Semantic Web Company

Facebook — Open Graph — Semantic Search

Alex Wilhelm from The Next Web writes:

There is data outside of Facebook that the company wants to be brought in and made relevant inside of the Facebook platform. Enter the Open Graph protocol, Facebook’s way to say, in the common tongue ”all your graph are belong to Zuck.”

The product combines graphs, be they music graphs from Pandora or what have you, into the Facebook wider social graph. You can think of it has a “knit-up” with Facebook for other websites that are not Facebook affiliated.

Nick O’Neill from AllFacebook:

If HTML is the way developers get information into Google’s search engine, meta data is the way developers will get data into Facebook’s semantic search engine which will be based on the company’s “Open Graph”. Through the use of easy to implement plugins, Facebook is rapidly collecting structured data on every user. Facebook has also upgraded their API to make building on top of the Open Graph a much easier process. What’s pretty clear is that it’s an attempt to tackle the residing search giant.

[...] As Mark Zuckerberg said on stage an hour ago, by the end of the day Facebook should have more than 1 billion likes and that data will grow exponentially.

[...] There are a number of standards that have been created in the past as some developers have pointed out, microformats being the most widely accepted version, however the reduction of friction for implementation means that Facebook has a better shot at more quickly collecting the data. The race is on for building the semantic web and now that developers and website owners have the tools to implement this immediately.

Found this piece on FCW.com. I love it!

Posted by John Klossner on Aug 03, 2009

For those of you, like me, who need a way to keep these things straight, I offer the following handy, wallet-sized program.

WEB 1.0 (browsers) – Users find data
WEB 2.0 (social networks) – Users find each other
WEB 3.0 (semantic Web) – Data find each other

Of course, a lifetime of science-fiction reading and viewing leads me to fear we can look forward to the following developments:

WEB 4.0 – Data create their own Facebook page, restrict friends.
WEB 5.0 – Data decide they can work without humans, create their own language.
WEB 6.0 –Human users realize that they no longer can find data unless invited by data.
WEB 7.0 – Data get cheaper cell phone rates.
WEB 8.0 – Data horde all the good YouTube videos, leaving human users with access to bad ’80’s music videos only.
WEB 9.0 – Data create and maintain own blogs, are more popular than human blogs.
WEB 10.0 – All episodes of Battlestar Gallactica will now be shown from the Cylons’ point of view.

Presently more and more tools come up in the Web 2.0 – Domain, which bring semantic technologies into blogger´s everyday life. Zemanta was for sure a break-through in annotation of blog entries. I’m running this service on my private and my corporate blog. It is easy to integrate in every common blog-software and it is really a save of time in my daily work. Unfortunaly it is avaible only for english blogs.

Another service which came up recently is Quintura, which provides search capabilities for your own blog with a visual map of tags or hints based on an index created of the own blog entries. It is easy to customize for the own blog’s style with the use of a simple interface. Quintura offers code-snippets to copy to your blog-post or sidebar. Even if it is no semantic search engine in the narrow sense, Quintura provide a fine semantic-like interface for a meaning-sensitive search. See how Quintura is implemented into The Semantic Puzzle at our sidebar.

Our open workshops on basics and practices in semantic web technologies are free to book in single or combined. Focused on the question how synergies between web2.0, semantic web and text mining can lead us to new approches at search engines, experts search, knowledge management, recommendation systems and e-business within a corporate framework .

• Day 1: Social web, semantic web and the web2.0
• Day 2: Social semantic web for companies

All cources are held in german. English speaking groups ask for extra arrangements.

Book today. Limited attendance.

Time for a bit of over-the-top web 2.0 adulation… at yesterday’s Digitalks event (organized once again wonderfully by Meral Akin-Hecke), Luca Hammer was there and filmed throughout the presentations and discussions – using two cameras at a time AND live-editing and live-streaming it on Make.tv. What is Make.tv? The most incredible web 2.0 application I’ve seen so far – it’s a TV-Studion in your browser! And it’s free! (Although I doubt I will stay free forever)

You can live-edit the input from several cameras – this can also be achieved by logging in on different computers at a time, thus using the input from several built-in webcams at a time. You can drag and drop the video input channels into your scene, make the embedded videos smaller to achieve a screen-in-screen effect, create your own TV design and virtual studio from graphics…. wow, wow, wow.

I played with it today, not being quite as adventurous as Luca, in that I used only one camera (see what he achieved yesterday with multiple screens), nor did I interrupt and restart the recording (which I could have), but even though, I find the visual result, i.e. the ’studio’ I built from the book cover, impressive enough.

So here is it: My introduction of the Social Semantic Web publication (which is in German, which is why the audio is in German, too, but you don’t need to understand what I am saying to be impressed by Make.tv). Jump to seconds 3:30 to 4:30 to see how you can switch between different screens while doing the web cast.

P.S. That’s an image below – you can embed the video, but you cannot (yet) deactivate that it starts automatically if you embed it, so I’ve decided to use an image on the blog instead. Click here, or the image, to launch the webcast on the Make.tv website.

Btw, I am not sure whether I said XML or XHTML in the webcast, but of course I meant XHTML when talking about the benefits of RDFa.

The “Social Semantic Web” is here – yay! The book of the same name, edited by Andreas Blumauer (right) and Tassilo Pellegrini, is now available in stores. Another contributor from SWC is Matthias Samwald (left), who, together with Holger Stenzhorn, discussed the relevance of the Semantic Web for biomedial research in their article for the book.

