Become a Web Expert!

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.

OpenCalais will become an essential part of the Semantic Web

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!