Interviews

The book publishing industry – like the newspaper and magazine sectors – is in a state of becoming. Becoming what is the question. The digitization of book content is changing more than book form – it’s changing the entire channel-driven supply chain.

The middleman bookstore, real-world and virtual, is still kicking, but, asks Joseph Esposito, CEO of GiantChair, “with electronic books do you need all that?” And if publishers don’t need all that – or at least if they don’t any longer need to see that as their exclusive portal to sales – how do they get visitors to their sites to build a direct relationship with readers? One answer: Have good metadata, get more search engine traffic, sell more books.

continued...

Mark Johnson of Microsoft Bing, talked with me at the Web3.0 Conference in Santa Clara, CA this January. Mark talks about his transition from Powerset to Bing, and how semantics is at the root of developing innovative features that power the Bing decision engine, without being intrusive, or even noticeable to users. Watch the interview to understand how Mark sees the progression from search to decisions via Bing.

I spoke with Scott Jarus, CEO of Cognition Technologies, a company that has developed a semantic index of the entire English language. The development process took 25 years and over 350 person-years to complets, and now provides an enhanced search function that uses natural language (NLP) to allow users to query data sources using normal English questions.

In addition, Scott announced that portions of Cognition Technologys' capabilities are being integrated with Microsoft's Bing, an already robust search facility.

Listen to the interview with Scott to know more about how Cognition Technology's capabilities are delivering ROI to the legal and biotech industries.

Brandon Claisse, Director of Business Development for Mojiva, a mobile advertising service, talked with me at mediabistro.com's Web3.0 Conference in Santa Clara, CA this January.

Brandon talks about the current and future prospects for mobile advertising and how semantic tech fits in with connecting the publishers and advertisers with the end user.

Watch the interview to see how Brandon sees where all the groups can benefit from this combination of technologies.

I spoke with Tom Gruber at the Web3.0 Conference in Santa Clara, CA this January. Tom is cofounder, CTO and VP of Design for Siri.com, an intelligent assistant for use over handheld and other web-connected devices. In this interview Tom talks about the perfect storm of semantic technologies, elastic cloud computing, and portable devices with high bandwidth connectivity, and how this combination is delivering capabilities thought never before possible.

Watch the interview to see Tom's explanation of how these components leverage semantics.

John Breslin is involved in semantic research at the largest single institute pursuing semantics; DERI at NUI Galway. In this interview John discusses a variety of current research and development projects that promise to expand the usefulness of semantics by making the information published in social networks more available and easier to cross-connect.

John discusses these topics in this interview:

- The release of Drupal 7, which contains facilities for including semantic tags automatically.

- The expanding use of SIOC in making data used in any one social network structure available for use in others.

- How efforts to expand the usefulness of microblogging platforms like Twitter can benefit from semantics.

At the Web3.0 Conference in Santa Clara, CA this January, I sat down for a discussion with Scott Brinker, President and CTO of Ion Interactive, about how semantic technology is changing the way marketing is being done on the web.

Watch the interview for Scott's full take on how things are slowly evolving, and where ROI is starting to emerge.

Jeff Revesz is the founder of Adaptive Semantics, a company that uses semantic technologies to evaluate user comments to online postings. The company's largest customer, the Huffington Post, uses the company's product Julia, to evaluate 90,000 comments each day, and identify which may be abusive.

- Machine learning is based on the evaluation of editors, but normalizes the evaluations across the publication.

- A version of Julia (currently in testing) is available for use by bloggers to moderate comments on their own blogs.

- Semantic drift, the tendency of meaning and acceptance to change over time, is part of the ongoing update process to keep up with social norms.

Listen to my interview with Jeff.

Consumers are starting to realize the first fruits of semantic search, but they’re not thinking of it as such. They’re just thinking of it as better search. “Semantic search is already here but it hasn’t been this ‘Voila!’ moment,” says Scott Prevost, principal development manager, Bing at Microsoft. “Semantic technologies are making an impact across three different dimensions of search: user queries and understanding what people mean when they type a query, having a better sense of what queries mean in a session when people refine the query, and understanding documents and content better.”

Prevost will be giving the opening keynote at this week’s Web 3.0 conference, and he plans to focus on how the incremental inclusion of more and more semantic data in search is affecting everything from search quality, to relevancy of results, to even speed in the sense that people can complete their tasks or find the information they need faster.

continued...

Jim Stanley, VP of Products for Technology and News for CBS Interactive. What that means is that Jim manages the Cnet web site. After 7 years working with semantics, the technology is thoroughly entrenched in the business and its properties.

- Semantics processes add secondary information from structured data provided by manufacturers.

- A variety of topic pages are generated by gathering content from a variety of content silos that house downloads, video, audio, and text. Semantic processes aggregate content from Cnet and external sources.

- The "More like this" feature on Cnet news leverages semantic analysis to present related articles to readers.

Listen to my interview with Jim to understand more about how CBS Interactive and Cnet put semantic technology to use in delivering content.