Commercialising the Semantic Web

Posted by Paul Miller @ 5:49 am

Categories: Commercialisation, Semantic Web, Semantic Web Companies, Investment

Tags: Garlik, Semantic Web, Internet, Paul Miller

Following an earlier post on this blog, last month I found myself moderating a panel in the final session of one of the tracks at this year’s World Wide Web Conference in Beijing. As I commented via Twitter at the end of the session,

“Great panel and great room… so a doddle.”

The panel comprised colleague Chris Clarke, Garlik Director and CTO (and Southampton University Professor) Nigel Shadbolt, DERI’s Giovanni Tummarello and David Peterson of BoaB Interactive in Australia. Each brought a different perspective to discussion of commercialising the potential of the Semantic Web, and responded well to questions from a technically knowledgeable audience.

Having expressed concerns about the relative lack of commercial engagement with the Web Conference during April’s Semantic Web Gang just days before this panel took place, I was certainly reassured by much of what I heard.

Giovanni, for one, spoke with conviction about activity at DERI to move their Sindice research project onto a sound commercial footing, and flew from Beijing to California to begin meeting with potential investors. Nigel was also able to shed light on the early success of Garlik in exploiting university research, building a consumer user-base (some 60,000 registered users, of which 10,000 are already paying for additional features), and monetising both in partnership with established organisations such as the major high street banks. Garlik CEO Tom Ilube points to the next stage of Garlik’s journey in an article for May’s Nodalities Magazine, to which I shall doubtless return when it’s published next week (disclosure: I am the editor).

Asked if Garlik’s DataPatrol product would have been ‘possible’ without the Semantic Web, Shadbolt echoed a sentiment that I’ve heard elsewhere, suggesting that it would have taken longer to do and been a much harder programming task;

“unpredictable data is hard to work with, without the Semantic Web.”

During questions, Tim Berners-Lee reiterated his earlier thoughts on the importance of Semantic Web technologies in facilitating ‘unexpected re-use’ of data, leading the panel to discuss several of the ways in which their own work has created unanticipated opportunities to push data in new directions.

W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead Ivan Herman cited a perception that universities are failing to provide sufficient skills to students entering the workforce, and asked if panellists struggle to recruit. He also pointed to SWEO case-studies on the deployment of semantic web technologies in business, and called for more examples.

Everyone on the panel was agreed in stressing the importance of building applications that solve real problems for real users. Neither users nor investors are particularly interested in being pitched with ‘the Semantic Web’ or ‘RDF’ or ‘triples’; they want applications and solutions. The fact that the Semantic Web is at work behind the scenes to make those applications and solutions ‘better’, cheaper, more scalable or whatever is clearly important, but shouldn’t be the opening gambit in conversation. Chris illustrated this point with reference to his presentation on Talis Engage from the session before the panel; a new application built in its entirety on top of a Semantic Web Platform, but intended for purchase by a conservative market (local government agencies) and use by a non-technical audience (the general public; specifically those interested in local clubs, societies and events). Chris stressed the effort that had gone into making this potentially powerful application look and behave in a conservative manner, in order to introduce its capabilities gradually to a market unused to Saas, semantic technologies and Open World opportunities.

From my (doubtless biased) perspective, we got a good discussion going between panellists and the audience, and it would be interesting to repeat the experience at a more business-oriented event such as next week’s Semantic Technology or Linked Data Planet in June. The obvious omission from the panel (we did ask!) was representation from a big organisation; one of the search engines, Oracle, etc. I’d make sure to rectify that omission next time.

Swotti - A Semantic Opinions Aggregator

Written by Sarah Perez / March 21, 2008 10:08 AM / 0 Comments

Swotti is a new semantic search engine that aggregates opinions about products to help you make purchasing decisions. With Swotti, you can learn from the good and bad experiences of others as the site gathers together reviews and feedback from across the web and categorizes them to provide you with more information about the product you're interested in. What's unique about this search engine is that it uses semantics to do so.

There isn't a lot of info about Swotti on their main site - no FAQ, no blog, no how-to section; it's just a search box on a white page. But as you begin typing, search suggestions appear underneath the search box, making it easier to find what you're looking for. Click on search and you'll be taken to a product reviews page, where you'll be amazed at the amount of data displayed.

