About the social semantic web

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More and more information about the “semantic web” is circulating in the news and in the blogosphere. Especially in february and march a lot of new semantic applications were featured, so it was the first time I´ve got lost a bit when I was scanning (and sometimes reading) all those new posts everyday.

So I went back to Alex Iskold´s great summary on ongoing developements in the semantic web community: “Semantic Web Patterns“.

If you´ve been abroad for the first quarter of 2008 or you just had something to do which was more important than watching the web evolving then go there - and you´ll get the best wrap up for the first three months of 2008.

Alex covers all the highlights there except Zemanta - which brings me to Semantic Web Pattern No. 8:: Smart Assistants for the Desktop (Your desktop might be build on SaaS and mashups in the near future…). Semantic Technologies will help people to forget about things which aren´t important anymore and will help to recall the right information in the right moment.

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.” - But the “shortcoming” mentioned by Marshall Kirkpatrick that “… it’s hard to keep track of all the levels and types of information available” I can´t agree with: This has only to do with a general problem, which arises whenever semantic technologies should enhance the user experience. Either you stay with “simple” user-interfaces like Google or del.icio.us or you spend 5 minutes or so to learn a new piece of software which will help you to save time in the future and which helps you to find related information automatically.
On the other hand I was very surprised, that the automatic recommendations Twine makes on how to annotate or describe a new resource is really unsatisfying. Users will only spend time to tag their bookmarks if the machine comes up with some intelligent suggestions. And it´s true, as Marshall says, “most of the web is made up of ugly, non-standard pages.”

So hopefully Twine will add that feature before it will open up to the public (isn´t there a plan to integrate OpenCalais or something similar?), otherwise there will be no “first mainstream semantic web application” but only another prototype of a yet another semweb-app.

The Semantic Web has evolved constantly over the last few years. Nevertheless, in many cases I have experienced a huge demand for profound knowledge in this area. Many potential end-users of semantic web technologies have quite a few ideas of how to apply semantic web, but still many software-projects will never happen, because of the lack of knowledge, because of the fear of getting trapped by too complex technologies. Obviously it´s not the technology anymore but the awareness and personal knowledge about the semantic web, which is the actual bottleneck for the semantic web getting real.

The Semantic Web Company (SWC) is offering in 12 daily seminars a training-course for persons who want to become a Web expert. Participants  get step by step advanced in methods and technologies for semantic projects. Each seminar is a stand-alone-module and can also be booked singularly.

From 27th of Mai to 4th of July 2008 the SWC curriculum will take place. A special focus will be on applications and solutions of semantic technologies to support social processes.
The curriculum will provide profound insights into the topics Semantic Web and Social Software. Therefore the seminars are grouped into three comprehensive modules:

* “Next Step”: Social Web & Social Software
27. - 30. May 2008
* “Advanced Level”: Textmining & Enterprise Search
10. - 13. June 2008
* “Expert View”: Semantic Web & Metadata Management
01. - 4. July 2008

The modules will take place at the Austrian Computer Society in Vienna. The main language in the courses is German. English courses can be provided on demand.

Really large companies start to spur the semantic web. Reuters has recently launched a semantic web service which is free also for commercial purposes. It helps to extract significant phrases from any unstructured text (web documents or office documents). This new service is called “OpenCalais” and is based on ClearForest text-analytics solutions (which was acquired by Reuters in 2007). So finally a dream comes true: Web content can be tagged automatically in quite a high quality. Technically spoken: Any unstructured text can be transformed into an RDF-graph on the fly, important phrases or even statements can be extracted from plain text.

OpenCalais is the core service for many new web applications and most of them will deal with better search functionalities or will also help to identify similarities between different types of content. For instance, for any document which is published on a web site related blogs or videos (or whatever) can be retrieved and presented as relevant context information.

Whenever an application will use OpenCalais content will be delivered to Reuters. Thus, submitting a URL has a different meaning in the future than it had all the years before: It´s not only about “promoting” a website anymore, it´s rather about examining ways to get connected with the semantic web - and about teaching Reuter´s global knowledge base

Try it out!

While I am still waiting for an invitation from Twine  (probably you too?) I have received one from Powerset - natural language search. Powerset obviously is a promising company (and is promising a lot), so I was excited when I was starting to play around with this new tool which still isn´t available for the public.

The very first impression was good. The interface is well done and there are a couple of new ideas how wikipedia (and similar knowledge bases) can be navigated in the future. But unfortunately after a while it was clear, that search results must be improved. However Powerset might be implemented, the only benchmark which counts at the end is, which improvement the new application (semantic web or not) delivers compared to existing ones. Some examples:

- The question: “who is the president of the united states?” delivers some similar questions or related articles of wikipedia but NOT the right answer.

In comparison: ask.com delivers this perfect result.

- My next question “where was mozart born?” delivers “Getreidegasse” which is correct but actually too much detailed. Again, ask.com delivers the perfect answer.

A third try which was an even more difficult question: “how far is london from paris?” was again correctly answered by ask.com, powerlabs wasn´t even close…

When I was asking START, the world’s first Web-based question answering system, which has been on-line and continuously operating since December, 1993 (!) those three questions - all of them - were answered correctly.

So finally I was asking something really tricky: “What is the relationship between RDF and XML?”: Only START gave the right answer which was: “Unfortunately, I don’t have that information.”

