It looks like quite a few of us from Talis will be making the trip over to San Jose in May, for this year’s Semantic Technology Conference.

Our CEO, Dave Errington, is on a panel of senior executives with Radar Networks’ Nova Spivack and others. I look forward to seeing past the usual vapourware demonstrations to actually hear what these CEO’s think, what makes them tick, and where they think this sector is headed.

Our CTO, Ian Davis, will be sharing some of our internal rationale in a paper on the ‘Semantic Web as a Blue Ocean Opportunity‘ (if you don’t get the reference, read the book), and he and Danny Ayers will also be offering a half-day workshop for those who want to get hands on with the Talis Platform.

I hope to be capturing proceedings, and sharing my impressions here or on ZDNet as appropriate. I shall also be securing a number of podcast interviews with some of the more interesting speakers in the run up to the event itself.

For those who plan to attend, why not check out last month’s Talis Platform News for a discount code that you can use when registering for the conference? And while you’re at it, get in touch if you fancy meeting up.

Technorati Tags: Semantic Web, Talis, Web 3.0

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The next generation of the web, this Semantic Web, is in its infancy but already we’re seeing some fantastic glimpses of its potential.

We saw some of that potential recently at DrupalCon 2008 where Dries Buytaert used his keynote to share a vision of the future… one that is built on RDF (read more on our sister blog).

Imagine every Drupal installation as a Linked Data source. Wow!

This would be a massive step towards the Semantic Web’s maturation and I hope the Drupal people can pull it off. My advice would be to remember that these are still early days and to tackle it with pragmatic baby steps. Just like the early days of the Web there’ll be plenty of stop energy trying to drag you back, but hold your nerve and see it through.

Adoption of the technologies by significant projects like Drupal really shows that we’re entering a new generation of the Web, one that is much more data-centric. The few billion triples online right now are just a drop in the ocean of what we’ll need for a useful Semantic Web so this news from Drupal is hugely important.

It feels like the Web did back when being able to launch a website on Geocities was a liberating experience. There wasn’t much to link to back then either but fifteen years later the Web is unrecognisable in terms of its diversity and effect on the World. I’m willing to bet that in another decade it will have changed again way beyond our expectations and predictions today.

The best is yet to come.

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No, before you get too excited (Ian!), I’m not leaving Talis. I am, however, delighted to announce that I’ve just started a shiny new blog devoted wholly to the Semantic Web. The blog, modestly called The Semantic Web, is the latest addition to ZDNet’s family of blogs. Given the importance of so many of ZDNet’s existing blogs to my daily reading ritual, this is both an honour and a rather daunting prospect.

Any observations on the proximity of Dan Farber’s move to my own arrival would be unwarranted, but likely to exercise minds on #talis for days to come…

As noted in my very first post,

“…I’ll be looking to line up a series of guest bloggers with interesting perspectives of their own to add”

So watch this space…

Technorati Tags: ZDNet, Semantic Web, Talis

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February’s issue of our monthly Platform newsletter is now available online, with its usual mix of stories relevant both to the Talis Platform and to the wider Semantic Web.

This month, we report on the arrival of new boy Tom Heath, as well as taking a look at discounted entry to one of the big events of the Spring. Ian Davis takes his usual peek behind the curtain, and Tom hits the ground running with a retrospective on the first year of the Linking Open Data Project

For all this and more, check out February’s issue of the newsletter. And to receive email notification of future issues as they become available, please don’t forget to subscribe.

Technorati Tags: Semantic Web, Talis, Talis Platform

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As I mentioned last week, Talis CTO Ian Davis was at the Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) yesterday, to give a talk on the Talis Platform.

Former KMi student Tom Heath, Sam Tunnicliffe and myself were also along (for the lunch, of course), and spent a fascinating day looking at some of the research that the team at KMi are engaged in. More on that in future posts, I’m sure.

Ian’s presentation was webcast as he spoke, and has now been made available online at KMi for those who weren’t free or awake at the time.

And the Moroccan fish? That was my lunch.

Cow picture CC-licensed on Flickr… Cow story from Wikipedia…

Technorati Tags: KMi, Semantic Web, Talis, Talis Platform

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It’s going to be a busy spring in Semantic Web land. There are five important conferences that are scheduled in a two month period.

First up is WWW2008 in Beijing which runs from the 21st to the 25th of April. This is the pre-eminent Web conference packed full of presentations, workshops and tutorials covering everything webby. The Semantic Web traditionally has a number of tracks running through the conference programme. This year we’re co-chairing a session called Linked Data on the Web with Tim Berners-Lee, Chris Bizer and Kingsley Idehen. Rob submitted a paper to the workshop on representing MARC in RDF which I recommend to anyone interested in the future of library data. I’ve seen a couple of the other submissions and it looks like it’s going to be a lot of fun.