Swotti aggregates opinions about products from product review sites, forums and discussion boards, web sites and blogs, and then categorizes those reviews as to what feature or aspect of the product is being reviewed, tagging it accordingly, and then rating the review on as positive or negative.

Take the iPhone for example - each review is tagged with keywords like Design, Usability, Display, Reliability, Noise, Battery, Service, Camera, Keypad, Size, etc. Based on the number of positive reviews for a tag, a rating for that feature is given. Bar charts show green bars for good, yellow for average, or red for bad reviews. And they seem to be pretty accurate, at least for the iPhone - "design" is 5 green bars, "speed" is 3 red bars.

There is even a pie chart that summarizes the views. In the iPhone example, 15% said "I Love," 11% said "Too Expensive," 11% said "Worst." (Note to those who hated your iPhones: please send them this way.)

Product images display on the left and the reviews themselves, linked to the original source, display on the right. The reviews can also be sorted to display the best reviews, the worst, or the most relevant. Beneath the sorting options, the number of reviews display.

iPhone Results in Swotti

What's interesting is that this data seems to have been collected, tagged, and rated using only Swotti's technology. This isn't Mahalo - no user-intervention here - it's all automated.

One problem with the site seems to the be with the English spellings of things and wording, like "Adjective" was spelled "Adjetive." Since the site is also offered in Spanish, its likely that the Spanish version was created first and this is an English translation. However, this is only a minor drawback.

Whether it gets it right all the time - that's the real issue. The problems lies in similarly named products, obviously something that is still being sorted out. For example, a search for the Lenovo x300 also returned results for the Dell Latitude x300. I couldn't filter out the Dell results by using -dell in my query a la Google, as that returned a "No enough opinions" result (Yep, that's the English again).

Clicking on "Are you unsatisfied with your results? Help us" gave me a Spanish entry form which returned a bunch of code when I submitted my comments...although at the bottom it did say "Gracias por haber dado tu opinion," so maybe it went through anyway.

Altough these issues would have to be worked out for the site to became mainstream, it doesn't deduct from Swotti's potential - Swotti is reading, categorizing, and rating data from the web on its own. A great concept which hopefully will get better with time. Definitely worth watching.

Semantic Web Brings Change to SOA

It's impossible to underestimate the impact that SOA, or service-oriented architectures, has had on enterprises and business integration. Whether or not a business has implemented a full-fledged SOA platform, there is still a very good chance that a large portion of their business and partner integration is based on core SOA technologies such as XML. The funny thing about SOA is that despite its importance, its origins were in many ways a surprise to many of the pundits and experts who followed the technology at the time of its infancy. Back then, most of the focus on Web services was on the consumer and individual side of the Web. Anyone who sat through early Web services demos most likely saw a sample application designed to help an individual book travel, or buy online goods. But while all of the pundits were focused on consumer-side Web services (and often predicting the failure of Web services due to the lack of consumer Web services) much of the real work in Web services happened in the nuts and bolts of enterprise back office integration. Core Web services technologies such as XML, UDDI and WSDL proved invaluable to helping businesses tie together their databases and applications and also integrate with partner applications. And the growth and maturation of these technologies has led to what we today call SOA. And now SOA is today facing a potentially radical change that could greatly alter the way businesses use and build SOA platforms. And interestingly, the technology that will bring about this change is one that faced a similar growth curve as SOA. This technology is the Semantic Web, which itself faced misplaced hype in its infancy and is now seeing real growth and interesting implementations that are in many ways different from the initial expectations. The Semantic Web is Web creator Tim Berners-Lee's next vision for the Web and a technology that has been called (somewhat unfortunately) Web 3.0. In short, the Semantic Web is a set of technologies that make it possible to treat all content and information on the Web as if it was data in a database. In a semantic-enabled Web, whole new types of applications and mashups become possible as everything on the Web is tagged, marked and linked to accurately portray what it is. Not surprisingly, these technologies could have a huge impact on how Web services and SOA systems are deployed. Think about a typical Web service. The technologies of Web services tell systems how to connect, how to map to each other and how to convert data. But they can't tell anything about the services themselves. To a SOA enabled system, there's really no difference between a WSDL for a supply chain system and a WSDL for reading RSS feeds. But in a semantically enabled SOA, the services would actually describe themselves. In these scenarios, it would be possible to write implementations that would automatically find all services and data that had been tagged to meet a specific SOA need (say for example tax information). These capabilities, along with other important Semantic Web technologies such as SPARQL, which essentially brings SQL-like querying capability to the entire Web, could revolutionize how SOA systems are built and used and, most importantly, how they evolve. In a semantic-enabled SOA, whole new realms of information become possible, and I expect we will soon start to see radically new SOA systems that leverage Semantic Web technologies. Will it be SOA 3.0? I sure hope not. But it will be very interesting.

