bluereek

Interesting to read Palisano’s (head of IBM) comments:

“We are amassing an unimaginable amount of data in the world. In just three years, [internet] traffic is expected to total more than half a zettabyte. That’s a trillion gigabytes – or a one followed by 21 zeroes,” he tells industry, academic and political leaders.

“Where we once inferred, we now know. Where we once interpolated and extrapolated, we can now determine. The historical is giving way to the real-time and it’s not just about volume and velocity. The nature of the data we are collecting and analysing is changing, too.

“All this data is far more real-time than ever before. Most of us today, as leaders and as individuals, make decisions based on information that is backward-looking and limited in scope. That’s the best we had, but that is quickly changing.”

This just reinforces my previous blog of June 2009: here.

And this week we had the official launch in the UK of its government linked open data site.

We’ve seen the debate – back and forth – about linked open data.  We’ve seen the debate about top down v. bottom up approaches to semantics.  We’ve seen the arguments about the merits of RDF as against other frameworks.  But the volumes of data continue to increase – as does participation in social networks.

On a daily basis we see announcement about new products.  Nova Spivack tells us that the days of ‘Search’ are running out – we need ‘Help’ not ‘Search’.  We eagerly await his Twine 2.0.  We have seen significant product advancements announced this month in products such as Open Calais and Open Amplify.  One other product which caught my eye last week is Kngine.

Products such as Amplify aim to deal with the ‘tricky’ content – e.g. the ‘opinions’ implicit in content of social networks.   And this is a key element of what we are looking for: context for the content.  I am more interested in information on a particular subject when I understand the context, the perspective of the provider of the information.  I also want the richness of analysis possible through the combination of wider sources of data – including data compiled by government agencies which should be available to me.  Linked open data initiatives are required in all countries.  For Ireland – the sooner the better, if we consider ourselves a smart economy or a knowledge society.

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Have to say that I think Hatem Mahmoud has done a great job in contextualising and explaining web 3.0/ semantic web in this presentation.

Takes you through web 1.0, through to 2.0 and on to 3.0.  Explains why web 3.0 is required and gives some current examples.

Worth spending 15 minutes – for anyone new to semantic web.

This 6 minute video is also an excellent introduction to the semantic web.

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Watched an excellent presentation from Stefan Decker at last year’s International Semantic Web Conference (Karlsruhe).  Stefan Decker is the director of the DERI project in NUI, Galway.

The presentation addressed, inter alia, the lack of excitement about semantic web.  My key takeaway from his talk was that semantic web is about networking knowledge for the benefit of PEOPLE.  I think in getting caught up describing things in terms of computers being able to process information on sites thought use of various standards (not of interest to anyone except the technical community) etc we have lost the focus on the fact that what we really want is more collaboration, more productivity, more discoveries.  Semantic web initiatives have an end game of helping people make more use of the information.

Just looked at a nice 3 minute video from Binaryplex – promoting their beta product Hivemind.  I do not know what the underlying technologies are.  They do not even mention the worked ’semantics’ in their three minutes.  But what it is about is helping people to find expertise and, more importantly, experts in an organisation.  Recognising that people, for any number of reasons, may not update their profiles within an organisation the product seeks to address this gap, in the background.

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data dot gov dot uk is about to become a reality.  Tim Berners Lee and Nigel Schadbolt cover this off in their article, ‘Put in your postcode‘, out comes the data, in The Times 18/11/09.

The UK government is moving forward on a similar basis to the US government – in making public data available to the public.

Curious to see how far advanced we are wrt implementing something similar in Ireland – in the context of our knowledge society and smart economy.  Must make sense to make this type of information available – as argued by Tim Berners Lee in the referenced article.

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Three different examples recently reported of use of semantic web technologies to improve online advertising efforts.

OpenAmplify is a web service developed by Hapax that brings human understanding to content. Using patented Natural Language Processing technology, OpenAmplify reads and understands every word used in text. It identifies the significant topics, brands, people, perspectives, emotions, actions and timescales and presents the findings in an actionable XML structure.

