News

The Semantic Web Blog had a chance to speak with Evri CEO Will Hunsinger and Radar Networks CEO Nova Spivack, in separate interviews, right after the news of Evri’s acquisition of Twine broke. They provide some insight into the deal, and what it portends for T2, the next version of Twine that Radar Networks has been working on over the last few months.

Hunsinger says the two companies are a good fit because, though each was looking at different types of content, each also was trying to solve the same problem: “Enabling the end consumer to filter through the noise and get the precise, relevant results set,” as he explains it. “Twine was going after verticals and content areas that were more semi-structured or even structured data, like recipes, where we are going after temporal trending data, like news and tweets. But you put the two together and you have the ability to address the problem for consumers of getting the most interesting, relevant information. …We were never focused on evergreen content like recipes, and so on, but with T2 we can bring these together and can apply these technologies for a much richer, deeper and broader consumer experience.”

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There have been rumors afoot for some time that Radar Networks’ Twine was being acquired, possibly by Microsoft. Turns out the acquisition is by Evri. The Microsoft connection? Maybe it’s that Evri and Twine have had backing by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.

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The game of tag in the web world isn’t as clear-cut as it is in the schoolyard. On the playground, when you tag someone, you know that person is “It.” Everyone else does too, and they take appropriate action based on that knowledge – that is, run. On the web, when you tag a photo, a video, or other rich or high-density content you create, you know what you’re talking about, but your meaning isn’t always as clear to others who also could take appropriate action if they had a better understanding of what you’ve posted.

Bueda is a hosted services startup that’s trying to help publishers of this user-generated content increase its value by improving their understanding of it. The basic idea is that an outfit – a YouTube or Flickr, for instance – could send Bueda the tags users attach to their content, and in return receive clean metadata and categories to add to that content to better match it to advertising opportunities, enhance additional content recommendations, and increase search accuracy. “It’s the usual things you can do with the semantic web but in a low friction and easy way,” says Bueda CEO and co-founder Vasco Pedro.

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Last week U.K.-based True Knowledge entered the next beta stage for its AI question-answering platform. The grand mission for True Knowledge is to use its semantic technology to build the first Internet-scale platform for directly answering the world’s questions.

It aims to be able to answer more questions as it understands more, thanks to pulling facts from Wikipedia, Freebase, and other online sources but also through the input of users who add people, businesses, or facts to its knowledge base. New in this beta, in fact, is the ability for users to contribute unstructured, or non-semantic, answers.

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SAP, the international enterprise software vendor, is just one of the many large companies whose core needs in a globally connected business environment can be addressed in part by the development of a multi-lingual semantic web.

Web services are the heart of SAP’s software, and its requirements to make those services searchable in different languages is one of the use cases for the new European project Monnet (Multilingual Ontologies for Networked Knowledge), whose goal is to provide a semantics-based solution for integrated information access across language barriers. As the Germany-based company’s development work expands further into other parts of the world where the European country’s native language isn’t widely known—India now and probably China in the future—it’s important for programmers there to be able to access the description of SAP’s web services in their native languages, or perhaps English. Making it possible to deal with information at the semantic level will help solve this challenge, allowing for more advanced and uniform integration, aggregation, querying and presentation of information across languages.

The need to deal with such global business issues is just one reason the tech industry is soon to have its First Workshop on the Multilingual Semantic Web, set for April. But it’s not the only one. International non-profit organizations such as the United Nations are seeing the benefits of transforming their systems to semantic web technologies, and it’s very important to them that the semantic web be able to manage multi-lingual information so that they can communicate with users all over the world who have very different levels of comfort with the English language. “We have the special enterprise, and business intelligence, and certain international organizations that need not only to manage information in many different languages, but also need to customize the information for those different linguistic communities,” says Elena Montiel-Ponsoda, Ontology Engineering Group, Departamento de Inteligencia Artificial Universidad Politécnica de Madrid in Spain. She is one of the members of the workshop’s organizing committee.

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NetBase – the company behind the Insight Discovery next-generation semantic search technology – is looking forward to an interesting spring. The company is working with one of the largest publishers of medical information, and by April about 60 percent of nurses around the world will be looking up information in its resources with the help of NetBase’s HealthBase Insight Discovery tool and lenses.

But also in the April timeframe, the next sibling in the NetBase toolbelt, ConsumerBase, will become generally available. It rounds out a line that so far also features ScienceBase; that product's APIs are used in NetBase partner’s Reed Elsevier’s Illuminat8 web-based research tool for the scientific and R&D knowledge worker communities, to help them find and make connections among data to accelerate discoveries and fast-forward commercial opportunities.

