Planet Semantico

Last week I was at the Semantic tech conference in San Jose. It was an exciting event that exceeded my expectations in many ways. First of all, the conference had a really great vibe. People from different parts of the planet converged to talk about their work and passion - Semantic Web.

From the conversations during lunch to keynotes there was a fluid exchange of intelligent ideas; people genuinely interested in the space and focusing on understanding how semantic technologies benefit us today and where they are headed. There was a consensus that many technologies are nearly ready or ready for prime time and that 2008 is the first year when semantic web is coming out of the stealth mode.

To get a flavor of the conversations and topics covered during this conference, I suggest that you review the 4 posts that I’ve written on ReadWriteWeb:

• Taking Semantic Technology to the Masses
• Investor Opportunities and Pitfalls
• The Story of SearchMonkey
• Freebase: An overview

In addition to these 4 posts, I’ve also written a post on Semantic Search. I highly recommend this post to you as well, it is a result of a lot struggle to crystallize in my mind what is going on in that space.

Finally, as with any great conference, it was a pleasure to meet up people that you work with remotely. I had a great pleasure of talking to Paul Miller, Tom Tague and Greg Boutin from Semantic Web Gang. We’ve done several podcasts together and it was great to see people behind voices and avatars :)

I also had an opportunity to speak on the Rising Stars of Semantic Web panel along with Barney Pell, CEO/CTO Powerset, Nova Spivack CEO of Radar Networks, Ian David CTO of Talis and Tom Grueber from stealth company. Both during the panel and the press conference that followed up, I kept on thinking about incredible amount of energy and brain power and enthusiasm that these folks bring to the space. In my book passion is the #1 recipe for success, so I was excited about the prospects of the space at large and what each of these individual companies is going to contribute.

For additional coverage of the conference, please see excellent round up by Daniela Barbosa.

English Barney Pell, Daniela Barbosa, energy, Greg Boutin, how semantic technologies, Ian David, Nova Spivack, Paul Miller, Radar Networks, San Jose, semantic technologies, Semantic Web, Taking Semantic Technology, Talis, Tom Grueber, Tom Tague, Web Gang, Web Panel

Many people rarely visit their favorite search engine’s homepage, but instead use the search bar in their browser. Likewise, you can add Powerset to your search bar instead of going directly to Powerset.com. The process is easy.

Step 1: Go to www.powerset.com and note the blue glow in your search bar

Step 2: Click on the drop down and select Add "Powerset"

Step 3: You’re ready to rock! Instead of going to your favorite search engine or Wikipedia for Wikipedia queries, try searching Powerset instead.

Sometimes, you encounter Wikipedia articles while surfing the Web.  A number of users have told us that they prefer the features and usability of Powerset’s enhanced Wikipedia pages to Wikipedia itself. So, Powerset developer/designer Ian Collins has created a Greasemonkey script that will redirect Wikipedia URLs to Powerset.

To install, you need to be using Firefox (sorry, IE users!). First, install Greasemonkey and then install the Redirect to Powerset script. Now, whenever you encounter a Wikipedia article, you’ll be automatically redirected to Powerset.  If you want to go back to the original Wikipedia article, e.g. for editing or to see if anything has recently changed, then you can use the Edit Wikipedia Article link at the top of Powerset Wikipedia pages.

If you have any suggestions for improvement or ideas for other tools, give us your ideas in Powerlabs or leave a comment on this post.

English favorite search engine, Ian Collins, search bar, search engine, www.powerset.com

Freebase, otra de las 10 aplicaciones más prometedoras sobre la web semántica

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Freebase, otra de las 10 aplicaciones más prometedoras sobre la web semántica

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We asked BlogHer community to try our BETA search engine with health queries and give us feedback. We received about 300 responses, and were overwhelmed by the compliments we received. The BlogHers said the following:

What is your first impression of hakia compared to your favorite search engine?
17% said - hakia is better OVERALL.
22% said - hakia is better WHEN THE SEARCH QUERY IS MORE COMPLICATED (OR LONGER).
33% said - hakia is better IN CERTAIN TOPICS.
23% said - hakia is about the SAME as my current search engine.
5% said - hakia is WORSE than my current search engine.

After testing hakia, which one applies to you?
From now on, I will use hakia…
14% said - EXCLUSIVELY or MOST OF THE TIME
35% said - HALF OF THE TIME ALONG WITH MY OTHER FAVORITE SEARCH ENGINE.
28% said - OCCASIONALLY.
3% said - I will NOT USE hakia.
20% said - I have not yet decided.

