details the creation and lifecycle of Description Resources (DRs), which encapsulate metadata
• Grouping of Resources (Last Call); which describes how sets of IRIs can be defined such that descriptions or other data can be applied to the resources obtained by dereferencing IRIs that are elements of the set.
• Formal Semantics (Last Call); which describes how the relatively simple operational format of a POWDER document can be transformed for processing by Semantic Web tools
• Primer (First Public Draft)
• Test Suite (First Public Draft)

Last Call comments are welcome through 14 September.

Calais R3 Technology Preview Now Available

Release 3 of Calais is now available for testing. Given the enormous increase in the number of production users of Calais we have modified our release process to incorporate a Technology Preview of new releases to allow for testing and experimentation. Of course, the
production Calais service remains up and fully functional during the R3
Technology Preview period.

The details on accessing the technology preview are located here. 

This is a long post, so I’ll highlight the significant changes right here:

• Many new entities and events
• A REST interface to the Calais web service
• Document level categorization into standard news categories
• Exhaustive extraction
• A variety of miscellaneous bug fixes
• Higher performance

Some details on R3….

What’s in R3?
First, as with every release we are expanding and enhancing the universe of entities and relationships extracted by Calais. While the details are located in the R3 Forum – a few highlights:

• New entities include Sports League, Programming Language, Operating System, Medical Treatment and Company Ticker

• New events include Movies Releases, Album Releases and a variety of
  business related items such as Bonus Shares Issuances, Types of
  Business Relationship and others.

Second, after many requests we have implemented a REST interface to Calais. This should simplify access to the service from a variety of environments.

Third, a preview of our new document categorization capability.
Categorization examines your text and attempts to place the document as
a whole into one of a number of news related categories. This
capability will be significantly expanded in the future – but will
provide immediate benefit to anyone aggregating news content today. The
initial categories supported are Business, Sports, Entertainment,
Health, Politics and Technology.

Fourth, depending on what you’re using Calais for this could be a big deal. In R3 we’re releasing a Generic Relations capability. Generic Relations will expose all
relationships in your document as long as one of the members of the
relationship is a known entity type. Generic Relations is sometimes
called Exhaustive Extraction – extracting all the relationships that
involve at least one entity, even if the relationship type hasn’t been
predefined. This capability is designed for semantic processing experts
who know what they are doing. The volume of output can be quite large –
but the ability to do in-depth information discovery is enormous.

And finally, we’ve done our best to solve any extraction related
issues that have been reported to us. We can’t promise 100% - but you
should see significant improvement.

What’s Coming?
Let’s limit ourselves to the very short term – things you can expect to see in the next month or less.

• Company Disambiguation. This is a big deal and the first step
  toward richer entity disambiguation throughout Calais. With company
  disambiguation we will use everything from the name of the company to
  the names of people to the geographies mentioned to return a single
  authoritative name for the company. A simple example: “IBM”,
  “International Business Machines”, “IBM Professional Services” will all
  be detected as companies – and will all be linked back to a single
  definitive reference for “IBM”.

• Geo Disambiguation. The same effort as applied to geographies. No
  longer will we be confused whether we talking about Paris, TX or Paris,
  France.

• A super secret skunkworks project. Just think of it as putting a semantic layer on top of the web. The whole web. Right now.

We tried to bring it together in a way that wouldn't impact users - but that's not going to happen.

Utilization of Calais is expanding at an amazing rate. To date we've been able to deal with that growth in a transparent fashion - but we've reached the point where we need to actually unplug some wires and get things reconfigured for significantly higher volumes.

All of the pieces have come together to make this happen this evening from 12:00 - 1:00. We've notified the East and West coast power grid coordinators, have the forklifts warmed up and a few dozen people trained in rapidly unplugging and plugging ethernet cables. So - it's a go. 

When we're done we'll have the infrastructure in place to scale to tens of millions of transactions per day and thousands of transactions per second.  That should last us for at least a few months.

Next week marks the kick-off of several upcoming events for hakia, beginning with Search Engine Strategies (SES) in San Jose. As the technology world begins it’s Fall tradeshow extravaganza, we too are gearing up to showcase some of our own considerable progress as we continue to work towards finishing development of the hakia search engine.