CEO and co-founder Jonathan Spier says he’s “super-excited about” the latest addition. Why? Five of the top ten CPG companies in the world are working with NetBase to adapt the vendor’s text analytics, natural-language processing and search and semantic indexing technologies to their own ends. To wit, that is gaining consumer insight both through their internal data as well as through other sources including, as one priority, social media.

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What’s Factoetum? In the real world, it's a general servant employed to do a variety of jobs. In the digital world, it is currently a beta service you can think of as your Internet assistant. It's being explored by a couple of hundred early users who are setting the stage for creating what by founder William Dyson describes as a “fun, giant semantic global graph, where people can enter in and search for short pieces of information [called items or nodes] that can be linked to one another,” as well as shared and subscribed to by other members. He sees the Global Graph the service creates as adding a social layer to search, where users get visual cues that their friends have favorited an item that appears in their search results to spur further investigation of and action upon their common interests.

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There’s a new working group for RDFa at theW3C – its mission isn’t radical, as the recommendation already exists, but its plans should address some of the concerns around the spec as it relates to HTML and wider adoption by web developers.

“One of the working group’s main goals is to add additional features, but not in terms of additional functionality,” says Ivan Herman, Semantic Web activity lead at the W3C. That includes “more features that simplify the creation of HTML files with RDFa. This is clearly one area.” That goes hand in hand with working with the HTML Working Group on incorporating RDFa in HTML5 and XHTML5, advancing it beyond its original definition for XHTML1.1. On the map is a version of the recommendation that is defined in a way that any XML application can use it. Herman points as examples to synchronizing the RDFa usage for the Open Document format that is used by OpenOffice, and to Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), a language for describing two-dimensional graphics and graphical applications in XML, which allows adding RDFa attributes to SVG files but needs a more clearly defined way of doing so. Additionally, the group is going to define an RFDa API, a set of functions that could, for example, let Javascript accept RDFa functionality directly.

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You may know Popego best as a website that uses your online activity to build an interest profile, and then filters the web based on that to connect you with the videos, news, people, and music that are a fit with your tastes. Behind that site, which was a finalist in the 2009 TechCrunch 50, is the Meaningtool technology: It feeds Popego’s recommendation engine, and the company hopes it also will get the interest of anyone who wants to “add a semantic flavor” to their own apps and web sites.

“The Internet is a vast and complex network of websites with huge amounts of different information, from blogs and tweets to news sites, forums, P2P networks and 2.0 applications such as Facebook and YouTube,” says CTO Fernando Zunino. “The present state of things is chaotic and intricate but very promising: It is the dawn of the Semantic Web, the Meaningful Web, where computers will learn to understand human needs and present solutions to every-day problems. We have developed a semantic tool that we hope will take us one step closer to our dream: giving computers the ability to understand, to generate meaning, from human information.”

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Siri formally launched itself into the eager hands of iPhone 3GS users late last week, as a free download in the Apple iTunes Store. On the Siri blog CEO Dag Kittlaus catalogued the stats behind the much-awaited virtual personal assistant: 5 years of work, 42 integrated services, 6,540 issues resolved, and UI redesigns once a day, among them – along with other figures such as number of soft drinks consumed in the process (12,090), pizza slices eaten (3,375) and average weight gain per person since the first day of employment (14 pounds).

Siri doesn’t yet have covered “Best Gyms/Diet Centers” near its offices, but the first version of the application can help you find (within range of your location) and book restaurants serving the cuisine you fancy, movies and events that meet your time and taste criteria, and taxi services to get you from where you are at point A to where you want to be at Point B – all through natural language voice or text queries. Siri, according to the company, now also is learning how to handle reminders, flights stats and reference questions to take it beyond its V1 self-described status as “Out and About Mobile Entertainment Assistant.”

The daily UI redesign comment in Kittlaus' blog is likely literal. Tom Gruber, Siri’s co-founder, talked about Siri’s delivering on the “big think small screen” concept with the Semanticweb Blog back in December, discussing its goal of harnessing the powerful trends of cloud computing, 3G networks, and semantic technologies to help “make people smart at the interface.” There aren't many early comments on the iTunes blog but the few there indicate it is succeeding (e.g. "You don't even need to think of which app to pull up to find information about shows or restaurants or just about any other life situation."

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