Last week, Radar Networks moved out of stealth mode with the public preview of its semantic web-based online service dubbed Twine. Radar is calling Twine a knowledge networking service, designed to help consumers, professionals and enterprises share, organize, and find information.
A consumer might, for example, use the site to keep track of or find new things about a special interest or hobby, while a professional or member of an enterprise team can use it to work on projects with a customer or other team members inside or outside the company, bringing together and organizing all the email and information related to those projects. Unlike groupware or knowledge management systems -- monolithic platforms that are not easily used between organizations -- Twine provides a way to share knowledge and collaborate across boundaries.
Twine uses semantic web technologies and natural language processing to learn about each user and his interests, in order to build a set of concepts that connect him to data related to those interests. Rich contextual information is added to turn it into semantic content, which can be shared with other groups or people, to make it easy to conduct very specific searches -- say, for a video about venture capitalists that are interested in green investing. The service also can rank the results of searches by their relevance to the particular individual -- giving higher value to content that was recommended by a friend, for example.
Radar founder and CEO Nova Spivack freely notes that there are plenty of services out there that enable individuals to collect information, from Wikis to bookmarks. “But it would be extremely difficult to put the level of intelligence and power that we have built. There is a qualitative difference over this and Del.i.cious or Lotus Notes and a Wiki.”
Twine can be complementary to other semantic services such as Metaweb’s Freebase database of public information and Powerset’s natural language search interface, integrating with the former’s data sources and using the latter to improve searches.
According to Spivack, Twine provides the end user piece in the equation. Twine is where “individuals and groups actually can start to use the semantic web,” he says. “The other tools plug in. We are the central place where information and digital life come together in Web 3.0 and the semantic web. But we want to work with other companies that are adding value that we think will make Twine better.”
There’s also potential for media and product companies to use Twine as an on-ramp to the semantic web, says Spivack, providing a way to get their product and content into semantic form to develop richer relationships with their customers.
“The platform we created is hard to make, and nothing else can really do this today. It will be five years or more before these kinds of capabilities are available anywhere else,” Spivack says, noting the company has a number of patents around semantic advertising, personalization, web crawling, mining, and search, among other things in this space. “In the meantime, this is going to be probably the most cost-effective and high visibility way to do it.”
Written in pure Java, Twine is a full platform, down to the storage layer, for efficient and scalable storage for RDF data and queries, with capabilities for managing, creating, and sharing ontologies, support for building knowledge bases and managing privacy and identity and user accounts, relationships, groups, communities and teams. It’s also built statistical analysis, graph theory and social search into the model, and above that semantic advertising, user profiling, personalization, as well as APIs to get data in and out of Twine.
Twine is now moving into its beta stage of testing, which will see some 10,000 selected users live on the platform. The next opportunity for more users to participate will be when Radar widens the scope in the spring.
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