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In May last year we wrote about the state of Linked Data , an official W3C project that aims to connect separate data sets on the Web. Linked Data is a subset of the wider Semantic Web movement, in which data on the Web is encoded with meaning using technologies such as RDF and OWL. The ultimate vision is that the Web will become much more structured, which opens up many possibilities for "smarter" web applications. At this stage last year, we noted that Linked Data was ramping up fast - evidenced by the increasing number of data sets on the Web as at March 2009. Fast forward a year and the Linked Data 'cloud' has continued to expand. In this post we look at some of the developments in Linked Data over the past year. Sponsor Governments Get on Board The most high profile usage of Linked Data over the past year has come from two governments: the United States and United Kingdom. The U.S. was first to open up some of its non-personal data for use by developers, with the May 2009 launch of Data.gov . In January 2010, the U.K. government announced Data.gov.uk - with the help of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. At launch, Data.gov.uk had nearly 3,000 data sets available for developers to build mashups with. At the time it was more than three times as much data than the U.S. site offered. Following on from the launch of Data.gov.uk, U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced a new British Institute for Web Science along with $45 million in government backing. The Institute will be led by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and prominent researcher Nigel Shadbolt. This was great news for Linked Data, because according to Prime Minister Brown, the Institute "will help place the U.K. at the cutting edge of research on the Semantic Web and other emerging web and internet technologies." Commercial Applications There have been commercial success stories too, such as OpenCalais for media, MusicBrainz for music and GoodRelations for e-commerce. There are also many commercial sites tapping into the general knowledge data store at dbpedia.org . However it's relatively early days for commercial applications of Linked Data. We're beginning to see smart people explore potential use cases, such as this list for news organizations , but much of the early implementation is being done by publicly funded entities such as the U.K.'s BBC. The latest version of the Linking Open Data dataset cloud , as at July 2009, maintained by Richard Cyganiak and Anja Jentzsch. Just Get The Data Up There To reiterate, Linked Data is data that has been marked up using Semantic Web technologies such as RDF (Resource Description Framework) or RDFa (a simpler variation). Minus the acronyms, Linked Data is simply structured data . However one of the reasons the Semantic Web hasn't yet been widely adopted, at least commercially, is that it's often difficult or time consuming to mark up data semantically. RDF in particular has a reputation for being painful to code. With that in mind, the past year has been as much about prompting governments and organizations to put their data up on the Web in whatever form they can . Indeed when I interviewed Sir Tim Berners-Lee last July , he told me that he'd be happy if governments "just put data up in whatever form it's available." He mentioned that "Comma separated values (CSV) files are remarkably popular." He'd be much more happier if it was semantically marked up data, using the likes of RDF, but conversion can happen after it's been uploaded to the Web. So overall, Linked Data is still early in its adoption curve. However it's undeniably become a solid on-ramp to the wider Semantic Web and world of structured data. For a good technical overview of the current state of Linked Data and the Semantic Web, see this presentation by Davide Palmisano. Discuss
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The State of Linked Data in 2010
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One of the first web design books I bought was Creating Killer Web Sites , a 90s classic by David Siegel. That book was known for pushing visual style over HTML standards. It also encouraged the use of HTML hacks , for example using tables to create layouts. Siegel's techniques were basically workarounds, but they just worked in an era when building web pages was painful due to browser incompatibilities. In Siegel's latest book, Pull , he tackles the Semantic Web. Once again, Siegel plays loosely with existing web standards. Sponsor Siegel's definition of 'Semantic Web' is much broader than that of many technologists. So, just as many Web standards advocates derided Siegel's version of web design back in the 90s, will they also cry foul of his version of the Semantic Web? Pull is being positioned as a business guide to the emerging Semantic Web. It has similarities to Creating Killer Web Sites , which caught the wave of an emerging big trend of the mid-90s (web site design) and became a bestseller. Siegel is attempting to catch a second big online wave, with the Semantic Web in 2010. Siegel explains the title in the introduction: "This book describes the pull era , where customers pull everything to them on demand - products, services, information, knowledge, and advice. Much of the foundation for pulling is called the semantic web , a new way of packaging information to make it much more useful and reusable. Over the next ten to twenty years, it will change business from a lead-push model to a pull-follow model of