Then there’s a week off until XTech 2008 which runs from the 6th to the 9th of May in Dublin. XTech is another webby conference that often has a Semantic Web streak through it. Many of the people involved in organising and helping to run it are SemWeb sympathisers. A couple of us at Talis have submitted talk proposals although we won’t find out if we’ve been selected until the end of this month. XTech clashes completely with JavaOne in San Francisco which also has a little Semantic Web session courtesy of Henry Story and friends.

Another break of a week before Semantic Technology in San Jose from 19th to 22nd May. This is the fourth year for this conference whose focus is coming from the world of semantics rather than the Web. Last year saw all kinds of attendees from the CIA and NASA to Lockheed and Citigroup. This is the conference to be at if you want to see commercial applications of the SemWeb.

Again, a week off until we reach ESWC 2008 in Tenerife from the 1st to the 5th June. This is a hardcore SemWeb conference with a strong research angle. Once again we’re involved in a organising a workshop: Scripting for the Semantic Web, which aims to cover the use of the Semantic Web with all kinds of scripting languages such as PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby and JavaScript. I’m also looking forward to the first workshop on Collective Intelligence & the Semantic Web which promises to be a very hot topic in coming years.

One more week off, before we reach the new kid on the block: Linked Data Planet being held in New York on the 17th and 18th of June. Details are sketchy at the moment apart from the keynote from Tim Berners-Lee, but Linked Data has a lot of momentum and there is a lot of potential for some cool demonstrations.

As you might expect a contingent of Talisians are attending each conference, but none of us are going to attempt all five! Personally I’m planning to be at XTech and Semantic Technology and possibly at ESWC and Linked Data. I know for sure that I’m glad of the holiday I have booked for the end of June. I think I’m going to need it

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Tim O’Reilly provides an interesting insight into the thinking of Reuters‘ CEO-in-waiting, Devin Wenig. Tim’s post rides on the back of an on-stage interview he conducted with Devin during O’Reilly’s new Money:Tech conference which just wrapped up in New York.

In amongst a lot of insight, Tim writes,

“Devin’s point about the semantic web was thought-provoking. Ultimately, Reuters’ news is the raw material for analysis and application by investors and downstream news organizations. Adding metadata to make that job of analysis easier for those building additional value on top of your product is a really interesting way to view the publishing opportunity. If you don’t think of what you produce as the ‘final product’ but rather as a step in an information pipeline, what do you do differently to add value for downstream consumers? In Reuters’ case, Devin thinks you add hooks to make your information more programmable. This is a really important insight, and one I’m going to be chewing on for some time.”

“Really important insight” ? Too right!

Tim continues,

“That’s a really good case for the Semantic Web, and one that I hadn’t understood before. It’s not about having end users add semantics for the love of it. That’s just overhead, which is why I’ve always argued against it, preferring the kind of implicit semantics that come from applications that harness user self-interest. But professional publishers definitely have an incentive to add semantics if their ultimate consumer is not just reading what they produce, but processing it in increasingly sophisticated ways.”

It sounds as if Devin needs the sort of connection exploiting that the Talis Platform was built for. It also sounds as if he’d be a great addition to Nova Spivack, Brad Feld, Mills Davis, Troy Lane Williams, this week’s extra-special mystery guest, and the rest in our ongoing Semantic Web podcast series.

Does anyone have his number?

Technorati Tags: Devin Wenig, Reuters, Semantic Web, Talis, Talis Platform, Tim O’Reilly, Web 3.0

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Our very own Ian Davis will be giving a presentation on the Talis Platform next week, at the Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute (KMi).

“The Talis Platform provides a generic infrastructure for building data-rich Web and Semantic Web applications. By taking care of the ‘heavy lifting’ associated with data management and storage, developers are freed up to concentrate on building applications using the Platform’s APIs and services. In this presentation I will outline the problems the Platform is attempting to solve, describe the principles on which our approach is based, and ground these in trends such as ‘Software as a Service’. The capabilities of the Platform will be illustrated through demos of Platform services for mashing up heterogeneous data and providing faceted querying over data sets. I’ll wrap up the talk by describing how members of the audience can use the Platform to support their own applications, and help shape its future development.”

KMi look like they’ve got a nice setup with their KMi Podium, and make events available for watching live or (higher quality, Tom tells me) in archived form after the event.

So if you’re awake at 1100 GMT (find out) on Wednesday 13 February, and reckon you can be one of the first hundred through the virtual door, why not come along and hear about what we’re doing from the mouth of the CTO?

