Planet Semantico

Wednesday Oct 29

9.00-10.00	Keynote 2: Freebase: An Open, Writable Database of the World’s Information (Johannes Brahms hall) John Giannandrea, Metaweb Technologies Inc.
10.00-10.30	Coffee Break
10.30-12.30	Research 1: OWL (Johann Peter Hebel hall) Chair: Frank van Harmelen Combining a DL Reasoner and a Rule Engine for Improving Entailment-based OWL Reasoning Georgios Meditskos and Nick Bassiliades Improving an RCC-Derived Geospatial Approximation by OWL Axioms Rolf Grütter, Thomas Scharrenbach, and Bettina Bauer-Messmer OWL Datatypes: Design and Implementation Boris Motik and Ian Horrocks Laconic and Precise Justifications in OWL Matthew Horridge, Bijan Parsia and Ulrike Sattler
10.30-12.30	Research 2: Ontology Alignment (Johannes Brahms hall) Chair: Harith Alani Learning Concept Mappings from Instance Similarity Shenghui Wang, Gwenn Englebienne, and Stefan Schlobach Instanced-based mapping between thesauri and folksonomies Christian Wartena and Rogier Brussee Collecting Community-Based Mappings in an Ontology Repository Natasha Noy, Nicholas Griffith, and Mark Musen Algebras of ontology alignment relations Jérôme Euzenat
10.30-12.30	Industry Talks 1 (Alfred Mombert hall) Chair: Joel Sachs Semantic Wikis: Fusing the two strands of the Semantic Web Mark Greaves (Vulcan Inc.) Internet of Services York Sure (SAP Research) Semantic Web @ BBN Mike Dean (BBN) Data Intelligence Evelyne Viegas (Microsoft Research)
12.30-14.00	Lunch break
14.00-15.30	Research 1: Description Logics (Johann Peter Hebel hall) Chair: Gerd Stumme Scalable Conjunctive Query Evaluation Over Large and Expressive Knowledge Bases Julian Dolby, Achille Fokoue, Aditya Kalyanpur, Li Ma, Edith Schonberg, Kavitha Srinivas, and Xingzhi Sun A Kernel Revision Operator for Terminologies- Algorithms and Evaluation Guilin Qi, Peter Haase, Zhisheng Huang, Qiu Ji, Jeff Z. Pan, and Johanna Voelker Description Logic Reasoning with Decision Diagrams: Compiling SHIQ to Disjunctive Datalog Sebastian Rudolph, Markus Krötzsch, and Pascal Hitzler
14.00-15.30	Research 2: User Interfaces (Johannes Brahms hall) Chair: Natasha Noy RDF123: from Spreadsheets to RDF Lushan Han, Tim Finin, Cynthia Parr, Joel Sachs, and Anupam Joshi Evaluating long-term use of the Gnowsis Semantic Desktop for PIM Leo Sauermann and Dominik Heim Bringing The IPTC News Architecture into the Semantic Web Raphael Troncy
14.00-15.30	Industry Talks 2 (Alfred Mombert hall) Chair: Fuesane Cheng Semantic Web in Asia: Example Use Cases Tony Lee (SaltLux) Making the Web searchable Peter Mika (Yahoo Inc) SemanticWeb from an industry perspective Jürgen Angele (Ontoprise)
15.30-16.00	Coffee break
16.00-18.00	Semantic Web Challenge & Billion Triple Challenge (Johannes Brahms hall)
19.30-20.00	Reception & Get Together (Foyer)
20.00-01.00	Dinner & Dancing (Weinbrennersaal)

English Achille Fokoue, Aditya Kalyanpur, Alfred Mombert hall, Anupam Joshi, Asia, Bettina Bauer-Messmer, Bijan Parsia, Boris Motik, Christian Wartena, Collecting Community, Cynthia Parr, Dancing, Data Intelligence, Dominik Heim, Edith Schonberg, Evelyne Viegas, Frank van Harmelen, Georgios Meditskos, Get Together, Guilin Qi, Gwenn Englebienne, Harith Alani, Hebel hall, Ian Horrocks, Improving Entailment, Instanced, Jeff Z. Pan, Joel Sachs, Johann Peter, Johanna Voelker, Johannes Brahms hall, John Giannandrea, Julian Dolby, Jurgen Angele, Kavitha Srinivas, Leo Sauermann, Li Ma, Lushan Han, Mark Greaves, Mark Musen, Markus Krötzsch, Matthew Horridge, Metaweb Technologies Inc., Microsoft, Mike Dean, Natasha Noy, Nicholas Griffith, Nick Bassiliades, Pascal Hitzler, Peter Haase, Peter Mika, Qiu Ji, Raphael Troncy, RDF, Rogier Brussee, Rolf Grütter, Sebastian Rudolph, Shenghui Wang, Stefan Schlobach, Thomas Scharrenbach, Tim Finin, Tony Lee, Ulrike Sattler, Vulcan Inc, Web challenge, Xingzhi Sun, Yahoo Inc, Zhisheng Huang

John Markoff has an article on botnets, A Robot Network Seeks to Enlist Your Computer, in today’s New York Times. It focuses on the efforts that Microsoft is taking to combat the botnet problem.