Will you recommend hakia to your friends?
67% said - I WILL recommend it.
3% said - I WILL NOT recommend it.
30% said - I have not yet decided

The results show a remarkable consistency with our earlier survey resultsof 1579 participants which increases the significance of the feedback.

We thank all participants for the feedback on our semantic search engine. We are constantly improving our technology, especially as we hope to complete the development of our BETA site this year. Your suggestions were therefore truly invaluable.

Farrah and I will be at the BlogHer conference in July. Watch out for the hakia t-shirts to spot us!

English favorite search engine, search engine, semantic search engine

La redacción de entrada donde hablaba de la frustración con que se afronta en España el futuro de las Ciencias de la Computación e Inteligencia Artificial (CCIA) -como entidad independiente de las tecnologías que la usan- me sugirió la idea de dar nota d...

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Otra herramienta similar a twine, herramientas de semantificación de marcas sociales-intereses

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Otra herramienta similar a twine, herramientas de semantificación de marcas sociales-intereses

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Herramienta de marcado de intereses. Similar a Twine

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Herramienta de marcado de intereses. Similar a Twine

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Interesante "casi" clon de del.iicio.us que trabaja en base a dbpedia para generar referencias

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Interesante "casi" clon de del.iicio.us que trabaja en base a dbpedia para generar referencias

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I had a nice productive week in San Jose / San Francisco last week, where I attended the Semantic Technologies Conference 2008 (SemTech 2008) and some other nearby events. SemTech 2008 had a record attendance of over 1000 people, and it was great to meet up with old friends and new (some of whom I had often conversed with online but not in real life).

• Arriving on Sunday afternoon, Uldis, Stefan and I prepared for our SemTech 2008 tutorial. On Monday, we gave the tutorial entitled “The Future of Social Networks on the Internet: The Need for Semantics“, inspired by our IEEE Internet Computing article from last year. You can get the slides here. We talked about how a combination of FOAF and SIOC could be used to represent and interlink people and social objects within and across social websites. The tutorial was well received and we had some interesting questions afterwards…
• On Tuesday morning, I chaired a late-breaking DataPortability interest group session, where I quizzed Chris Saad on the initiative and we had a good discussion with Daniela Barbosa, Danny Ayers, Ian Davis, Henry Story, Uldis and others. Afterwards, I attended the keynote talks by Nova Spivack and Eric Miller. You may already have seen my reports here and here respectively.
• On Tuesday afternoon, I met with Sanjay Sabnani, CEO of CrowdGather and friend Chris. CrowdGather is a big network of medium to large message board sites that includes the huge General Mayhem community. (Disclaimer: I am on the CrowdGather Inc. board of advisors.) That evening, we met Ashely and went along to the SF Beta event (”The San Francisco Web 2.0 Mixer”), where I saw some interesting demos including Hitchsters (share taxi trips to the airport). After dinner, we had drinks with TouristR’s Conor Wade, LeFora co-founder Vinnie Lauria and friend David. Unfortunately, I was pretty much “wiped” with jet lag by then.
• On Wednesday, I took it easy. From the lovely Hotel Kabuki in Japantown, I wandered up Fillmore to see what old breakfast haunt Galette had become (it’s now La Boulange). I skipped on to another breakfast favourite, Ella’s, and had something of a mammoth breakfast (yes, those three plates of food in the picture!) that kept me going for the day. After a spot in Kinokuniya, where I picked up the latest in the Alita: Last Order manga series, I walked on and drove over the Golden Gate Bridge, and then headed back south again for an evening spent with family in the locality.
• On Thursday, I attended some more SemTech 2008 talks in the morning including Steven Forth et al. from Monitor presenting about Team Learning on Semantic Mediawiki and also part of the FISHBOWL SemTech Reflections discussion session. In the afternoon, a team of us DERI researchers headed up to Radar Networks in San Francisco where we presented some of our work and brainstormed on things we could do together.

And I flew back on Friday, arriving back in Galway on Saturday. San Francisco is still a very special place to me, and I look forward to a proper family holiday there in the next year or three. Funnily enough, on Sunday I was driving behind a car with a California license plate on a Galway road - it was a long way from home!

Now, it’s catch-up time again. We’ve had a busy few weeks here in DERI what with our major funding review (which was held on-site a fortnight ago), so a lot of stuff went by the wayside (if I haven’t replied to you yet, please accept my apologies as I have a backlog of e-mail to get through and also my phone SIM card died this morning).