This Monday, hakia’s Chief Architect, Kartal Guner, will speak on a panel entitled “Semantic Search: How will it change our lives?” Along with other distinguished colleagues in search, Kartal will discuss hakia’s QDEX technology and the implications of semantics for the future at search. If you plan to attend SES, we strongly encourage you to stop by at the panel on Monday at 11:15 a.m. PT.

Also in September, hakia’s Chief Scientific Officer Dr. Christian Hempelmann will travel to Vienna, Austria to deliver a speech on the “Doing Semantic Internet Search Semantically,” at the European Semantic Technology Conference. Christian will provide a general overview of our OntoSem capabilities, as well as discuss the key issues facing Web search today. Down the road in October, hakia will exhibit at SMX East, right here in our backyard of New York City. Stay tuned for more details and exciting news about our booth presence at this particular event!

All three events promise to deliver valuable insight into the business aspects of search, an area in which we are working diligently, particularly through the availability of our technology licensing program and Syndication Web Services. We’re looking forward to seeing some familiar faces and meeting new search fanatics, from the West Coast to Europe.

Cuando oyes la palabra “semántica” seguramente la asocies actualmente a la Web Semántica - la que se espera sea la nueva iteración de Internet que contenga datos estructurados y protocolos específicos que ayuden a ofrecer una red inteligente.

Pero el concepto de la semántica no tiene, necesariamente, que aplicarse solo a la red, también puede adecuarse a otros aspectos como, por ejemplo, tu escritorio … es mas, incluso a tus hojas de cálculo de Excel, como es este caso.

(hay mas…)

LibraryThing have followed the opening up of their Common Knowledge API with the A million free covers from LibraryThing announcement:

A few days ago, just before hitting thirty million books, we hit one million user-uploaded covers. So, we’ve decided to give them away—to libraries, to bookstores, to everyone.

Get yourself a LibraryThing Developer Key (any LibraryThing member can get one), and you can retrieve up to 1,000 covers per day.  As they encourage local cashing of images, even this is not really a limit.

Tim Spalding openly admits that this service competes with Amazon web service, but LibraryThing’s Terms of Service are far more open it also competes with other commercial services (which are on average better) but without their costs.

The folks at LibraryThing have been promoting the open use of data for a long time, it is great to see them continuing to practice what they preach – lets hope their bandwidth can support this, as I can see it becoming very popular.

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Listening to the conversation on the August show from The Library 2.0 Gang, the seems to be a consensus that it has.  I believe that  the folks behind the open source movements can credit themselves not only with providing alternatives and a challenge to the [traditional] commercial vendors, but also with changing the way those vendors now interact with their customers. 

SirsiDynix CTO, Talin Bingham, said that they are now behaving in a more open way with their customers, by providing APIs and helping libraries configure their systems.  Carl Grant, newly moved from [Open Source] CARE Affilates to become president of Ex Libris North America, commented - we are heading towards the best of all possible worlds - with choice of open or commercial systems that will openly connect.

Whilst neither Talin or Carl took up the suggestion that, because they are involving their customers so closely, it might be worth considering open sourcing their software; it was clear that both of their organisations see a mix of open source and commercially licensed software on customer sites being the way forward.

Adding a more global theme, one of the guests on the show was L J Haravu Chief Domain Specialist, Verus Solutions Pvt., Ltd., Hyderabad India, the software company behind NewGenLib the Open Source library system successfully spreading across India, Arabic speaking countries and as far afield as Cambodia.  The NewGenLib experience is of a climate where funds, or even the acknowledgement of the need, for investment in library systems is lacking, makes their success in rolling out over 120 installations impressive.

All on the show, vendors and open source advocates alike, are enthusiastic about the library systems market and the part open source is playing in it.

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A group of experts from the municipality of Zaragoza and the CTIC foundation published a new Semantic Web Use Case, as part of the SW Case Study and Use Case collection. It describes an eTourism application: users can personalize their city tour using a specialized service (called “CRUZAR”) that integrates relevant databases (with RDF and specialized Ontologies), and that translates the users’ wishes and profiles in a set of rules on those data. A matching algorithm is then run to produce a personalized itinerary.