“In a windowless room on Microsoft’s campus here, T. J. Campana, a cybercrime investigator, connects an unprotected computer running an early version of Windows XP to the Internet. In about 30 seconds the computer is “owned.” An automated program lurking on the Internet has remotely taken over the PC and turned it into a “zombie.” That computer and other zombie machines are then assembled into systems called “botnets” — home and business PCs that are hooked together into a vast chain of cyber-robots that do the bidding of automated programs to send the majority of e-mail spam, to illegally seek financial information and to install malicious software on still more PCs.
…
“The mean time to infection is less than five minutes,” said Richie Lai, who is part of Microsoft’s Internet Safety Enforcement Team, a group of about 20 researchers and investigators.”

One item I found interesting is that some botnet programs have their own own ‘antivirus software’ to eliminate any competition and even use standard measures to keep their newly acquired machine safe.

“Mr. Campana said the Microsoft investigators were amazed recently to find a botnet that turned on the Microsoft Windows Update feature after taking over a computer, to defend its host from an invasion of competing infections.”

English antivirus software, J. Campana, John Markoff, malicious software, Microsoft, New York Times, Richie Lai, Safety Enforcement Team

OLE – The Open Library Environment Project has been around for about a year now, and I am guilty of not monitoring as closely as I would have liked to.  So the opportunity to listen to their recent webcast seemed a great way to get up to speed again. 

Following the instructions on the OLE Project site to replay the webcast, led me to one of the most unusual webcast playback experience I’ve had for a while.   To see the slides you have to click through to a service run by Adobe Acrobat, which provides a good representation of the webcast environment, complete with chat traffic in real time.  The problem then is that you have to use the telephone system to get the audio.  This is not a cheap exercise for those of us having to dial international – at least with Skype Out you can keep the costs down a bit.  Synchronising the listening with the viewing is then a bit of a challenge, especially if you have to pause and restart.

Anyway enough about the experience – what about the content?

What is clear is that the Mellon Funded Project has got a great deal of attention and significant partners from academic and national libraries.  They also have a challenging and worthy goal, which they are taking significant early steps towards:

“By the end of our project, we will have a design for a next-generation library system using Service Oriented Architecture. We also will have built a community of interest that can be tapped to help build the OLE framework.”

The webcast inevitably, especially in the QA section, swung between the low-level detail, the strategic approach, and things like privacy which are more the policy concern of potential implementing libraries than the project itself.

Having listened to it, it is clear that they are working on an assumption that implementing libraries would have to throw their current investment in commercial or open source systems away and build all this from scratch – this being based on experience with the current generation of systems not being capable of integrating easily, or not  dealing with electronic resources.  That is a heck of a large chunk to bite off, even if you pull in things like circulation and cataloguing from other projects.

Experience also calls me to strongly question the emphasis on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), that is if SOA is being used as generally understood as against a generic term for systems being connected via web-style calls.

A bit of background on that ‘experience’ I mention – There are [in general terms] two approaches to Web Services – tightly coupled SOA, and loosely coupled REST based services.  The difference being that a SOA developer/integrator trying to embed the service in to their application needs access to web service descriptions and other enterprise integration tools. Whereas in the RESTful world, integration calls can often be tested using a web browser, and integrators/developers need no more development tools than they currently use.

Both SOA & REST have their benefits and their, sometimes religious, proponents.  With our first use of SOAP (the underlying messaging protocol for SOA) back in the late 1990’s I have been using both of these competing approaches for some time.  Talis over that time has developed and rolled out and established a significant user community for a product known as Talis Keystone.  Keystone is a web service integration component designed to enable external enterprise services (Student Registries, Finance Systems, Student Portals, e-payment services, CRM systems, etc.) to easily and reliably integrate library system data and functionality into their workflow. 

Keystone is now in use in many Talis customer libraries, and with some from libraries with a system from another vendor, in the UK.  Successful integrations have been completed with products such as: Aggresso, Civica, Oracle, and SAP finance systems; Microsoft Sharepoint, uPortal, Moodle, and Blackboard learning and portal environments; and WorldPay e-payment services.  Integration with systems from other suppliers are already in the pipeline.