So what else is happening? I had an interview with Maryrose Lyons yesterday for the latest Brightspark Consulting newsletter, and today I’m correcting some exam papers that were put on a very long finger. I also got a copy of Jonathan Zittrain’s “The Future of the Internet - And How to Stop It” in the post which I’m looking forward to reading soon…

English Brightspark Consulting, California, Chris Saad, Conor Wade, CrowdGather Inc, Daniela Barbosa, Danny Ayers, David, Eric Miller, food, Galway road, Golden Gate Bridge, Henry Story, Hotel Kabuki, Ian Davis, Internet Computing article, Japantown, Jonathan Zittrain, Mayhem, Nova Spivack, San Francisco, San Jose, Sanjay Sabnani, Steven Forth

Early tomorrow I head to Chicago for the TechCocktail conference. The speaker list that Frank and Eric have amassed is impressive and the sessions are all stellar. Make sure to register if you haven’t already.

My session’s titled Understanding the Semantic Web and takes a top-down (;)) look at everything an entrepreneur needs to know about the space. For semantic ninjas that regularly reader the BlueBlog it may rehash some familiar ground but for those not deeply involved in the space it will be a great 30 min discussion.

Here’s a short summary of what you can expect.

What is the semantic web: for a term that has a simple definition the phrase ’semantic web’ is generally difficult to describe and confusing to understand. It shouldn’t be.

Two approaches to semantic web: the two popular approaches to realizing the potential of semantic web are: the bottom-up approach, which annotates information to describe concepts, terms, and relationships; and the top-down approach, which leverages existing information to infer meaning.

Applications: the real value of the semantic web is not in the technology that creates it but in the applications that the technology enables. From semantic search to contextual browsing we’ll explore what’s being done today and where applications are going.

Making a business of semantic applications the semantic web is an emerging market but what about the business opportunities?

As I said, it should be a great conversation and my goal is to stimulate discussion and debate that carries on throughout the event and into the evening. See you soon Chicago.

English Chicago, Eric, Frank, phrase semantic web, semantic applications, semantic search, Semantic Web

English Web Order

For a change of pace, we thought it would be fun to share with you some hakia trivia.

1- What is the most expensive asset in hakia’s office on Wall Street?

a) Victor’s collectible chocolate
b) A bull sculpture
c) Riza’s chess board
d) Barbecue set in the terrace

2- Which one of these facts about a hakia team member is true?

a) He was traded for a mainframe computer
b) He survived a shark attack
c) He is the cousin of Bill Gates

3- What does hakia have that Google doesn’t, involving chickens?

a) A datacenter surrounded by chicken wire
b) More engineers who are allergic to chicken feathers
c) A song dedicated to the query “why did the chicken cross the road?”

4- A company used hakia’s name without permission doing what?

a) Promoting their hamburgers by the slogan “Hamburger that can only be found by hakia”
b) Promoting their magazine by the slogan “Do you think hakia is a Japanese restaurant?”
c) Promoting their video by an opening karate act with the sound “haaaa - kia”.

Come back for the answers.

English Bill Gates, Google, Riza, Wall Street

Esta entrada está sugerida por dos fenómenos que he observado atentamente estas últimas semanas. El primero, muy interesante, es la resonancia en menéame de la noticia sobre la consecución del campeonato de la liga de fútbol por parte del Real Madrid. L...

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Just a quick posting - I'd promised a number of people to post a copy of my presentation from SemTech 2008. This presentation - as you might have guessed from the title - presents five simple ideas for getting value from Calais quickly and easily.

Regards,
Tom

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Three weeks ago I released RDFohloh, a RDF wrapper of Ohloh. That first version had many errors (thanks Richard for your complete report) that obviously I needed to solve. But, as usual, the problem is the time…

Well, today I had some minutes to do it, not only to fix the errors reported, but also others that I found checking the application. This is the changelog:

• Fixed RDF export (issues with namespaces, external URIs, etc.).
• More checks of empty values from Ohloh’s API.
• Added documentation about URIs schema.
• Improved definition of OWL properties.
• Many other optimizations and fixes.

The new version is already deployed, and its source code is also available to download (development of the project has been moved to Google Code).

BTW in these weeks Rob Cakebread added support for RDFohloh in his DOAPfriend, cool stuff :-)

The next step in RDFohloh will be to add search support of projects and users, but that will be another day…

English, Spanish API, Google, RDF, Rob Cakebread, search support

Planeta en español sobre web semántica

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Planeta en español sobre web semántica

delicious Web Semántica Planeta en español sobre web semántica

I’ve been on a strange book buying streak lately. It is strange for two reasons: I have not been buying books in the latest months and also I have no time to read. But books is one of my few hobbies so I rarely not buy if I feel that I should have the book.

