Interviews

Courtesy Flickr/ John E. Robertson

Fortunata is a new tool that aims to help developers and graphic designers that aren’t well-versed in semantic web technologies create Internet applications that use and generate semantic data.

The idea behind the tool, which is the product of work by researchers from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid's Ontology Engineering Group, based at the Facultad de Informática, in partnership with the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid's Department of Informatics Engineering, is that compartmentalization of tasks eases processes.

So, it breaks development tasks into specific chunks – the web designer first creates semantic templates, capable of rendering semantic data (data presentation templates) or gathering data from the user (data capture templates) that will then be converted into semantic data. Then the developer, regardless of a lack of background in relevant programming languages or semantic web technologies, uses these templates to create the web applications. Think of it as fostering a modern-day assembly line for creating semantic web apps.

That sounds promising for boosting the development of interoperable applications that will help the web of data cycle forward. So, The Semantic Web Blog asked Oscar Corcho and Mariano Rico, of the UPM's Ontology Engineering Group at the Facultad de Informática, to provide us with more details about their project.

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We wrote last week about a new organization, the Semantic Valley Consortium, that is hoping to get more businesses to take advantage of the Semantic Web. Prof. Alberto Sangiovanni Vincentelli at the University of California at Berkeley, a leading light of the Consortium, tells us a little more about the new organization.

Q: What spurred the creation of the Semantic Valley Consortium -- and how did you gain the support of some big name technology players. What do they see as their ROI for participating and is there a requirement to/cost of membership?

A: There are several considerations that spurred the creation of the Semantic Valley concept:
• First and foremost the attractiveness of the Trentino area in terms of scientific excellence in this domain as well as other contiguous domains. Trento has some of the very best research groups world-wide in semantics: for example, the group headed by Professor Fausto Giunchiglia at the University of Trento and the one headed by Bernardo Magnini in FBK (Bruno Kessler Foundation). The Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in Trento is among the strongest in Europe as witnessed by the decision of the European Community to award the European Technology Institute in Information Technology to a consortium of Universities in Europe that includes Trento. The FBK Foundation has a computer science Department headed by Paolo Traverso that is considered among the best Computer Science institutions in Europe. This excellence provides the intellectual basis for Semantic Valley and will produce the personnel backbone that will be active in realizing the Semantic Valley manifesto.

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The quest for knowledge never ends. That’s a good thing for the Q&A AI platform True Knowledge. The Semantic Web Blog recently had an opportunity to catch up with its founder and CEO William Tunstall-Pedoe to discuss the semantic-powered platform he’s been developing for the past couple of years.

● On why the world needs ‘the first Internet-scale platform for directly answering the worlds questions’”:
° The idea, William Tunstall-Pedoe says, came out of his observations about Internet search: That the search engines don’t understand what you ask, and as a consequence can’t produce the answers to what you ask – just a statistical list of documents that may/may not be what you are looking for. “Computers don’t understand natural language. Documents are magical things humans can read and understand but the best a computer can do is scan it for keywords and patterns. So the starting point is how to represent knowledge in a way that computers can understand and process it. How do you build a system where the world’s knowledge can be stored in structured form, where computers can reason with it and directly answer questions. The ultimate dream for that is an Internet search experience by mobile or web where you get back exactly what you are looking for, not a list of links, but direct perfect answers to every question.”

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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.

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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.