From day one, Talis Keystone has had the capability to support both SOA and RESTful integration. It maybe useful for projects such as OLE to reflect on the experience in rolling out these integrations, and the take-up of the REST and SOA options.   The vast majority of these integrations have taken the RESTful approach, with only one or two going for SOA.  There are many reasons for this, but they all fall under the heading of there being a much lower barrier to implementing REST than SOAP.  Pragmatically I am of the opinion that lack of SOA capability would not have prevented any of these integrations taking place, whereas if SOA was the the only choice many would not have been undertaken at all. 

I/We would be more than happy to share some of these experiences in implementing and rolling out a product that addresses many of the concerns of the OLE Project.

English CRM, e-payment services, enterprise integration tools, external enterprise services, finance systems, Microsoft, open source systems, Oracle, SOA, telephone system, underlying messaging protocol, United Kingdom, web browser, web service integration component, Web Services, web-style calls

The Web of Data Practitioners Days are approaching - giving me the opportunity to do an advance interview with Danny Ayers, Semantic Web evangelist, Community Platform manager at Talis, Web of Things everything (I think). I’d just like to extract two or three points here - you can read the whole interview on our website. First something that’s noteworthy to me as it says something about the patterns of technological evolution in general:

Looking back a few years, I don’t think many people working on the Web could have predicted the remarkable rise of blogging, the revival of DHTML and ancient Internet Explorer tricks such as Ajax, online social networks, Wikis, the whole Web 2.0 thing. It’s worth noting that these developments have been consistent with Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the Web as a system in which people are the key component.

Shifting to the Semantic Web perspective, for a long time I have believed this approach is on track simply because it offers improvements to the Web for which there are no obvious alternative techniques. Personally, I was relatively late to realise what those improvements really were - moving from a Web of Documents to a more general Web of Data. Expressed like that, and looking at existing Web architecture, the Semantic Web is the path of least resistance.

Remember? AJAX, when it cropped up and caused a big buzz in 2005, was nothing new, it was just a new term for an old thing, i.e. the Internet Explorer tricks Danny mentions (see also A Brief History of AJAX: “Browser asynchronous hacks have been possible since 1996, when Internet Explorer introduced the IFRAME tag, passing through a number of techniques such as pixel gifs, Netscape layers, Microsoft Remote Scripting, Java/JavaScript gateways, stylesheet hacks, image/cookies, and most recently the XMLHttpRequest.”)

Sometimes it takes a while until someone (society, industry, what have you) starts to notice that this or that, something, could actually be useful. Sometimes technologies that everybody thinks are silly become a huge sucess - think text messages!

And sometimes you have a great (piece of) technology and it just never really catches on, and if that is the case, then mostly because some forces in the market (trusts, monopolies, corporations who force you to use their software/technology and at ridiculous price, people who would do anyhing they can to undo the natural laws of the digital world) won’t let it happen. What happend to Video 2000 and Betamax? Nixed by JVC’s licensing strategies for VHS. Just wanted to make this point before moving on to the next quote. Danny:

Regarding possible obstacles, there are many ways the Web could suffer, probably most dangerous being interventions from national governments or commercial interests, tilting the table on which we build these systems - such as software patents and threats to net neutrality. The Web works because it’s more or less the same to everyone, everywhere.

So if you think that the Web should continue to be the same to everyone, everywhere, if you would like to liaise with other people interested in the SemWeb and the Web of Data, but most importantly, if you do not know a whole lot about the SemWeb yet but would like to learn more, then please come and do attend the Web of Data Practitioners Days in Vienna, Oct 22-23.

It is going to start with a “Web of Data 101″, i.e. a low-threshold introduction given by Keith Alexander (Talis, UK) and Yves Raimond (Queen Mary University of London, UK) to Semantic Technology in the context of the Web. Here is the full program - please mind that there is a deadline for the registration also (6 Oct 2008!).

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English AJAX, ancient Internet Explorer, Danny Ayers, DHTML, Google, Internet Explorer, Java, Keith Alexander, Microsoft, Semantic Web, social networks, software patents, software/technology, Tim Berners-Lee, United Kingdom, University of London, Vienna, web architecture, Web creator, Web Debate, Web evangelist, Web perspective, Yves Raimond

Release 3.1 now in Technology Preview

Well, it’s been over two weeks since we released something cool (www.semanticproxy.com) – time to get cracking on some new stuff.

We’ve placed Release 3.1 of Calais into technology preview status. Just as a reminder, technology preview is a separate instance of Calais that allows developers to evaluate new features and test their software prior to our moving the release to production. You can access the Preview by simply pointing your tool to http://beta.opencalais.com rather than http://api.opencalais.com. Just like Calais, the preview version requires that you have a developer API key – your existing key will work just fine.