We've just done a fun interview with The Guardian's Jemima Kiss, which you can find here: http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/digitalcontent/2008/08/reuters_labs_brews_more_conten.html

As you can see, Reuters Spotlight Content API, found at http://spotlight.reuters.com, now features integration with Calais, enabling you to build news apps that include fully metatagged Reuters news.

Spotlight is an open developer community, coming out of the Reuters Labs initiative (http://labs.reuters.com), that gives non-commercial developers access to Reuters multimedia articles, pictures, videos and text news via a set of API services.

Spotlight also offers community tools, resources and forums, including the Spotlight gallery (http://spotlight.reuters.com/project) which is now showcasing cool news apps by early adopters.

Developers can also share snippets of their code and generate additional Web traffic when others embed their Spotlight applications into their personal sites or non-commercial blogs, etc.

Here are links to some great work, including mashups of Spotlight, Calais and other services, such as the Daylife API and Yahoo! Pipes.

-- Developer Sven Elligan has created a Spotlight + Daylife + Calais mashup that was runner up in Daylife's recent developer competition: http://challenge08.daylife.com/news-in-digital-media

-- Developer Michael Bade created a Spotlight + Daylife + Calais mashup that also leverages Yahoo! Pipes: http://opencalais.com/node/4705

-- Thomson Reuters developer Todd Faulls created GIST using Spotlight and Calais as well: http://gist.whistlehog.com

To get started with Spotlight, go to http://spotlight.reuters.com or visit DevX's API Finder at http://www.apifinder.com/APIFinder/APIDisplay/29743

-Krista 

What can microwaves teach us about commercializing web services? Thanks to a wonderful post from Jono at Mozilla Labs, a great deal:

“A shopper may choose the microwave with more buttons, because it seems “more powerful”. However, the shopper will soon find out that it does the same thing as any other microwave, you just have to spend longer figuring out which button to push… The best microwave has no buttons at all.”

While an individual will be stuck with the button-rich microwave until they’re ready to purchase a new one, web services have minimal friction and individuals easily move on.

This means that the interactions that an individual has with a service need to be pleasurable. The easiest way to realize this? Minimize the interactions required in order for the individual to enjoy and experience the value of the service.

Regardless of how complex the technology is, it’s important to bury it beneath a simplistic UI that doesn’t put itself between the user and the benefit.

The classic example of this? Google, of course. Incredible architecture is necessary, complex algorithms required but a user sees a white box and two buttons. Not a hint of anything else.

In his book,  Inside Steve’s Brain, Leander Kahney shares an excellent thought from Apple’s Jonathan Ive on the topic:  

“The task, Ive said, is ‘to solve incredibly complex problems and make their resolution appear inevitable and incredibly simple, so you have no sense of how difficult this thing was.’”

Thinking about it, that statement holds true for all of my favourite products and services - from the iphone to my iron. Simplicity rules the roost.

Do you have an example of a complex product or service hidden beneath a simplistic user interface?

Calais Release 3 is Coming!

In the next couple of days we’re going to announce the availability of a technology preview of Calais R3.

In the past new releases have been done “in place” and have simply replaced the existing web service. Given both the increasing number of production services built on top of Calais and the ever increasing number of developers – we’re going to do this a little differently in the future.

R3 will be made available as a Technology Preview for approximately two weeks before being shifted to production. This preview period will allow developers to test their applications and provide us with feedback if anything doesn’t look right.

The preview will be accessible with your existing Calais API key. You’ll get to it by simply pointing your application at a different URL – which we’ll publish when we release.

There will be a wide range of changes, improvements and new functionality in R3 – we’d like to encourage anyone that relies on the Calais service to take advantage of the preview period to make certain everything still works well for you.
 

W3C invites people to participate in a Workshop on Semantic Web in Energy Industries; Part I: Oil & Gas to be hosted by Chevron in Houston, Texas, USA on 9-10 December 2008. Participants will explore how Semantic Web technologies can play a role in the management and analysis of the huge amounts of data gathered from highly diverse sources in this sector of the energy industry. Position papers are due 19 September.