For everyone else, check back later in the week for the archived version which you can then watch at your leisure.

Technorati Tags: KMi, Talis, Talis Platform

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Kendall Clark of Clark & Parsia writes,

“Last week POPS—the expertise location service we built for NASA—went into production as an Agency-wide application; it’s thought to be the first ‘institutional’ (that is, business) Semantic Web app deployed Agency-wide at NASA”

“We’re very proud of this accomplishment. It’s proof that SemWeb technologies like RDF and SPARQL are useful for building information integration problems.”

“And despite all the OWL—and, especially, OWL DL—work we do, this demonstrates that we’re also a pretty good ’shallow end’ SemWeb app company, too.”

Absolutely. It’s great to see examples such as this one, in which Semantic Web technologies ’simply’ get on with making something mundane but necessary that little bit better, that little bit more functional, that little bit more able to play in the wider web of data.

I wonder what a Semantic Space Shuttle would look like?

Technorati Tags: Semantic Web, Talis

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Do you ever have those days where a lot seems to happen whilst you’re distracted by other things? I’ve just had three of those in a row, induced by circuitous travel arrangements, dodgy network connectivity, a long day spent actually talking to people, a rather nice dinner down by Oslo harbour, and…

…swimming lessons. No, not mine.

So, let’s pretend it’s Monday again and then I can topically break the news that Jemima Kiss has ‘just’ (it’s Monday, remember?) written a piece for UK broadsheet, The Guardian; ‘Web 3.0 is all about rank and recommendation.’ Whilst I would never suggest that a paper like The Guardian should make its writers hold a single point of view, it’s interesting to contrast Jemima’s piece with Anthony Lilley’s last October…

Writing in the context of UK success story, Last.fm, Jemima suggests,

“If web 2.0 could be summarised as interaction, web 3.0 must be about recommendation and personalisation. While the Tim Berners-Lees of this world work out how to make the language of the web function more effectively behind the scenes, our front-of-house task is to get stuck in and intelligently work these technologies into our businesses. It is not enough to understand the strategy behind these new applications, such as Twitter and Reddit - they rely on participation.”

We could quibble (endlessly) about what Web 3.0 is, whether it exists, and how it differs from the equally hard to nail notion of Web 2.0. We have certainly seen increased awareness of various recommendation and tracking systems, and these are becoming ever-more sophisticated inside the walls of the silos for which they were created.

The Architecture of Participation really has arrived, but the architects and builders of today are focussing all of their attention upon their own houses, without consideration for the neighbourhood. They’re all digging their own wells in the back garden for water. They’re all building their own massively over-engineered power stations in the cellar, just to run the champagne fridge and a few light bulbs. They’re all going all Capability Brown, and crafting stunning views of the landscape around them, whilst giving no thought to the implications for their neighbours. They’re all doing everything, without considering the benefits of appropriate collaboration, and without recognising where their true - differentiating - core strengths lie. The guy next door is a better plumber than you; why not let him lay your water pipes? That power station of yours isn’t working very hard at all; why not find ways to let the neighbours use it too?

With the arrival of missing piece SPARQL, the ‘language of the web’ is ready to ‘function more effectively behind the scenes’. As Jemima argues, it really is time to ‘get stuck in and intelligently work these technologies into our businesses.’

Tim Berners-Lee wrote last year about the ‘Giant Global Graph‘. The ideas there, and some of the technical pieces that solutions like the Talis Platform bring to the table, show that the Semantic Web has moved way past ‘research’ or the endless debate of the standards process. Jemima’s ‘recommendations’ are simply one manifestation of the network of relationships between people and resources; recommendation, warning, review, ‘friend’, ‘colleague’ and more. That web of assertions and relationships is something to which the Semantic Web is perfectly suited. Pragmatically and realistically applied, the semantic technologies built into the Talis Platform are just the thing to help real businesses solve real problems that they face out on the web. We’re past the early days. It’s time to stop digging our own wells and building our own power stations. Utilities make sense, and relying upon them means that you concentrate on differentiating and adding value… rather than spending your days lifting sludge and dead rats out of the well.

Those recommendations and relationships upon which Amazon, Last.fm and others rely? They’re far more valuable when they can be used in more than one place. There are other ways to differentiate than by the size of your recommendation database.

Jemima concludes,

“Above all, the most reassuring trend is that the values of credibility and trust are more important than ever in the ocean of information we have to navigate every day. The technology is not enough on its own, and that should be a comfort to editors everywhere.”

Editors, and everyone else. I couldn’t agree more.

Technorati Tags: Giant Global Graph, Jemima Kiss, Semantic Web, Talis

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