This will be a relatively extended Preview – most likely lasting throughout October 2008. We want to give everyone the opportunity to test some significant new features and make sure we have adequate time to respond to any issues you discover. That being said – please don’t wait until the last minute to give things a spin.

As you may have noticed, our releases are getting significantly larger and incorporating substantial new functionality on a monthly basis. Release 3.1 is no different – it contains everything from major new capabilities such as company and geography disambiguation to performance improvements to new output formats to some significant expansions of the types of information it can extract.So, in our tradition of lengthy blog postings – here’s an overview of what’s new in 3.1. I’ve broken this up into a few high-level focus areas. You can also visit the release notes right here.

New and Significant (at least to some of us)

Release 3.1’s big new functionality is disambiguation of company names and geographies. One of the big challenges of automated entity recognition is how to deal with ambiguity – for example “IBM”, “IBM Corp” “International Business Machines”. For the vast majority of use cases you want each of these variations resolved to a single entity called “IBM”. There are similar challenges around geography such as Calais, Maine vs. Calais, France.

For companies we’ve implemented a sophisticated disambiguation capability that is driven by a reference database of tens of million of company names and their variations. This database is primarily focused on public companies – but we’ll be expanding it to contain a broader range of companies in the future. In addition to variations on a company name, we also use hints that may exist in the text, such as location or industry, as additional evidence.

For geography we’re utilizing elements of DBPedia and other public data assets to dive in and figure out which Calais or Paris or wherever the text is really talking about. We base this disambiguation not just on the name itself – but hints in the surrounding text (for example longhorns are seldom discussed in the same article as Paris, France – but Paris, Texas is another story). To jumpstart mapping applications we also return the geo coordinates of the geography we’ve detected.

Efficiency and Scalability

We’ve implemented a couple of changes to make life easier for our higher-volume users. First, you now have the option to tell Calais you do not want a copy of the original text returned to you. If your application doesn’t care about offsets of detected items in the text you might consider turning this option on to reduce your bandwidth utilization.

Second, Calais now supports HTTP traffic compression. Given that we’re dealing with text on the input and output sides of the transaction, this can dramatically reduce the size of your transaction, again reducing your bandwidth utilization.

New Output Formats and Integrations

Please take a look at the Release Notes for details on a number of small changes to the RDF, MicroFormats and Simple format outputs. We’ve also added a JSON output format that’s covered in more detail here.

Calais now also talks PopFly! Microsoft’s PopFly is an interesting mashup building platform with a visual development interface. You can now directly integrate Calais within your PopFly mashups. Our documentation for this capability is available here.

Getting Smarter

In keeping with prior releases Calais is also getting smarter. We’ve added a number of new elements to the Calais vocabulary. These include PatentFiling, PatentIssuamce, FDAPhase, PersonEmailAddress, PersonEmployment, new elements for PersonAttributes, and SecondaryIssuance. In addition to these elements, we have one particularly interesting one: PersonRelation. The PersonRelation entity extracts references to symmetric relationships between people in the areas of business, friends, academic, military service or politics. This is one you’ll have to play with to get an idea of – but here’s a simple example:

The text:

The two served together in combat, and McDonald said Odierno was an "absolute joy to work with”.

Would result in:

Person1:  Mark McDonald
Person2:  Ray Odierno
PersonRelationType: Military Service

That’s it for R3.1. Any questions, please feel free to post to the forums or drop us a note at questions@opencalais.com. I’ll be posting an update on what’s in the pipeline for R4 in the next few days – lots of interesting stuff is on the way.

English API, France, HTTP, IBM Corp, International Business Machines, Mark McDonald, Microsoft, Military Service, Paris, Ray Odierno, technology preview, technology preview status, Texas, www.semanticproxy.com

You are invited to ISWC 2008, the major international forum for the Semantic Web. The conference serves introductory tutorials, cutting-edge research presentation, exhibitions of the latest business products, and many social activities. It also offers great social networking opportunities for meeting academic leaders, industrial practitioners, researchers, developers, and students.

==Attending Conference==
ISWC 2008 will be held in Karlsruhe Germany, October 26-30, 2008.
conference website

Please register online by October 9 to save 100 eu and take advantage of special hotel offers which are good if made four weeks in advance.
online registration

==Highlights of the Conference Program==
* 11 tutorials on, e.g., Introduction to Semantic Web, Ontology, RDFa, Multimedia, Business Intelligence, Health Care, Applications, Linked Data.

* 13 workshops on, e.g., e-science, reasoning, software engineering, web service, information extraction, scalability, and social network.