The Francisco Partners investment fund has sold its holdings in Ex Libris to New York based Leeds Equity Partners for an estimated $170M, according to HAARETZ.com.

In the upbeat Ex Libris press release  Matti Shem Tov, Ex Libris Group president and CEO is quoted as saying “the Ex Libris corporate structure will remain unaltered, this change in ownership will provide Ex Libris with additional resources for accelerating our current and future product strategies and our plans for international expansion.”

It looks like Francisco Partners made a reasonable return on their couple of years ownership of Ex Libris, Leeds Equity Partners seems to think it has bought in to a good investment, and Ex Libris has got access to extra resources – so everyone is happy…..

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Here’s a question that has been on my mind lately:

As digital creeps into all forms of media, and companies adjust their structure and strategy, what’s the correct amount of “digital”, or “technology”, capacity that they should bring in-house?

I’ve interacted with teams from a number of  firms operating in the same industry. Every single one is answering the question in a different way.

One group happily proclaimed that they’re not a “tech-shop” and outsource all of their technology needs. Another opened the conversation by saying, “within five years we want to be perceived as a technology firm.” Some have a “digital” lead (a single person) while others have created an entire digital division.

All of the companies have an understanding that something needs to be done, but it’s clear that nobody’s certain about what’s necessary.

Which brings me back to my question - how much technology/digital capabilities do these traditional firms need? You have to respect current balance sheets and business models, yes. But how do you position yourself to thrive when digital changes the game? How much is the right amount?

I’d love to hear from anyone, especially smart new friends like JA, Ami, and Kristy who may be thinking about this already.

Although I had my dreaded PDA with me on my recent couple of weeks away, I did resist the temptation to do much other than delete spam whilst sat on the beach in Cornwall.   There were a few things worth comment which passed through between spam so here is a catch up in no particular order:

 Bibliocommons goes live in Oakville
The public library of Oakville, ON, near Toronto, is the first to go live with a Bibliocommons based system.  Bibliocommons is an interesting mix between centrally hosted social features and the local [Horizon I believe] library system. 

This OPAC looks good, and presses all the 2.0 buttons – tags, comments, summaries, personal collections, save to lists, etc.  It will be interesting to see how the social features work as other libraries join Bibliocommons – but a great start.

Amazon buys AbeBooks
The LibraryThing blog had the scoop on this last week.   Not unsurprising really as AbeBooks had minority shareholding in LibraryThing.  Tim Spalding assures the LibraryThing membership that there will be little effect for them, but I bet he is looking enviously at the pile hardware that Amazon have whirring away in their data centres.  

The move has also spurred the LibraryThing developers in to action to release some services to demonstrate LibraryThing’s commitment to open data and support for libraries and other book lovers.  - See below.

Carl Grant moves to Ex Libris as LibLime acquire CARE Affiliates
Listeners to the Library 2.0 Gang will know Carl Grant as someone with great experience in the world of Library Systems.  Carl his moving from the open source company CARE Affiliates to take the position of president of Ex Libris, North America.  

That other well known open source company LibLime announced at the same time they were to acquire  selected assets of CARE Affiliates.  

This move of a sector heavy-weight from open source back in to the commercial vendor community, no doubt will be seized upon by some to predict the bursting of the open source bubble – things are never that simple.

LibraryThing opens up Common Knowledge
LibraryThing have announced the release of an open API for Common Knowledge their groundbreaking "fielded wiki" for interesting book information (see original blog post). It includes fields like series, important characters, important places, author dates, author burial places, agents, edits, etc.

Access, limited to 1,000 hits per day, is free and made available under the highly permissive Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license.

As Tim hints, this is only first such announcement from LibraryThing – watch out for other useful data being opened up.

III web site gets a social refresh
The latest incarnation of the Innovative Interfaces web site features a 2.0 looking tag cloud and links to blogs by III staff and others, under the heading of ‘What’s Brewing’  - good to see.

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