The publication (in German, with the exception of one article by Narayanan Kulathuramaiyer and Hermann Maurer addressing issues of Data Mining) has four sections:

• a low-threshold introduction to Web 2.0 and social software, covering technological, cultural and social aspects,
• an overview of core technologies and methods, covering e.g. knowledge discovery, expert finders, tag recommendation, etc,
• an overview and discussion of existing applications and their perspectives within the Social Semantic Web, e.g. the Semantic Desktop, Bibsonomy or the perspectives for biomedical research,
• a discussion of phenomena of the Social Semantic Web from the perspective of communication studies and social sciences, e.g. privacy on the social semantic web, or the role of user-generated content for individual empowerment.

We have also created a wiki for the book (using Semantic Media Wiki) which is available at social.semantic-web.at. You can, for instance, browse it by article, by author, or by organisation. Tom Schandl made a few changes to available templates, which he is soon going to blog about.

Image by leobard via FlickrAuthor copies were shipped last week – some of the contributors have already blogged about the book, for instance Leo Sauermann, who, together with Malte Kiesel, Kinga Schumacher and Ansgar Bernardi, contributed an article about the Semantic Desktop and personal knowledge management (image also provided by Leo Sauermann). Jan Schmidt a.k.a “Schmidt with Dee Tee”, in an article he wrote together with Tassilo Pellegrini, approached the Semantic Web from the perspective of Communication Studies; Jan has posted the abstract (in German) and offered a bit of commentary on his blog. Michael Nagenborg, who authored the article about privacy on the Social Semantic Web, announced the book on his website.

Please let us know if you’ve also written a blog post about the book or have resources on Flickr, Slideshare, elsewhere; and/or tag it with “socsemweb08″ so that we can find it. Of course you can also immediately add them to the wiki yourself (page Resonanz).

Complete list of contributors (in order of appearance in the book): (more…)

An interesting article for all those who are interested in technology discourse. In a recent VNU.net post the EU Commission made a statement about their understanding of Web 3.0:

While Web 2.0 described the trend towards online collaborative working, including the evolution of social networking sites, wikis and blogs, Web 3.0 will rely on high-performance broadband infrastructure.

According to Viviane Reding, Commissioner for Information Society and Media, Web 3.0

means seamless, anytime, anywhere business, entertainment and social networking over fast reliable and secure networks. [...] It means the end of the divide between mobile and fixed lines. We must make sure that Web 3.0 is made and used in Europe.

This sounds to me like selling old wine in new bottles, revitalising the Commission’s infrastructure policies. And altough broadband is a crucial factor in the evolution of the web, the Commission totally misses the point about the semantics-related innovation paths rolling out in a Web 3.0-scenario.

If anyone has the opportunity, please give Mrs. Reding a briefing!

The benefits of the Web 2.0 and Social Web are finally gaining wider recognition within the scientific and the (slowlier adjusting) academic community, with several online platforms evolving that seek to address the needs of researchers and (probably) academics.

There is ResearchGATE which calls itself a “scientific network” and who, among other things, offer a file sharing service that supports versioning, called ReSTORY.

Science mag Nature has its own online community, Nature Network, which offers profile pages and groups and a blog network. There is a little admission procedure anyone has to go through who wants to blog on Nature Network: “Send us a brief description of who you are and the topics you want to write about in your blog. We want to make sure that your proposed blog is a good fit for Nature Network.”

In Germany, there are two projects currently in beta, seeking to develop a social network for scientists: Scholarz.net, which evolved out of a research project dedicated to doing research with the web 2.0 at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg, and SciLife, which is developed by several PhD students in collaboration with Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden and members of the AK Spatz Group in Heidelberg, both research institutions.

Instead of setting up yet another social network, one can of course use the communities that exist. Today, for instance, I received an invitation from OpenCalais to check out their Facebook profile.

In addition to those communities, there are tagging and bookmarking services like Connotea, CiteULike and Bibsonomy who seek to make work and research easier for researchers.

While we are at it: François Bry and I have written an article about Web 2.0 and the Scientific Community which is due to appear in August in IM – Information Management & Consulting. Title of the publication (German only): Kreidetafel und Lounge 2.0 – Der Einzug sozialer Medien in Technik und Wissenschaft.

Image CC, based on WikiCommons, Buchner Flask.

Media. One of the sexiest businesses there is. Such is also true regarding the definitions of media within the last – let´s say – ten years.

Let´s catch a few glimpses. Explore the latest Web 2.0 developments at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco end of April. Web 2.0 has come to a close and now the work begins.

Change of scenery. Vienna has been a town of congresses ever since. A few days ago journalists and media experts all over Europe discussed the Online-versus-Print-topic at a European Newspaper Congress in the Wiener Rathaus (Photo: pte). Naturally, there are numerous interpretations and perspectives – dependent on the individual position, viewpoint and employment – but also on objectives: Who is the target group? Amazingly enough, I can notice all over the place – and across all businesses – that this primary topic within marketing is often being neglected. Lots of managers lose sight of this in their daily business.
In media terms: Who is going to read, watch or listen to my content? That´s THE question for media people. And being a journalist myself, I have been keeping an eye on this matter for many years. But whether something is sexy or not – who is going to judge? Even media experts might differ in this question.
(more…)