* one doctor consortium

* 10 keynotes and invited industrial talks
- Multimedia Semantic Web, Ramesh Jain (UCI)
- Freebase: An Open, Writable, John Giannandre (Metaweb Technologies)
- How can the Semantic Web Community be more convincing, Stefan Decker, (DERI Galway, Ireland)
- Semantic Wikis: Fusing the two strands of the Semantic Web, Mark Greaves (Vulcan Inc.)
- Internet of Services, York Sure (SAP Research)
- Semantic Web @ BBN, Mike Dean (BBN)
- Data Intelligence, Evelyne Viegas (Microsoft Research)
- Semantic Web in Asia: Example Use Cases, Tony Lee (SaltLux)
- Making the Web searchable, Peter Mika (Yahoo Inc),
- Semantic Web from an industry perspective, Jürgen Angele (Ontoprise)

* 57 paper presentations, including 14 in Semantic Web in-use track, 87 posters and demonstrations, a panel on OWL2, and lightning talks

* social events , social networking, reception, banquet and dancing.

* co-located events: RR2008 and OWLED2008

The complete conference program is available at this link.

English Asia, Business Intelligence, business products, Data Intelligence, DERI Galway, e-science, Evelyne Viegas, Ireland, John Giannandre, Jurgen Angele, Mark Greaves, Metaweb Technologies, Microsoft, Mike Dean, online registration, Peter Mika, Ramesh Jain, Social network, social networking, social networking opportunities, software engineering, Stefan Decker, Tony Lee, Vulcan Inc, Web community, web service, Yahoo Inc, York

It’s been a few weeks since my last confession so here goes…

I started teaching last week - so far it’s going well - I teach EE109 Fundamentals of Electronic Engineering to first year Engineering and Information Technology students. The class is pretty big and there’s no common timeslot so it means I have to teach the material twice, but as both halves alternate between being the first recipients of material, I think it balances out pretty well. We also started the associated first year labs yesterday morning, and both final year and third year projects have been assigned so things are pretty busy.

The week before last, I was in UCD for a one-day workshop organised by staff and researchers with the Intel-sponsored TRIL Centre (Technology Research for Independent Living). We had an interesting session describing the BioMOBIUS platform, which builds on work from the EyesWeb project. My colleagues in the Bioelectronics Research Cluster are associate researchers with TRIL.

Last week, some of us from the College of Engineering and Informatics visited the new Cisco R&D facility here in Galway. It’s pretty impressive. Cisco have 140 people in Galway, mainly developers and testers, with a majority of R&D staff. Their big focus in Galway is on “Unified Communications and Collaboration” (data, voice, video, IM, etc.), and real-time sharing of video content. Their TelePresence demo is really amazing. It’s a conference room where the table almost blends into three huge screens that show the remote participants in the correct proportion to where they’d sit at the table. The audio also moves with the people as they move across the room. You can see some demos here and here.

I’m still carrying out research in DERI for about a half to one day a week, where I meet my students and researchers in my role as leader of the Unit for Social Software. We’ve been taking part in forthnightly (public) telecons regarding the SWAN SIOC joint initiative, looking at synergies between SIOC and Semantic Web Applications in Neuromedicine (with Tim Clark and his team from Harvard). I was also in DERI briefly yesterday for a meeting with some researchers from Microsoft in Redmond.

English Bioelectronics, Cisco, College of Engineering and Informatics, Harvard, Information Technology, Intel, Microsoft, R&D facility, Tim Clark, TRIL Centre, Unit for Social Software, Web applications

Powerset officially became a part of Microsoft a little over a month ago and we’ve already completed our first few integration projects: Freebase Answers, improved captions for Wikipedia results, and new related searches using our Factz engine . 

These projects were meant to be achievable in 30 days and act as a first collaboration between the Live Search and Powerset teams.  We have plans for deeper integration in the future, but these projects gave us an opportunity to get to know our colleagues up in Redmond and drive greater understanding of our respective technologies.  All of these projects are currently being “flighted” on Live Search, which means that they are being shown only to a small percentage of users (if you get one, consider yourself lucky!).  Once we’ve gotten data back from the tests, we’ll plan next steps and decide what features will eventually roll into the product.

The first project was to expand the number of queries for which Live Search shows Answers.  Queries like San Francisco weather, MSFT, and Banff national park already produce answers.  Also, many celebrities from abba to frank zappa and even bloggers from seth godin to leo laporte show up with xRank biographies.  But, many topical queries do not show Answers today such as  musicians, albums, films, etc. For this experiment, we selected some of these categories and will return a topic summary with links, similar to the Freebase Answers we show in Powerset, using data from Freebase.  Eventually, we hope to give Answers for even more topics.
 