Tim Berners-Lee Says the Time for the Semantic Web is Now

Written by Marshall Kirkpatrick / February 27, 2008 10:50 AM / 8 Comments

In an hour long interview posted today about the Semantic Web, W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee says all the pieces are in place to move full steam ahead and realize the potential of a world of structured, machine readable data. Available as a part of the Talking with Talis semantic web podcast series, the interview (listen here) is summarized on interviewer Paul Miller's new ZDNet blog dedicated to the semantic web. A full transcript is available here.

It's an important conversation and a good introduction to what the semantic web is. Also notable is the way that Berners-Lee sees Semantics and Data Portability as very related. Some highlights are excerpted below.

My standard explanation of the value of the Semantic Web is this:
Once our software is capable of deriving meaning from web pages it looks at for us, then there's a whole lot of work that will already be done, allowing our human, creative minds to reach new heights.

In the interview with Miller, however, Berners-Lee emphasized that it's not just about web pages. He told Miller that that the core pieces are in place today for developers to build robust Semantic Web applications;

“I think… we’ve got all the pieces to be able to go ahead and do pretty much everything… [Y]ou should be able to implement a huge amount of the dream, we should be able to get huge benefits from interoperability using what we’ve got. So, people are realizing it’s time to just go do it.”

On the topic of challenges still faced, Berners-Lee said:

“There’s an awful lot of data out there. And I think, one of the huge misunderstandings about the Semantic Web is, ‘oh, the Semantic Web is going to involve us all going to our HTML pages and marking them up to put semantics in them.’ Now, there’s an important thread there, but to my mind, it’s actually a very minor part of it. Because I’m not going to hold my breath while other people put semantics in by hand… So, where is the data going to come from? It’s already there. It’s in databases…”

Other topics of the interview include whether leading social networks are likely to implement semantic web technologies, how semweb engagement benefits companies and what users can do to move the technology forward.

We've cover the Semantic Web extensively here at RWW. See below for a list of posts on the topic.

Sometimes It’s Just Semantics

from GigaOM by Stacey Higginbotham

As someone whose job involves understanding how certain people and things relate to one another, the idea of the semantic web is both compelling and scary. It could make my job that much easier, or it could make me as redundant as switchboard operators are today.

Coding information in a standard way so that machines can see how one person relates to another, or how a string of words could alternately be a movie or a book title, is a challenge. But plenty of companies are taking little bits and pieces of the problem and solving them. One such startup, Radar Networks, the maker of Twine, today received $13 million in funding from Velocity Capital, Vulcan Capital and DFJ. Other startups such as EVRI and Freebase have also benefited from VC interest in the semantic web.

Some of the companies are following the standards offered by the W3C, which is pushing RDF as a standard data structure to underlie the semantic web. But not all companies working on helping machines figure out the relationships and categories that most humans have learned use that standard.

Nor are all the companies interested in making the semantic web work startups. Yahoo uses RDF in some of its offerings and Google’s efforts with its social graph API initiative resembles the semantic web in its goals. Instead of using RDF, however, it’s using XFM and FOAF tags.

Reuters is another company that sees potential is getting machines to understand relationships. Earlier this month its CEO laid out a pretty compelling vision (at least to Tim O’Reilly) about how Reuters would rely less on delivering information and more on packaging its information in a way that could be used by analysts and computers to quickly delineate relationships.

Reuters would then be able to take its content, make it programmable and offer that data to users, who could then do with it what they will. Things like making relationship charts that currently can take a journalist and graphics department a couple of days to complete, and must then be monitored and changed manually, become easy.