interacting with customers." It's hard to argue against the vision that the book outlines. However for many Semantic Web proponents, the foundational technologies are Resource Description Framework (RDF), Web Ontology Language (OWL), and Extensible Markup Language (XML). These standards allow web publishers to encode meaning - semantics - into their sites. David Siegel's definition of Semantic Web is far broader. On the book's accompanying website, The Power of Pull , there is a " Semantic Web Acid Test ." It defines a semantic web business as one that has an "unambiguous" structure for its data. The book states that "some technologists feel that semantic web data must be expressed using a language called RDF," but Siegel disagrees. Instead, he believes that "simple, unambiguous formats are part of the semantic web." The book is ultimately about how structured data will change how we do business. Frankly, the use of the term 'Semantic Web' in this book feels forced. Even so, I think it's a very useful book and offers detailed scenarios of how structured data will improve business. For example, chapter 4 is about retailers and outlines the benefits of RFID tags in retail - including describing a visit Siegel made to forward-thinking German retailer Metro Group. Overall Pull is a solid and well-researched book. It's a good introduction for business people to structured data and the Semantic Web. My one issue with the book is that Siegel's appropriation of the term 'Semantic Web' leaves me feeling a little uneasy. On the home page of his personal website is a blog post (entitled 'Why I Should be Apple's Next CEO'), in which Siegel claims that he "started talking about the Semantic Web in 1998, before Tim Berners-Lee coined the term." Whether that's true or not, it does beg the question: is Siegel's definition of the Semantic Web the same as Tim Berners-Lee's? Discuss
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David Siegel: From Killer Web Sites to Semantic Web
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As one of ReadWriteWeb's iPhone users, I'm always looking for new applications to try out. Some get downloaded for a day and then deleted right away, others slowly inch their way closer to my homescreen. Even rarer are the ones that become actively used on a regular basis. Occasionally, we like to share our findings regarding our favorite new apps. (See, for example, last month's list here ). Although I can't guarantee that all of the ones on the list below will become favorites forever , they piqued my interest enough to get a coveted spot on my iPhone this month. Let us know what you think about their potential for long-lasting success. Sponsor 1. Miso I've been playing with Miso off and on for a week or so. Dubbed a "Foursquare-Like App for Homebodies" by yours truly, this app lets you "check-in" to the TV shows and movies you're watching and earn badges. While I like the idea, I've found that the app suffers from the lack of an easy way to find and follow other users. That leaves us TV-watching "stay-at-home" folks feeling a little too isolated when already taking part in a rather non-social, non-interactive activity. However, if the app can improve the ability to find and follow other like-minded entertainment consumers, there's potential for a fun "niche use" type of app here. (Review: Miso: A Foursquare-Like App for Homebodies ) 2. MediaServer MediaServer seems so promising, but I've had trouble getting all aspects of it to work properly. The app is designed to be an easy way to view your iPhone media on your TV set by way of a Media Center-type hardware device (XMBC, Boxee, etc.) or game console (PS3, XBox 360). And it is easy to use. You install the app, launch it, and boom!, your media console sees your iPhone - no configuration required. As far as viewing user-created videos or photos, the app excels. But streaming music or video? Not so much. Due to varying degrees of DRM applied to the files themselves and codec support on the hardware device, playing media on your TV is harder than it should be. (I tried with the Xbox in my tests.) Whether it's the app that's to blame or the hardware, I can't tell. However, MediaServer did become a great way to do iPhone photo slideshows on the TV and that alone is keeping it on my phone for now. Hopefully the rest will be improved in time. 3. Sticky Bits The RWW bloggers who attended the recent SXSW festival have come back raving about the barcode-scanning Stickybits app (iTunes link). The app, which debuted at the conference, goes hand-in-hand with the online service that lets you either print your own barcodes or buy pre-made stickers which you can then associate with real-world objects. Using the Stickybits iPhone application, anyone encountering these stickers in the wild can scan them to discover whatever data theyv'e been associated with. Will Stickybits actually stick around though? It's too soon to tell, but it sure is fun to play with in the meantime. (Review: Stickbits: Portal to Another Dimension or Graffiti for Nerds? ) 4. Siri Although not brand-new, the Siri app which debuted in February on the iPhone is rapidly becoming one of our all-time favorites and therefore has to make this list again. If you have not installed Siri yet, do so now! Built with artificial intelligence technology, Siri functions as a personal assistant which can provide information on a variety of topics from weather to movie listings to restaurants, events and more. You can either type into the app's search box or speak your query to get started. And the more