 

The second project was to use Powerset’s semantic technology to generate improved captions for Wikipedia articles.  Since Wikipedia articles show up in a large percentage of Live Search queries, it’s important that the captions are top notch.  These changes are transparent to the end user, but we’ll be able to analyze the Powerset captions versus the Live Search captions to see which perform better.



The third project is also transparent.  We used Powerset’s Factz extraction to generate a list of related searches for a set of queries.



We also started to use some of Live Search’s technology on the Powerset side.  You’ll notice that we now have “related articles” on Powerset enhanced Wikipedia articles.  We’re getting these directly from Live Search.

 

Powerset is excited that we’re already able to make improvements to Live Search.  Expect more announcements in the coming months, both of Powerset’s technology integrated into Live Search and of enhancements to Powerset.com.

-    Dr. Scott Prevost, General Manager, Powerset
-    Dr. Hugh Williams, Primary Development Manager, Live Search

English Banff national park, Hugh Williams, Live Search, Microsoft, Powerset, respective technologies, San Francisco, Scott Prevost, semantic technology

Video from my panel at DEMO Fall '08 on the Future of the Web is now available. I moderated the panel, and our panelists were:Howard Bloom, Author, The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the...

English Google, Howard Bloom, Microsoft, Web Video, Yahoo

In our latest podcast I talk to Sean Martin, President and CTO of Cambridge (MA)-based semantic technology startup Cambridge Semantics.

We discuss Sean’s background with IBM, before turning to consider the work he’s currently involved in; building a sustainable business.

During the conversation, we refer to the following resources;

• Anzo for Excel
• Aurora
• Cambridge Semantics presentation at Semantic Technology Conference 2008
• Lee Feigenbaum
• Jeff Han
• Haystack
• IBM
• IBM alphaWorks
• IBM Websphere
• Microsoft Surface
• Dennis Quan
• Semantic Layered Research Platform
• Simile

This conversation was conducted using Skype on Friday 5 September, recorded with Ecamm Network’s Call Recorder for Skype, and edited on a Mac with Garageband.

For other Talis podcasts in this Nodalities series, see here. To subscribe to updates from all of Talis’ podcast series, see here.

English Aurora, Cambridge, Cambridge Semantics, Dennis Quan, IBM, Jeff Han, Lee Feigenbaum, Microsoft, Sean Martin, semantic technology startup

Powerset+Microsoft hosted another Lunch 2.0 this year.  We seved delicious food, including sliders and cupcakes.  There were lots of people from many different companies present and we all celebrated the Microsoft acquisition of Powerset with our commerative shot glasses.  Andrew Mager of ZD Net did a great writeup of the event (and he tooks some rockin’ pictures). Terry Chay was there with his huge camera and took a gorgeous set of pics with his fancy camera.  In the photo is Marie Williams of SHIFT, Linda Chan of Powerset, and me.

Expect Powerset+Microsoft Live Search to be hosting more events like this in the future, so subscribe to our blog or check our Twitter feed for details. 

In fact, keep on the lookout for us at TechCrunch50 next week!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

English Andrew Mager, delicious food, Linda Chan, Marie Williams, Microsoft, Powerset, Terry Chay

Suddenly this slashdot item, IE8 Beta 2 Fatter Than Firefox and XP, posted today gains in relevance.

snydeq writes “Consuming twice as much RAM as Firefox and saturating the CPU with nearly six times as many execution threads, Microsoft’s latest beta release of Internet Explorer 8 is in fact more demanding on your PC than Windows XP itself, research firm Devil Mountain Software found in performance tests. According to the firm, which operates a community-based testing network, IE8 Beta 2 consumed 380MB of RAM and spawned 171 concurrent threads during a multi-tab browsing test of popular Web destinations. InfoWorld’s Randall Kennedy speculates that Microsoft may be designing IE8 for the multicore future. But until your machine sports four or eight discrete processing cores, IE8 will remain ‘porcine,’ Devil Mountain’s Craig Barth says.”

Last week it was widely reported that Firefox would soon get a new JavaScript engine that could result in an order of magnitude performance increase by using a compiler.

Maybe this is a case where things come in threes, with Microsoft, Mozilla and now Google all preparing major new browser releases.

Uncategorized community-based testing network, Craig Barth, Devil Mountain Software, Google, Internet Explorer, machine sports, Microsoft, RAM, Randall Kennedy, Web destinations

I just noticed that the beta version of Google Chrome to be released sometime today will only be available for Microsoft Windows. Hopefully, the MAC OS X and Linux versions will follow without too much delay.

Update: You can sign up to get more information on other releases here:

• Mac OS X
• Linux

Uncategorized Google, Linux, Microsoft

Spanish Google, Microsoft

Updated below: (a).

