Insight

Thoughtpick Blog

Web 2.0 was all about getting people to connect with one another and establishing a presence for them on the web. Now that you have gotten the chance to get to know each other through the web, it's time for our computers to socialize.

The aim of the next iteration of the web, Web 3.0, is that computers will be able to understand the content and the information they contain. Rather than the data just being a document, it will be put within context helping the computer to relate pieces of information and present them to you accordingly. Therefore, you will no longer have to sift through a pile of search results, some of which are irrelevant, to get the information your want.

While most of the semantic technology is still pretty much underdevelopment and improvement, we at the Thoughtpick blog came up with a list to whet your appetite on, in no particular order.

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Ivan Herman
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

W3C

Kisti, the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information, has provided a W3C Semantic Web Use Case on the OntoFrame 2008 semantic portal service on academic research. The goal of the service is to provide connection, fusion, and analysis services on academic research information to enable scientists to effectively obtain information.

Currently, the semantic portal service is in service as a prototype (http://ontoframe.kr/2008/). It contains about 450,000 articles, which have been written by 1.35 million researchers, on 340,000 topics, who work for 90,000 institutions, spanning 410,000 locations. In total, the system has a total of about 300 million RDF triples.

Complete Kisti Use Case

Twitter hat tip to Shaun Gamboa (shaungamboa) for the tweet that led us to this.

 

Fred Wilson, principal, Union Square Ventures:
The dream of the semantic web has been upon us for quite a while now. There have been hundreds of academic research projects, hundreds of approaches, and hundreds of startups working in this space. We have several in our portfolio like Adaptive Blue, Zemanta, Outside.in, Infongen, and one more we have not yet announced.

But this is a hard problem to solve and I don't see a single clear path to getting it solved. And what's interesting to note is that the most ambitious approaches have largely been failures. If anything, the more pedestrian approaches are showing more promise.

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Composing the Semantic Web
One of the new features of the Maestro Edition of TopBraid Composer 3.1 is a simple yet very flexible diff tool that can be used to compare two versions of an RDF file or database. Diffing is a common requirement of collaborative modeling work, but conventional text-based diff tools often fail miserably on RDF-based data.

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Renato Iannella:
Very little has been written that challenges the approach and relevance of the Semantic Web. Not that this new technology has taken us backwards - but there is a serious lack of critical analysis of the prophesied advantages and determining if these are valid and reasonable outcomes for the web metadata community.

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David Pogue
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

State of the Art
New York Times

For the last 15 years, Microsoft's master business plan seems to have been, "Wait until somebody else has a hit. Then copy it."

I know that sounds mean, but come on - the list of commercial hits/Microsoft knockoffs is as long as your arm. PalmPilot/PocketPC. Netscape Navigator/Internet Explorer. Mac OS X/Windows Vista. Apple iPod/Microsoft Zune.

You'd think Microsoft would feel a little sheepish after a while.

And now we have yet another me-too effort. It's something called Bing, and it's the latest iteration of Microsoft's multiyear attempt to imitate Google.

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By Jack Krupansky
The Semantic Abyss - Plumbing the Semantic Web

I have been wanting to write a post on the relationship of Linked Data and the Web of Data to the Semantic Web, but even now I am still struggling to get a secure handle on the distinctions between these three related concepts. Meanwhile, I stumbled across a relevant blog post by Tom Heath on the topic entitled "Linked Data? Web of Data? Semantic Web? WTF?" It's difficult to get a hard-core representative summary, but a semi-reasonable approximation is:

Complete post

By James Hendler

Nature Network

The Semantic Web is based on the relatively straightforward idea that to be able to integrate (link) data on the Web we must have some mechanism for knowing what relationships hold among the data, and how that relates to some "real world" context. The following is a lot of detail that comes from this simple idea.

To answer this question properly, let me start back in the early Web era. While I'm going to do some potentially boring personal history, I'll note the key ideas as I go along.

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Diane Mueller
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

In the aftermath of banking failures, subprime mortgages, and bailouts across multiple industry sectors, it is a good time to examine the strategies it will take to rebuild public trust in our government and in the world's financial markets. I believe the answer depends both on what we can do and how we do it.

With all the financial information that corporations were obligated to report because of existing government regulations, how could we not have foreseen this financial disaster? Did we misread the data? Was the information in the reports incorrect? Is there more that should have been required to report? What was missing were regulations that properly addressed how the information was to be reported. Being specific on the "how" may very well have provided the warnings of the impending disaster rather than finding out how bad it was in the midst of it.

The key to solving the problem is figuring out the best way to publish our data.

A major step towards solving the problem of how to report financial information has been addressed in the latest set of regulations from the U.S. SEC. The regulations now require a growing number of companies to provide financial statement information in eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL). Once all companies that are required to report use this format, analysts will be able to provide more accurate and timely warnings. Rather than using the past rules of demanding information -- whether locked inside spreadsheets, forms, PDFs, the web, and other proprietary formats -- specifying XBRL makes the data more usable and more easily gathered and analyzed.

If we can't find the data, if we can't figure out the problems that may be buried in the mountains of information, and if we haven't any means to explore the data, we are no better prepared for the next financial crisis.

Creating Compliant Data

To complete the true financial picture of our economy, we need to complete the move to XBRL to ensure that all financial reporting is available as XBRL-tagged content. The government also needs to use XBRL reporting as part of creating a complete picture of the economy. As the bailout legislation, Recovery Act and other massive appropriations that include requirements for public disclosure continue, XBRL reporting could provide an excellent method of measuring the effects to the economy in real-time. Usually economic indicators lag behind because time is needed for surveys and reports to be collected and processed.

The initial impact of new regulations layered on top of existing regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley will be that corporations will be obligated to publish even more data, more frequently. The Obama administration's effort to push more government data out via Recovery.gov is a good example of the movement to encourage more disclosure. If that information was in XBRL, we could more easily use the data. As the government rolls out its mandate for corporations to submit their financials using XBRL to the U.S. SEC for closer scrutiny and better compliance, they could also take a page from their own book and make all government financial reporting available to the public in XBRL, facilitating a more open national dialogue on our government's financial health.

continued...

Dan Grigorovici
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Dan Grigorovici
Web3Beat Blog

Reality check: money has been draining, but not because of the recession, but because of fear and decisions from the VC firms themselves to raise smaller funds for themselves. Why? Maybe to counteract previous glorified Nirvana-type investments.

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