ReadWriteWeb just posted an interesting article about investor opportunities and pitfalls in the Semantic Web space. The questions were asked to a panel of industry insiders at the SemTech 2008 conference. Panelists include Amanda Reed (Palomar Ventures), Eghosa Omoigui (Intel), and Stephen Hall (Vulcan Capital). This information can be very useful if you're looking to start a business within the Semantic Web industry.

QDOS, measurer of digital presence, has built an interface that lets you search for a FOAF profile. You can search for an individual by their email address or by the URL to their blog or homepage. Their goal is to index and make visible the entire FOAF social graph. If I'm not mistaken they're also helping to extend the social graph by republishing data provided by its users through its primary service (very cool indeed).

I got an email from Dolors Reig about his Semantic Web planet-type site, Planeta Web Semántica, an aggregator of Semantic Web news in Spanish. The site indexes feeds in both Spanish and English to make up for the shortage of Spanish-language Semantic Web activity in the blogosphere. I doubt this will be so in the near future as Semantic Web concepts continue to gain traction with people around the world. The site sports a clean layout and I like that you're given the ability to comment on each news item. This is an excellent resource for those whose primary language is Spanish.

When constructing the Semantic Web, we are actually building two varied aspects simultaneously. One aspect is the Web that includes things such as the communication protocols, the Web data presentation formats, and so on. In particular, we have invented new technologies such as RDF, OWL, SPARQL, and other W3C recommended Semantic Web standards. The other aspect is the semantics that represent the meanings of Web data. Building semantics is, however, different from building the Web.

Continue reading Building Semantics is Different from Building the Web

Deadlines are fast approaching for those submitting papers, Doctoral Consortium applications and tutorial proposals for ISWC 2008! More information can be found here.

Upcoming deadlines:

• Research papers: 9/16 May
• Semantic Web in Use papers: 16 May
• Tutorial proposals: 16 May
• Doctoral Consortium applications: 16 May
• Posters & Demo proposals: 25 July
• Workshops papers (13 workshops): Varies
• Semantic Web & Billion Triples challenge: 1 October

The Semantic Web Company in Vienna, Austria is giving away a full conference pass worth $1,095 for the LinkedData Planet Conference! LinkedData Planet 2008 will be taking place on June 17-18, 2008 in New York with confirmed keynote speakers Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Kingsley Idehen and Ian Davis.

Continue reading Win a Full Conference Pass for LinkedData Planet 2008

Today finally I logged in to Twine the first time. I was reading yesterday about some shortcomings of the system, so I was keen on trying out the system by myself to get my own impression.

It's true that the system isn't as easy to understand as del.icio.us or other bookmarking tools. It takes a while until you get used to all those additional ways you can navigate through the system. Remember: "Twine looks at content and parses it automatically for the names of people, places, organizations and other subject tags. Users are then able to navigate between related content, view recommended content and connect with recommended people with related interests."

Continue reading My First Experiences with Twine

Unlike traditional search engines, which crawl the Web gathering Web pages, Semantic Web search engines index RDF data stored on the Web and provide an interface to search through the crawled data. Below is a list of Semantic Web search engines that are currently under development.

Continue reading Semantic Web Search Engine Roundup

The Calais Initiative is almost one month old, and they've already received a large and welcoming response from the development community (1,113 early adopters)! When they weren't busy doing interviews or answering hundreds of emails and forum posts, they were coming up with ways to help spread the technology. They will soon be releasing a Wordpress plugin, followed by plugins for Drupal, Plone and other content management systems. They also express that Calais is not only good for named entity extraction, but can extract other facts from documents. An example they give is "what technologies are associated with what company in a document?" Good luck, Calais team!

True Knowledge is a natural language search engine and question answering site, but to leave it at that would not do the site justice. What makes it stand out from similar sounding services like Powerset and Freebase? True Knowledge tackles natural language search and question answering (much like Powerset and Hakia), and it also maintains a knowledge base of facts about the world (similar to DBpedia and Freebase). However, what makes True Knowledge stand out is that they've combined these features and encourage their userbase to contribute facts and add new knowledge.

Continue reading True Knowledge: The Natural Language Question Answering Wikipedia for Facts