Google has announced that they will launch a new Web browser, built partly from scratch and partly form other open source projects. The Google Chrome browser uses the WebKit open source rendering engine and an open sourced Javascript virtual machine named V8.

“On the surface, we designed a browser window that is streamlined and simple. To most people, it isn’t the browser that matters. It’s only a tool to run the important stuff — the pages, sites and applications that make up the web. Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome is clean and fast. It gets out of your way and gets you where you want to go.

Under the hood, we were able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today’s complex web applications much better. By keeping each tab in an isolated “sandbox”, we were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites. We improved speed and responsiveness across the board. We also built a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of web applications that aren’t even possible in today’s browsers.”

As part of their roll out, they have released a 40 page Google Chrome comic book created by none other than Scott McCloud.

It’s always significant when Google releases new software, but not all of their projects have been successful. The technical details on Chrome sound promising. Having another good be open source browser might spur competition, experimentation with new ideas, and lead to better web tools for everyone. But, of course, we hope that it does not kill off any of the other good browsers, open sourced or not.

I scanned the comic quickly and saw no mention of the Semantic Web or direct support for noticing or capturing data encoded by sites. Chrome looks like it is mostly trying to do rework a conventional browser to make it cleaner, faster and safer. That’s a good goal, but an incremental one.

Google blogscoped has a good summary of Chrome’s features if you don’t want to read the comic.

UPDATE (a): The New York Times has a story, Microsoft Faces New Browser Foe in Google , that focused on the Google vs. Microsoft angle.

Uncategorized Google, Microsoft, Scott McCloud, The New York Times, virtual machine, Web applications, web browser, Web browser Tue Sept, Web tools

Selected links related to Semantic Web technologies for the week ending 2008-09-01, all weeks. Also available in RDF as linked data or via GRDDL.

Summer Special!

(or Winter Special! down under)

FOAFlets of the Caribbean

No blurb, just links.

In the Media

• Print: Nodalities Magazine of the Semantic Web latest issue (pdf or printed, free)
• Podcast: A Chat with Michael Hausenblas
• DevX: Relational Database Integration with RDF/OWL
• Podcast: HTML 5 news, Web Workers, W3C Selectors, and Dojo happenings
• Videos: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (new to me)
• Web of Data News: Linking Open Data on ESW Wiki
• Fun Thread for Logicians: Intersection of properties?
• Interview: Google Open Sources Protocol Buffers
• Podcasts: Talking with Talis Aggregator

Docs

• W3C Public Newsletter - one link to find them…
• Make your Data Web Friendly
• RDF as self-describing data
• Europe discussing the business of the Semantic Web at ESTC
• Putting Semantic Technology to work at BT
• CrunchBase Interview
• Crunchbase & Semantic Web Interview (Remix)
• Thoughts on Linked Data and Closed Source APIs
• Proceedings of the WWW2008 Workshop on Linked Data on the Web
• Using the ontology editing tool SWOOP to edit taxonomies and thesaurii
• Captcha, Turing Test, and Semantic Web - you the dog
• Clark and Parsia: Our OWLED 2008 EU Plans
• Is the Semantic Web necessary (and feasible)?
• The Gap between the Web 2.0 and Semantic Web Community
• The Incomplete Web - in case anyone didn’t see it yet
• RDFa in HTML5?
• HTML4ever or: the next logical step
• OpenSocial RESTful spec
• Putting Together A Personal Conference Schedule
• Semantic Web in Government - Wiki page, “This page needs development! Please expand it!”
• UMBEL as a Coherent Framework to Support Ontology Development
• Virtuoso, Linked Data, and Linq2Rdf
• Not another mapping markup language!
• Dave Raggett’s blog
• Changing my mind about XBRL again
• Zach Beauvais Online

Software News

• Freebase Parallax - “a novel browsing interface designed for freebase”
• Connecting Freebase, Wikipedia, DBpedia, and other Linked Data Spaces
• Sheaflight - “is an experimental Linked Data Browser which uses Microsoft’s Silverlight technology…”
• Get sophisticated - RDF in Ruby stuff
• DBpedia 3.1 now live, release notes
• Semantic Discovery System for Excel, see also The Semantic Desktop? SDS Brings Semantics To Excel
• Berlin SPARQL Benchmark (BSBM), see also BSBM With Triples and Mapped Relational Data
• RDFStats for SPARQL endpoints
• Atomojo Server 0.11.0 supports SPARQL
• SPARQL Implementation Coverage Report
• RDFa implementations in Javascript
• Ubiquity - a must-see
• FOAF Ubiquity - with write-up
• ubiquity - a collection of commands for the web of data
• Ubiquitus CrunchBase
• CrunchBase Twitter Bot
• How to use CBbot
• Sun Intranet FOAF Experiment
• [Playlist] libSpiff 1.0.0rc2 released
• Google Music - with reusable artist IDs..?