Anyway, I’ve been buying books but not reading them and I figured at least I can share them with you (in case you find them interesting and have time to read books). So here they are:

The only one I read from the list above is about Steve’s Jobs brain. This book is definitely worth it - short and packed with excellent insights into how Steve and Apple crew get it done.

Enjoy the Memorial Day Weekend everybody!

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This is such an insanely brilliant art project. The artist sent a special GPS tracking unit around the world via DHL on a specially designed path. The resulting points form a giant drawing on the...

English GPS

Excepcional artículo sobre la evolución de la web y el retraso europeo al respecto

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In no particular order

Book signing with Jim after his talk - selling out!

Singing blues classics with Danny Ayers at 3:00 am.

Channeling  Ari Fleischer at Tuesday's press conference.

Herding a hundred or so cats through two hands-on trainings on semantic web deployments.  And having a bunch of the cats thank me for being such a great teacher!

Random people thanking me for the 'great demo!' at the Oracle tutorial.  Last minute work pays off.

Chris Halaschek in a suit.

A room full of people who knew enough about data warehousing to understand our OLAP work.

All in all - great conference!

Uncategorized Ari Fleischer, Chris Halaschek, Danny Ayers, OLAP, Oracle, semantic web deployments

One of the positives of moving to NY was the ability to join Netflix. One of the positives of joining Netflix was the ability to add a personal Netflix Widget to my site, which I did this week when I added my Netflix List to my Facebook profile: Now anyone who visits my Facebook profile can see just how big of a geek I am.

The past week saw a number of other people discover our Netflix widgets and display them on their site. Here are a few.

Dr. Wigglebutt added a Netflix Widget to highlight the good doctor’s movie list. It looks great in the sidebar and adds a valuable piece of self-expression to the site. It also serves to highlight Wigglebutt’s good taste in movies.

JR, a fellow NYer, has a Netflix Queue Widget that displays what’s coming down the pipe. Do most people have so many movies in their queue? JR, why not a book widget for your sidebar?

Didi - aspiring photographer, full-time nanny, mother, and wife - has a Netflix Widget that shows her family’s recently reviewed movies. The diversity is fun, mixing children’s movies with great dramas from the past year.

Welcome everyone to the AdaptiveBlue family. We’re happy you’ve decided to join us :) Grab our RSS feed and stay up-to-date with our happenings and join our Facebook group.

English Wigglebutt

The day after I’m highlighting OCLC and Google getting closer together to make it easier to find books and their digitised versions, Microsoft announces they are getting out of that game.

The Microsoft Live Search team announces on their blog that they are winding down Book Search:

Today we informed our partners that we are ending the Live Search Books and Live Search Academic projects and that both sites will be taken down next week. Books and scholarly publications will continue to be integrated into our Search results, but not through separate indexes.

With Live Search Books and Live Search Academic, we digitized 750,000 books and indexed 80 million journal articles. Based on our experience, we foresee that the best way for a search engine to make book content available will be by crawling content repositories created by book publishers and libraries.

Not continuing the service they developed in partnership with the Internet Archive, CCS, and others, they are giving away what they have amassed:

… we intend to provide publishers with digital copies of their scanned books. We are also removing our contractual restrictions placed on the digitized library content and making the scanning equipment available to our digitization partners and libraries to continue digitization programs. We hope that our investments will help increase the discoverability of all the valuable content that resides in the world of books and scholarly publications.

It is interesting that they have come to the realisation that the best way for a search engine to make book content available will be by crawling content repositories created by book publishers and libraries.  - The question of course is who’s search engine.

Without doing much reading between the lines, it is clear that Microsoft have failed to see a business model in the worthy job of digitizing the world’s books.  I wonder if there is one, or does the answer lay with open data projects like the Open Library, the Million Book Project, and the sharing of libraries.

English Google, Internet Archive, Microsoft, Open Library, search engine

The 7th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) has an exciting program of thirteen one-day workshops that will be held on October 26 and 27. The deadlines for submitting papers vary. See the individual workshop pages for detailed information on their scope and structure and for information on submitting papers and participating.