NEW YORK – ad pepper media, the international online advertising network and semantic advertising technology solutions provider, launched the SiteScreen for Agencies platform, enabling advertising agencies to apply its ground-breaking SiteScreen semantic brand protection technology across their entire range of online media buys to effectively prevent ad misplacements.

Read more: http://www.adoperationsonline.com/2009/11/12/ad-pepper-media-launches-sitescreen-for-agencies/#ixzz0XL2vwtcR

Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

In Italy, Quattroruote is a leading online magazine for car aficionados and buyers, with its reputation built on testing and evaluating models and its own blue book-like price estimates for vehicles. Now it’s a leading-edge user of semantic web technology, too.

It has deployed Expert System’s Cogito semantic solution to help add value to user searches for used cars in its portal to the world of classified car sales.

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There is a great deal written about web 3.0/ semantic web in terms of knowledge and intelligence.  Much of it relates to computers being able to process data published on the web and ‘understand’ it – either via Natural Language Processing type solutions or through markups such as Resource Definition Framework (RDF).

This
piece of research being conducted by IBM reminds us of the competition – the human brain.

For now I see the real benefit of the semantic web being to give me some assistance in terms of processing the vast amount of data which is available on the web (and within enterprises – under linked open data initiative).  For instance, if in going to a meeting to discuss evolving health & safety issues in the construction industry in Australia, I have a piece of software which can filter/find/ summarise much of the information and data in the public domain then my contribution to the meeting may be more valuable (or my preparation time may be accelerated).  Again, within the context of semantic web, my profile – if I have an interest in such a field – should result in my being prompted with relevant information.  This ties in with Kevin Kelly’s dictum, ‘No personalisation without transparency’.

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Find myself being asked more regularly to explain ‘the semantic web’.  I think it’s a combination of a growing awareness in the business community of the semantic web and a greater focus on this topic by myself.

Read a piece this morning on the hypios web site – a web 2.0 based problem solving site.  In the first page of this essay the author offers an excellent introduction to the semantic web (and the requirement for a semantic web).

The only reservation I would have would be the ‘plea’ to business to make more data available publicly as linked open data.  I agree with the sentiment – but not sure that business on such sentiment.

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Excellent presentation (to undergrads I presume) outlining background to semiotics and semantics.

Great start – asks the participants in 15 seconds to define ‘forward’.

Works through the basics of symbols, icons and indices.  This in turn leads on to the importance of context (more important for symbols e.g. language than for icons).

Follows on from this to explain the need for rules and agreed terminologies – leading to Ontologies.

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I think Paul Walk’s analysis in his recent posting is clear and to the point.

To some extent I think Tim Berners Lee may almost be a victim of his own success.  Seems to me his initial guidance to government (and others) was to get on with making the data available (at that time he was not stressing the need to provide the data in RDF format).  Now that data.Gov has provided data TBL and others are understandably pushing that the data be in RDF format – to enable linking of the data.

Obviously we,promoting things semantic, want the data to be published and easily linkable.  But sometimes, as per Paul’s posting, I think we make it all look a little more confusing than necessary, by ‘mashing’ (apols for pun) the terminology.

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I referenced recently Tim Berners Lee’s encouragement to everyone looking to publish linked open data to use the Resource Definition Framework.  I also referenced in this blog recent work completed by the New York Times in this field.  The New York Times initiative has attracted an amount of comment in the technical community identifying the teething issues/ errors in this data as published.

Stefan Mazzocchi’s recent post, Data Smoke and Mirrors, speaks to some of the issues associated with publishing lots of linked data using RDF.  Stefan has reviewed a triplification of all the data from data.gov – and has been left somewhat bemused.  The posting itself provides some examples.

The point here is that we want to see the data published, we want to see the standards used – but it’s far from simple and publishing for the sake of publishing or triplifying for the sake of triplifying may be self defeating.  As a community we need to focus on quality and the end user of the data.

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