Vocabs/Ontologies

• ontologymatching.org
• GoodRelations - The Web Ontology for E-Commerce
• SCOT (Social Semantic Cloud of Tags) Ontology - new spec
• Describing the content of RDF datasets - voID
• Online Presence Ontology (OPO) see also MeNow
• The Statistical Core Vocabulary (scovo)
• FRDCSA - “Our goal is to assemble the most comprehensive ontology of FLOSS [free/libre/open source software] applications, and make packages available for every free operating system, distribution and hardware platform”

Events etc.

• One World - One Web Day
• Boards.ie SIOC Semantic Data Competition starts September 1st
• BarCampLondon5, September 27-28, 2008.
• Semantic Web Interest Group (SWIG) F2F, October 20-21, Cannes, France
• Web of Data Practitioners Days (WOD-PD 2008), Vienna, Austria, Oct 22-23, 2008
• See also : Presentations of W3C Team, Office Staff, and Working Group Participants

Miscellany

• My Life With Tim
• Embrace Change
• Rummble - YASN, but with mobile, recommendation and geo feature
• OneGeology - “Making Geological Map Data for the Earth Accessible“
• Why Twitter Hasn’t Failed: The Power Of Audience
• Ants, Overlays and Open Data
• Mail Art : a predecessor of global online social networks
• End of Life for PHP 4
• Tim Bray: Tab Sweep - Technology
• Nancy Pelosi, URI on Watchdog.net site - “try it with Tabulator“, says timbl
• WhatLanguage: “Ruby Library To Detect The Language Of A Text”
• My pager smaller than yo’ iPhone!

Quote of the Week

…fighting the web is like holding back the ocean; it will route around you or it will wear you down, but will never go away, and it will never tire or give up.

- DeWitt Clinton, On Fighting the Web Itself

Summer Bonus Quote of the Week

“Language-independent” just means they invented a new language.

- Kevin Reid

~

Sources include Planet RDF, various other blogs, Semantic Web Interest Group IRC Chatlogs & Scratchpad, ESW Wiki, SemWebCentral, Sweet Tools, W3C Semantic Web Activity, mailing lists, personal emails etc etc. If you see anything suitable this coming week, please mail meor use the del.icio.us tag “TWSW” - thanks!

English Austria, Cannes, Caribbean, Dave Raggett, DeWitt Clinton, e - commerce, Europe, European Union, France, free/libre/open source software, Google, Google Music, HTML, Kevin Reid, Michael Hausenblas, Microsoft, Nancy Pelosi, Online Presence Ontology, online social networks, ontology editing tool, operating system, PHP, Putting Semantic Technology, RDF, Relational Database, Semantic Web Interest Group, Semantic Web Interview, Technology, Vienna, Watchdog.net, Web Day, Web Friendly, Web Interview, Web Ontology, Web Workers, XBRL

On Friday, August 1st at 5:15 p.m., Powerset officially became part of the Microsoft family.  Though the deal was announced on July 1, 2008, there were a few more i’s to be dotted and t’s to be crossed.  That’s all finished and the deal is done.  Our employees are excited to be a part of Microsoft and the Live Search team.

Integration is underway in force.  This Thursday and Friday, there will be a bunch of folks down from Redmond for a Symposium to share details about our respective technologies.  We’re excited to learn about everything now available to Powerset in the Live Search stack.  We’re also excited to share the cool things we’ve cooked up here at Powerset and start planning opportunities for us to integrate with Live Search.  Check back over the next month to see what we’re up to both on this blog and the Live Search team blog.

English Microsoft, respective technologies

Spanish Google, Microsoft, Web Semántica

We are pleased to announce our participation in Yahoo!’s Search BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service) today. As part of this initiative, we have access to one of the largest Web directories on the Internet, which accelerates hakia’s QDEXing process and semantic analysis of the Web’s content. QDEXing is a critical element that replaces traditional index to allow scalable semantic search. Without this kind of infrastructure, application of semantic technology is destined to be limited, such as covering Wikipedia only.

The search landscape is currently in a dynamic stage of reinvention. Yahoo! is inviting more innovation to enter the market, while Microsoft validates the importance of semantic search technology with its recent acquisition of Powerset. For the latter, we congratulate both parties, yet are disappointed by the fact that we’ve lost our favorite competitor. From now on, we will look for traces of the Powerset-effect in LiveSearch.

For hakia’s part, we will continue the momentum as we keep up our progress towards coming out of BETA later this year. As we always say, the every day application of semantic technology is an irreversible, long-overdue process. It is coming…

English Microsoft, Powerset, search landscape, semantic search, Semantic search technology,