The effort to render all of the data on the web into a semantic form will take a while. Nova Spivack, CEO of Radar Networks, believes that semantic web applications are currently in the early adopter phase. Twine will unveil its efforts in March through a private beta and another startup, AdaptiveBlue launched a semantic plug-in called Blue Organizer earlier this month. Spivack believes that in 2010 mass adoption will take place as people start to expect machines to make “intelligent” connections between people and things.

All of this is interesting, but putting a layer of semantic code over the existing web raises some concerns. One is the danger of inaccurate or at the very least less nuanced sense of relationships between people. Another is the everlasting nature of information on the web. How will coded tags be able to follow the intricacies of human relationships as fights ensue, jobs shift and even names change?

Another issue that we’ll have to deal with is confusion as people try to figure out what the semantic web really is. I’m thinking of it as code added to existing and new web content that helps determine and maybe track relationships between people and contexts for objects. I’m not married to the W3C standards, however, and others are doing this without using those particular programming tools.

There are also plenty of other definitions and hopes for the next phase of the web that may play out before we get an intelligent Internet. It’s already apparent that the web will continue to become more useful over time, but won’t ever replace the benefits of human interactions. If you doubt me, just recall your most fulfilling customer service call with a person compared with your most fulfilling experience with an automated agent. While both are helpful, sometimes you need a real, live human being.

Back from EC-TEL07

September 28th, 2007

Another week, another conference :)

This time, it was the EC-TEL07 (European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning) in Crete. Elisa Dalla Vecchia and I presented the MACE project (slides, video 1, video 2) and besides, met a lot of nice people.

The conference itself was really well organized. The keynotes (Hermann Maurer and Bruce Sterling) were excellent and big picture, covering a wide range of digital lifestyle topics and wild ideas. Digital quacks & charlatans, why Google is not so non-evil after all, telepathy is trivial, flying cars. No kidding. Many of the session talks, on the other hand, were not that exciting at all. I have the feeling many people in this area first build a “framework for…” before actually trying out some ideas on real learners.

More info on the conference blog, wiki and the flickr stream.

Greetings to Martin Memmel from DFKI, who I met to talk about the ALOE project and Christian Glahn, who presented nice work on Smart Indicators for learner feedback, and Joris Klerkx, who is quite into information visualization. I am looking forward to future developments, guys!

And just for the record, here are my favorite insider nerd joke conference memes:

Magic doesn’t scale.

Minigolf? Ouzome!

“Everything is a platform” - freaky!

Telepathy is trivial.

“Anyways - back to me”

conference , ectel07 , presentation , technology enhanced

11 Things To Know About Semantic Web

Written by Bernard Lunn / February 16, 2008 3:46 AM / 13 Comments

1. You don’t need to apologize for calling it Web 3.0. Of course the Web does not upgrade in one go like a company switching to Vista. But there is a definite phase transition from current technologies. My personal Web 3.0 definition is “the combination of Web 2.0 mass collaboration with structured databases”.

2. Semantic Web will start the long, slow decline of relational database technology. Web 3.0 enables the transition from “structure upfront” to “structure on the fly”. The world is clearly too complex to structure upfront, despite the tremendous skills brought by data modelers. Structure on the fly is done by people adding structure as they use the service and by engines that automatically create structure from unstructured content. Structure on the fly is very, very hard and RDBMS is very, very entrenched so this will be a long and slow transition; but the decline is inevitable. Innovation has slowed in the RDBMS world - with open source at one end and Oracle at the other, there is little reason to innovate - just when Semantic Web innovation is accelerating. RDBMS was good for enterprise scale performance and reliability but for Internet scale it falls short; just look at what companies like Amazon use.

3. If you have a firm grasp of the theoretical underpinnings of the semantic web, things like RDF, tuples, Sparql and OWL that make my brain hurt, you will be able to charge a fat premium in consulting fees for a while, as not many people really understand this stuff. But make hay while the sun shines, as some entrepreneur will surely figure out how to abstract this stuff and make it accessible for the masses.