• 2nd International Workshop on Service Matchmaking and Resource Retrieval in the Semantic Web
• Terra Cognita 2008
• 3rd International Workshop on Ontology Matching
• 3rd ExpertFinder Workshop: Personal Identification and Collaborations - Knowledge Mediation and Extraction (PICKME’08)
• 7th Semantic Web Services Challenge Workshop
• 4th International Workshop on Semantic Web Enabled Software Engineering (SWESE2008)
• 4th International Workshop on Uncertainty Reasoning for the Semantic Web
• International Workshop on Ontology Dynamics (IWOD2008)
• Nature inspired Reasoning for the Semantic Web (NatuReS)
• Social Data on the Web (SDoW2008)
  
• 4th International Workshop on Scalable Semantic Web Knowledge Base Systems (SSWS2008)
• 1st International Workshop on Incentives for the Semantic Web (INSEMTIVE 2008)
• 1st International Workshop on Ontology-supported Business Intelligence (OBI 2008)

Uncategorized Business Intelligence, Scalable Semantic Web Knowledge Base Systems, Web Conference, Web Enabled Software, Web Services Challenge Workshop

Bill Gates’ criticism that pure keyword search is “just syntax and not semantics and has limits no matter how much you build those things up” came at the heels of a heated conversation I took part in at the Semantic Technology 2008 conference in San Jose. The session title was: Will Semantics Give Web Search a Face-lift?

It was clear from the outset that very different notions of semantics were used, so a lively discussion ensued during the Q&A, where the panelists compared their own approaches to take search to the next level. Since everyone belongs to a different school of thought, we agreed not to agree: Fernando Pereira, Research Director at Google, assumes that semantics can be captured from the use and formatting of language–ironically, he later stated that Wittgensteinian (meaning is use) or Fregian (meaning can be reduced to formal logic) approaches are futile. Google’s approach is using classic statistical machine-learning methods (robust, in the sense of a brick being a robust tool for switching off a light, but as we know non-scalable), so we know that there is no “semantics” focus. Peter Mika, a recent hire at Yahoo!, on the other hand, talked about their new SeachMonkey interface that is, inter alia, to be fed by RDF markup. Obviously, hakia’s position is rather different.

Keyword Co-occurrence Statistics as Semantics (Google)

Fernando killed the light with a rock.

If meaning is co-occurence for you, then this sentence will be a possible answer to queries about people dying in avalanches. Not much that structure of a webpage could help you here, either. Seemingly relevant words, not disambiguated as to their actual senses in the given context, will easily mislead you.

Syntax as Semantics (Powerset)

It should also be mentioned that Ron Kaplan, CSO of Powerset, made a few statements from the audience, including the very telling one that Powerset believes in the “syntactic web”, which pointedly illustrates his belief that you can get to meaning from surface syntax.

If meaning is syntax, then for you the sentence above is not distinguishable from this one:

Ron killed the program with a memory leak.

The surface structures of the sentences are identical, even some words overlap, but killing a light is different from killing a program (not to mention, killing an animate being), and the ‘rock’ is an instrument in the first case, while the ‘memory leak’ is a cause in the second. Syntax does not grant you access to any of these important differences in meaning.

Semantic-Web Markup as Semantics (Yahoo!)

If, on the other hand, you believe in semantic-web-style markup as the solution, then the author of the sentence will have to add tags that clarify that a lamp was switched off, hopefully in a way that another user has tagged this sentence:

Peter used his usual brick to turn off the lamp.

Semantics as Semantics (hakia)

If, finally, you have access to semantics, your constraints on the different senses of ‘kill’, ‘light’, and ‘rock’ will get you to the meaning automatically, and you will serve the sentence above only as an answer to queries about methods to switch off lamps, and not pollute your results with it otherwise. For more examples, you can read my prior blog posts.

Where we currently are in search is nice, but there is much room for improvement. Non-semantic methods have reached their ceiling. Carefully tested and appropriate semantic methods, based on understanding natural language, will get us to the next stage. We are phasing these in, beta release by beta release, and will show you the difference between real semantics and yesterday’s attempts at avoiding semantics. Stay tuned!

English Bill Gates, Bill Gates Speaks, Fernando Pereira, Google, Peter Mika, pure keyword search, RDF, Ron Kaplan, San Jose, semantic-web-style markup, syntactic web, web search, Yahoo

Esta entrada es una reflexión provocada por las últimas aplicaciones que he analizado (siempre desde la perspectiva de la Inteligencia Artificial), así como por los temas en los que estoy trabajando. Me da la sensación, viendo los nuevos proyectos, que Silicon Valley ...

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