you use it, the smarter it gets. The voice recognition works well, too, although it never understood "Alice in Wonderland movie" no matter how many times I said it. (Maybe it already knew I wouldn't like that movie?) We'll give it a pass there, though - voice recognition is a tough nut to crack. Still, the intelligence of this app will soon have you relocating the apps it replaces (movie listing apps, restaurant finders, etc.) to back screens of the iPhone. (Review: Siri: Your Personal Assistant for the Mobile Web ) 5. Tweeb Obsessed with ego-tracking your Twitter stats or tasked with managing a corporate account of some kind? Then Tweeb's new Twitter analytics tracker (iTunes link) is a handy app to have. For $1.99, you get access to real-time, on-demand statistics including tweet counts, follower counts, retweets, mentions and clickthroughs on your tweeted links. You can also use the app to tweet, manage your friends, block or unblock users, view Twitter profiles, view your following lists and manage multiple Twitter accounts. The data is presented in clean, easy-to-read layouts and there is even a history section so you can measure your growing influence over time. Well worth a couple of bucks if you access this data on a regular basis! 6. Buzzie The first app to access Google Buzz natively is pretty great, but I'll admit that I'm more likely to switch over to Buzz from Google Reader's mobile website than launch a standalone app. If the iPhone had app multitasking though, that would be a different story. Still, Buzzie has a few standout features - photo-sharing and photo browsing, most notably. It also feels "a lot snappier" than Google Buzz's web app, noted Frederic earlier this month during his demo. (Review: Buzzie: The First Native Mobile App for Google Buzz ) 7. SpringPad Part of Springpad's service , this Evernote competitor functions as a mobile note-taking and reminder app. Similar to Evernote's offering, you can write a note or snap a photo to remember something (which is then added to your online account), but it also introduces barcode-scanning as another way to "remember" an item. You can use the app to access all your saved data, too - handy for accessing shopping lists, recipes and restaurants you want to try while you're out and about. (Review: Springpad Takes on Evernote with Semantic Technology, Barcode Scanner ) Honorable Mentions Other apps getting demoed on our iPhones include the following: Brizzly for Twitter : Will we leave Tweetie 2 for this new Twitter iPhone app? It could happen! Feathers : Want to have a little fun with your tweets? Feathers lets you decorate them with symbols, icons or even post them upside-down. Notifio : Just launched, this app tries to bring Android-style notifications to one central place on the iPhone, but it's dependent on others to use its API to do so. If successful, it could be amazing...but that remains to be seen. You can see all the apps on my iPhone courtesy of AppsFire here . Discuss
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Weekend Fun: New Apps for Your iPhone
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Think the semantic web is all hype with no bite? Paul Allen backed semantic startup Evri will announce tomorrow that it has been acquired, we've learned from a reliable source. The service specializes in extracting the names of people, places and things from raw streams of text in order to facilitate smart user navigation and related content recommendation. The company launched a striking new version of its website earlier today. Evri launched just short of two years ago and raised $8 million from Vulcan, the fund of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. More interesting than the business side of this story, though, is the technology. Evri brings the semantic and the real-time web together in some very interesting ways. Sponsor We profiled Evri as one of 10 intriguing companies in the real-time web space in our recent research report The Real-Time Web and Its Future . Also included was the now Google-acquired Aardvark. (See our coverage: How I Loved and Lost an Aardvark ) Here's how we described the real time part of what Evri does in that report: Evri is a semantic Web recommendation service for online publishers. The company tracks the real-time Web to know when it needs to create or update a topic page for one of its emerging news topics. Evri watches news sources to see when a news topic is trending, including articles on Wikipedia that publicly available data shows have leaped in page views. Then it visits structured databases like Wikipedia and FreeBase to check for updates to entries about related entities. It then creates or updates a topic page with news links, photos and Twitter search results. The language used in those Twitter posts is analyzed and the names of news entities in the posts are linked to other Evri topic pages, like pivots. Evri has done lots of other things as well, including a blog widget, an iPhone app, automated content portals for publishers and a sentiment analysis product. The company didn't see a particularly large amount of hype but was closely watched. Robert Scoble, for example, named Evri one of his top startups to watch for 2010 , even a year and a half after it launched. We haven't been able to identify the company that has acquired Evri yet but the most obvious candidate would be its neighbor and kin Microsoft, where the service would compliment the Powerset team nicely and change the Bing user experience in news search dramatically. Now that we know that Google is working on building a real-time index of the web ( our coverage ) the prospect of a competitor upping the ante with near real-time semantic parsing, riding on top of real-time indexing, sounds like a hot move. A number of people have raised the possibility of an Amazon acquisition as well. Evri was also tested out by Yahoo! starting last Fall as a way to facilitate navigation throughout its Sports content pages. Take that, semantic web doubters. We'll update this post when the acquiring party is identified. Geeky types interested in an in-depth explanation of Evri's work would be well served by checking out a 6 part video series on YouTube wherein Deep Dhillon, CTO of Evri, discusses the company's technology with students at the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering. Discuss