As mentioned on Read/WriteWeb there are at least 10 (rather commercial) semantic web applications “around” which claim to use semantic web technologies for different purposes: “10 Semantic Apps to Watch”. (Besides this at least 100 prototypes from various research programms exist in this field).

My “short list” of those 10 apps consists of the following three:

1. twine
2. Talis
3. clearforest

To my opinion these 3 projects have the highest potential to become a “big player” in the next generation web. Instead of “improving” what Google does, they try to fulfill a totally new mission:

Twine isn´t organising the “knowledge of the whole world” (like Google would like to do) they rather focus on the users themselves: Using a semantic graph (including the social graph) for each user, information in a social network will flow in a more efficient way. Information will come to the users instead of searching around. Twine is a combination of many of the well known Web 2.0 applications like Facebook or del.icio.us but will use base technologies from the semantic web and will provide a SPARQL API and a REST API.

Possible Risks:

• It´s still not clear if people will accept personal semantic graphs rather as an advantage or rather as a possible danger for privacy
• Semantic Web database technologies (Triple stores) are still very young. Although some of the existing systems have already proved that they are scalable none of them have been used so far for really big systems.

USP:

Twine is the first company which will combine social tagging, social networking, natural language processing and semantic web on a professional level. So it has the potential to become a very popular service for many people to support their daily business. Sooner or later the same system might be offered also as a very attractive business solution. Nevertheless, twine hasn´t opened its portal for the public so far, so it´s still not clear if all the promises will be held…

Talis is a “domain-agnostic” technology platform which supports developers to build applications on the principles of “mass collaboration”. It is a new breed of a distributed programmatic interface heavily deploying all opportunities the Web of Data may offer. “DNS is used as a robust routing mechanism to connect requests with the closest data or service both for the native platform services, but also for third party data access services.“

Possible Risks:

Talis mission sounds great, and its success depends a lot on how this company will be able to build an ecosystem around its services. My forecast: Talis will be acquired in 2009 by one of the big web companies.

USP:

Talis tries to establish a new way of organizing information flows throughout the Web of Data. Since it relies on open standard protocols like RESTful Web Services a lot of applications will use Talis technologies. Talis as a company has a well founded background since it has been provided services for governmental organizations or libraries for the last 30 years. Some of the people working at Talis rank among the best semantic web thinkers.

(Clearforest was acquired by Reuters) was bought by Thomson. ClearForest’s technology automatically categorizes documents and structures entities contained inside text. The Semantic Web without text extraction algorithms which really work will never take place. And Clearforest really works. Just try it out!

Possible Risks:

Clearforest is well embedded in a giant: Thomson is the world´s largest media company. This is, of course a great opportunity to sell these new kind of semantic solutions to many of the global Top 5000. On the other hand, it might be a risk since “traditional” media companies still tend to forget about the long tail and open APIs.

USP:

Simply spoken, the USP of Clearforest is that the technology works and it can be integrated into existing architectures without being a semantic web expert. It can become one of the cornerstones of an integrated corporate semantic web architecture.

When Nova Spivack says: “It’s the wisdom of crowds and the wisdoms of computers working together” it sounds a bit like a romantic imagination of a young man or - more likely - it sounds like the next new marketing slogan.

Crowds can´t be wise at all. It´s always a single human being who is (or can be) wise. It´s rather a matter of HOW people organise themselves. The use of web technologies to improve communication isn´t really new but, it´s the kind of mass collaboration which is new and it´s based on the way the internet is perceived by digital natives.

The only bottleneck on the way to Web 3.0 are human beings (not technology) and their tendency to reflect on their mindsets only from time to time. And it´s a matter of fact that people rather spend a lot of time with thinking about strategies to gain personal advantages than with strategy building for better ways to communicate. With digital natives it´s a bit different: They were socialised within networks, so they have already learned that cooperation also improves the personal situation.

So it´s rather like the “blindness of crowds”: When will all the digital immigrants finally learn, that they must co-operate in many cases, since it´s the only way out? And there is another principle natives are already aware of: “It´s always very dangerous to listen for the gurus…”

When I first stumbled upon “StumbleUpon” about two years ago or so, I was fascinated by the idea of this application using “collaborative filtering” - the wisdom of the crowd. But after a while more and more friends were using del.icio.us, which wasn´t that brilliant at all to my opinion but simply more often used. Most of all I am missing a function which helps you to identify new interesting websites by simply clicking on one button. Moreover delicious doesn´t help to identify “Friends with same interests” like for example Facebook offers with music taste etc.

Now, a year after del.icio.us had its tremendous boom StumbleUpon seems to catch up.

Sometimes websites have strange “careers”: it´s a bit the word of mouth, a bit - of course - media which helps to boost websites, and finally with a little help from one of the big Web 2.0 companies (in this case Ebay´s US$75Mio.) you can do it!

One of the most important class of applications within the semantic web are services which help users to find out “hidden” relationships between resources like people, concepts or documents.

I´ve been trying out Google Sets from time to time which was an always impressive application to me. You enter one or more members (eg. persons, companies, technologies etc.) from the same class of your choice and Google “predicts” what else could fit into this set.

To me it seems like this service has been improved constantly in the last few months. If you type in just one member of an imaginary class like a person´s name you´ll see that Google has not only categorized search phrases but also knows a lot about social relationships.

http://labs.google.com/sets?hl=en&q1=andreas+blumauer - wow, Google knows a lot about my social network…