The recent Linked Data Product Development Lab at MIT, billed as an opportunity to create the next killer app, was born out of its organizers’ desire to create both a highly adoptable, viral and compelling case for what sets semantic technology apart from the other kinds of technologies that people are playing with on the web -- and also to create something that would be sustainable as either a business or open source project. The winner, LocalFocus, seems to have legs on both fronts, and its competitors present some interesting potential, as well.

The Lab’s co-chairs – K. Krasnow Waterman, who came to MIT as a Sloan Fellow and is a visiting fellow, DIG, CSAIL, MIT, and technology entrepreneur Reed Sturtevant — say they picked a cross-section of judges to ensure that both the technology and business viewpoints were accounted for in picking a winner. They included luminaries ranging from world wide web inventor and MIT professor Tim Berners-Lee and MIT Media Lab professor Alex Pentland, who’s also a pioneer in organizational engineering, mobile information systems, and computational social science, to serial entrepreneur Brian Shin, to VCs Alex Finkelstein from Spark Capital and Austin Westerling of Charles River Ventures, among others.

For Waterman, the lab was a chance to open to others a door that she was thrilled to discover after a career spent in the data trenches. “I’ve spent most of my career working with data,” says Waterman. “I used to manage the data centers for J.P. Morgan, and I did some very large scale data work for the federal government, so when I got to understand the concept of the semantic web and the idea of reaching directly to data, I could just see a thousand different ways that things I do in my life would be so much easier and faster and the results so much more accurate and really on point when you think about how the structure works.”

For entrepreneurs, a standardized interface to various sources of data could create a positive feedback loop that can be harnessed to their advantage. “As more applications know to consume data in a consistent way, there’s more demand to put data out in that form and an acceleration of that virtuous cycle,” says Sturtevant, who among his credentials was founding director of Microsoft Startup Labs. “That’s a great trend to get in the middle of if you are looking to start a new company and create something that grows rapidly.”

LocalFocus, developed by the team of Francis Phan, Zach Richardson and Gladys Filchtiner, appears to be heading in that direction, as there are plans to pitch the idea to investors at SxSW Interactive in March. The winning entry is described as a platform in which developers can create sophisticated Linked Data queries, which can then be deployed as modules to a client. The prototype was focused on the iPhone and triple-store location-based information, querying school and police station data sets to determine proximity, but its developers note that it is limited neither to that mobile device nor to location-based data. “What we looked at doing was using Linked Data as almost the product itself,” says Richardson, “where we provide easier methods for everyone to access all of the power of Linked Data.” (Above photo: Phan, Filchtiner, Berners-Lee and Richardson at Linked Data Product Development Lab.)

Phan sees LocalFocus as serving two audiences: the semantic web developers who can use it to put together complicated Linked Data queries and then have that packaged up to be used from a client such as the iPhone (or the Android or the web, as the client interaction is through web services), and end users who don’t know anything about Linked Data but want to take advantage of pre-developed Linked Data apps -- including those that can be based on crowd-sourced data sources. “So in the case of our iPhone client it is in essence a kind of an App Store for pre-developed Linked Data queries, so all the end user needs to do is choose from a menu or catalogue of queries that have been developed already,” says Phan. “Eventually our dream is that the amount of linked data applications we could have in our Apps Store would be in the thousands.”

The viability of that vision is one of the reasons LocalFocus got the nod. “You could imagine how it would be useful to end users, how it would accelerate the growth of the use of Linked Data,” says Sturtevant. “And in terms of sustainability as a potential business there was a clear way they could charge developers to use their platform because it had the concept of an ‘App Store.’”

Richardson expects that over the next three or four months LocalFocus will evolve from what’s now a limited proof of concept to something that a power user would be able to use and rapidly develop an application to harness location-based data or other semantic web data they’ve indexed and do something “really useful.” He sees this as a step towards dealing with the semantic web problem that “right now it’s hard for someone to figure out exactly how to harness it,…and it’s dependent on people putting data into a format used by the semantic web. The future for us and what we’ve done is to provide tools that make it easy to take the information that’s out there, put it into a triple store and make it searchable as information in the semantic web is searchable — which is linked data and being able to make intelligent connections quickly.” The runner-up to LocalFocus was OpenChart, a platform for visually charting linked data and understanding the connections between different data sets; Phan says his team’s solution could potentially leverage that technology, as well.

Waterman says the event has left her reinvigorated over the potential of Linked Data and the semantic web. “I find that having done this my brain is racing with things I’d like to do,” she says. “It’s won me over and I started in a good place to begin with.” She says she’s already getting requests to make this an annual event.