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Paul Allen Backed Semantic Service Evri Has Been Acquired
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Our top story this week was location - location-based networks, services, advertising and even "feelings". Read on for our coverage and analysis. We also continued our exploration of the significant Internet trends of 2010, including Real-Time Web, Mobile Web and Internet of Things. Note: We've refreshed the format for our longest running feature, the Weekly Wrapup. It now focuses more explicitly on the key trends that ReadWriteWeb is tracking in 2010, as well as giving you the highlights from the leading story of the week. Let us know your thoughts on the new format. Sponsor Story of the Week: Location Can Brightkite Beat Foursquare & Gowalla With a Universal Check-in? Google Patents Location-Based Advertising 2 Services for DIY Mobile Social Networks Google Chrome Becomes Location Aware Can Geosense for Windows Help Kickstart the Development of Location-Aware Apps for Windows 7? Glow: Location-Based "Feelings" for iPhone More coverage and analysis of location-based technology Announcing the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit Join us for the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit on May 7 in Mountain View, California as we explore the latest mobile development trends, both the technology and the emerging business applications. Be a part of the discussion on geo-location services , augmented reality , native app vs. browser-based , commerce and marketing , mobile social networking and the Internet of Things. Sponsorship enquiries: sales@readwriteweb.com , Register now for the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit and get early bird rates - only $295. Mobile Web Watch Out, iPhone Devs: One-Man Android App Nets $13K Monthly Netflix on the iPhone? Yes, Please! Can We Kick Our Keyboard Addiction by 2013? More Mobile Web coverage Historic Conversation in NYC: Ai Weiwei, Jack Dorsey & Richard MacManus On March 15, at the prestigious Paley Center in New York City, a conversation will take place between Chinese digital activist and artist Ai Weiwei , Twitter co-founder and chairman Jack Dorsey , and yours truly, Richard MacManus , ReadWriteWeb founder and editor in chief. The moderator will be Orville Schell , the director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York. The topic of the event is the emergence of digital activism for fostering positive social change. The onsite event is invitation only, but it will be live streamed exclusively on ReadWriteWeb on Monday, March 15, at 6:30 PM EST (-5 GMT), from the Paley Center for Media, New York City. Internet of Things McKinsey: Get Ready For Sensor-Driven Business Models Ads with Eyes: Keeping Digital Signage in Check Google Wants Your Lamp to Tell You How Much Power It's Using More Internet of Things coverage Real-Time Web Google Index to Go Real Time 10.5 Million WordPress Blogs Get PubSubHubbub Beyond Twitter Search: Semantic Analysis of the Real-Time Web More Real-Time Web coverage . Don't miss the next wave of opportunity on the Web supported by real-time technology! Get ReadWriteWeb's report, The Real-Time Web and its Future . Check Out The ReadWriteWeb iPhone App We recently launched the official ReadWriteWeb iPhone app . As well as enabling you to read ReadWriteWeb while on the go or lying on the couch, we've made it easy to share ReadWriteWeb posts directly from your iPhone, on Twitter and Facebook. You can also follow the RWW team on Twitter, directly from the app. We invite you to download it now from iTunes . ReadWriteStart Our channel ReadWriteStart , sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark , is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs. The Startup Bus: Is This How Outsiders See Startup Culture? Picnik CEO to Startups: The M&As Are Out There Are Crowdsourcing and Outsourcing No-Nos For Startups? ReadWriteEnterprise Our channel ReadWriteEnterprise is devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' and using social software inside organizations. Will StatusNet Be Another Open-Source Star in the Enterprise? Drupal Founder Critical of SaaS and its Proprietary Nature ReadWriteCloud Our channel ReadWriteCloud , sponsored by VMware and Intel, is dedicated to Virtualization and Cloud Computing. Steve Ballmer: Microsoft's Future Is in the Cloud Weekly Poll: What is the Top Threat to Cloud Computing? How Many Enterprise Workers Will Work in the Mobile Cloud? Try 130 Million That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone. Discuss
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Weekly Wrap-up: Location, Location, Location, and More...
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