I will give a talk about the relevance of Semantic Web and Linked Data for news publishers at this year’s IFRA summit in Vienna on October 15, 2009. IFRA is the World Association of Newspapers and News publishers and within their Technical Group Publishing they are starting to deal with Semantic Web. Further invited speakers are Michael Steidl (IPTC) and Robert Schmidt-Nia (dpa mediatechnology).
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Beside W3C´s Linked Data Initiative, it were semantic services like Calais, Zemanta or textwise which have made the advantages of the Semantic Web visible for a broader community in the last few months.
Each of those services follow a slightly different approach, but in a nutshell: They all offer an API to provide “similarity search” around social media or also to enhance enterprise information management.
Like a magic bullet those services offer a relief from information overflow and seem to become kind of a “semantic web killer application“.
If you´re familiar with one or many of those services, drop a comment and let us know, what you´ve been experienced so far, or also if you can think of any applications or further developments you would like to see around these kind of services.
If you are not familiar with this stuff, for a quick demo go to
The widget uses text from this blog to calculate similar stuff from the web.
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In a recent interview Prof. Chris Bizer from FU Berlin gave some insights into the commercial opportunities of linked data. In the short run he predicts three application areas:
I think we will see a growing number of applications that use data from the public Web as background knowledge to offer better search capabilities and to augment local content with additional content from the Web of Data.
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Beside of the classic search engines, there might also be market opportunities for new search engines that specialize on Linked Data. [...] This will allow them to sell access to cleaned views on the Data Web and to become central components within Linked Data applications.
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Within the corporate market, there is interest in using Linked Data as a lightweight, pay-as-you-go data integration technology.
Additionally Chris comments on the latest developments in the area of triple stores and D2RQ, and the necessity for more privacy awareness and information accountability in an increasingly interlinked world.
Read the full interview on our homepage.
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In recent days – here at Semantic Web Company – we have had a lot of discussions on how the future of the Semantic Web (name it Web3.0 if you like) will develop. Several stakeholders on the future of the Semantic Web see already, that also a potential danger will come along with the technical realisation of the web3.0: This is the present possibility to create applications and mashups with semantic technologies that are a real drain on privacy and information ethics. Without an underpinning discussion about the ethical framework within technolgies like linked data, text-mining, biometric-systems and geo-systems in combination with the web of data, the whole domain is in danger to be doomed like genetic engineering some years ago.
It’s crucial for the public opinion on the Semantic Web, to adress the immanent risks regarding privacy and ethics. In this context I’ll see also Tim Berners-Lee‘s statement yesterday: “W3C wants to help make sure data use is appropriate,” he said. Berners-Lee, who is director of W3C, said in an interview on Wednesday that the teams working on the Semantic Web project are making sure that privacy principles are included in its architecture: “The Semantic Web project is developing systems which will answer where data came from and where it’s going to — the system will be architectured for a set of appropriate uses.”
Maybe it’s an important step in keeping the further development of Semantic Web trusty in the eyes of public opinion, that the W3C has privacy and information ethics on their agenda and persons like Berners-Lee stand with their reputation for it. But it is also crucial to build this awareness on the corporate side. Only if everyone within the domain follows a common ethic understanding we have a public opinion, which is on the future potential of the Semantic Web, and not in fear of the same.
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