Zimbra is the Collaboration Suite for the Social Semantic Web

We´ve been using Zimbra since a couple of months now, and I think it´s a fantastic opportunity for each small or medium enterprise, especially when virtual teamwork becomes more and more important (like in my working environment), to make a step towards Web 2.0. Besides typical features a collaboration suite usually offers, Zimbra comes with a couple of concepts which have the potential for a “Next Generation Collaboration” (collaborate or collapse):

• Zimbra comes with a powerful search engine based on Lucene
• Zimbra has an integrated tagging-system
• Zimbra´s spam filter learns from each user in the system, if an email is spam or not – a very good example for an application of collective intelligence
• Zimbra´s Zimlets support meshups and with that mechanism any message content can be made “live” by linking it with other services and content (eg. if in a textpassage the word “today” appears it will automatically be linked with your calendar entries from “today”)

And: Zimbra can be synchronised with your PDA…

Scripting for the Semantic Web

This year´s ESWC hosted the 3rd International Workshop on “Scripting for the Semantic Web” (SFSW 2007). I really enjoyed that event, also because of the very friendly and relaxed atmosphere in that community. Danny Ayers started with a talk called “Two Webs!“. He pointed out the ways to use the “Semantic Web” (again: it´s NOT a completely new web aside Web 2.0!) as an “RDF-Bus” where existing data sources can be interlinked quite easily (see: LinkingOpenData @ SWEO).

• Michael Hausenblas presented “PSIMeter” which is a demo to show alternative ways to RDF-ize the flickr API regarding machine tags.
• Chris Bizer outlined once more the importance of the “Web of (open) data” and presented The RDF Book Mashup: From Web APIs to a Web of Data (For a demo go here)
• Eyal Oren was talking about two services which play an important role in a Semantic Web infrastructure: Sindice and Ping the Semantic Web
• Uldis Bojãrs and some others from the SIOC project presented their ideas and I really liked the SIOC Browser.
• And finally the brilliant Ripple won the Semantic Scripting Challenge (Paper).

I also enjoyed talking with Sören Auer, Chris Bizer, Danny Ayers, Tom Heath and some others very much. Thanks to the organizers!

Why Yahoo bought del.icio.us …

An outstanding talk at this year´s European Semantic Web Conference was Ron Brachman´s “Emerging Sciences of the Internet: Some New Opportunities“. Yahoo´s (and somehow this company has more and more to do with the Semantic Web…) Vice-President of Worldwide Research (with his strong background in the fields of AI and description logics) pointed out the need for rethinking traditional approaches of computer science: “…another emerging element in what we might call a new Science of Search is a social one… Will ontologies matter or do folksonomies rule? Others have begun to address the substantial differences between the social Web world and the Semantic Web world. While sometimes portrayed as diametrically opposed, the sides may benefit from each other if we look more deeply. My intuition is that there is room for synergy, and it would behoove us to investigate.”

That´s it! The Social Semantic Web finally became a huge business opportunity… (And again, I think it´s actually more accurate to say “Semantic Social Web”, because it´s the Social Web which will be enhanced by Semantic Web technologies and not vice versa.)