4. The success stories will be different from Web 2.0. Just like Web 2.0 success stories were different from Web 1.0 successes. Web 2.0 successes were mostly about a single feature (photos, bookmarks, video, phone, blogging, etc) where there was extremely rapid adoption by consumers. Semantic Web is inherently about integration and those plays tend to be different, longer and much bigger potential.

5. Don’t look for a killer app. That implies a client/consumer win. This is much more likely to be a server/platform/enterprise win. Even if the initial experimentation is done in the consumer domain; Freebase for example looks like a mass Beta test for some enterprise technology that Metaweb wants to release later.

6. As this is a platform play, look for powerful APIs and ways to motivate entrepreneurs to build apps on top, with a clear “show me the money” proposition. Those apps maybe consumer or enterprise focussed.

7. Semantic Web could slow the Google steamroller. This could be like the PC for IBM or the Web for Microsoft. The steamroller’s momentum carries it forward for a very long time and it can build all kinds of wrapper systems around it, but something new always does come along. Google mastered how to give some structure to countless unstructured HTML pages. Semantic Web will gradually make that less critical as the underlying content will be more structured. These big generational changes - mainframe to PC to Web - seem to be happening faster, so it seems about time for another big generational change to start happening.

8. But don’t look for Yet Another Search Engine (YASE) to be the David to Google’s Goliath. Just like PC was not another mainframe and Web was not another PC. Don’t ask me precisely what it will look like; if I did know I would have to kill you if I told you. I just know what it won’t look like

9. Vertical Search is the pragmatist’s Semantic Web. Vertical Search businesses use whatever techniques they need - basic search engines, scrapers, APIs, human editors - to create some meaningful/useful structure in a single domain. Over time these cobbled together pragmatic solutions will be replaced by a semantic web platform, probably by an API that enables human editors to leverage their valuable domain expertise.

10. Tagging is the quietly disruptive technology. Everybody tags. It is the most basic human urge to mark what we find. We do it with Folders in Windows. We do it online with Bookmarks. Specialist tag Microformats such as Hcard and Hcalendar add more structure and we are only at the very start of this wave.

11. Semantic Web will leverage the “community” to add structure and this will use some techniques from first generation Social Networking. But it is very unlikely that Semantic Web will emerge from the walled gardens of current social networking sites. The winners will know how to motivate community to provide structure and will provide the tools that make the structuring so easy that nobody knows they are doing anything so boring as structuring. That is the big lesson from Web 2.0 that will be applied in the Semantic Web.

TWINE semantic web tool VIDEO

This is very interesting and clearly in the center of the next wave of the internet Semantic Web. A very relevant video in relationship to the future and how it relates to oneQube.com

Metaweb Gets $42 Million; There’s Hope Yet For Semantic Web

January 15, 2008 — 12:56 AM PST — by Stan Schroeder — Share This

One of the big names in the somewhat cloudy area of “semantic web,” Metaweb, just received a hefty round of funding from Benchmark Capital and Goldman Sachs - 42 million dollars. Metaweb is building Freebase, which is described as “an open, shared database of the world’s information.” This is their second round of funding; first one was $15 million back in 2006.

The promise behind Freebase (and semantic web in general) is an exciting one: by providing structure for the web’s data, it can be used as a better, more intelligent way to browse the web. For example, you can ask Freebase about “Films starring Jennifer Connelly and actors who have appeared in Steven Spielberg movies” and you will get a nice list of results. However, this is an official example taken from the FAQ; trying to get similar results on your own queries usually wont work as well.

At this stage, it’s very hard to decide whether Freebase is the real deal just by trying it out; and one can of course argue that Google’s approach also organizes web’s information quite well, albeit in a different way. Semantic web as an idea sounds great, but I haven’t yet seen many useful, practical implementations of it. However, this large round of funding proves that MetaWeb just might be onto something here.

Semantic Web: What Is The Killer App?

Written by Alex Iskold / January 9, 2008 10:22 PM / 1 Comments

The Semantic Web has been in the making for some time and people think it is nearing maturity. We have written about this trend extensively, with our two most notable posts being an analysis of the challenges of the classic bottom-up approach and the promise of the new top-down one. Regardless of how the Semantic Web will come about, for it to flourish it needs to hit the mainstream. There is no way that consumers will appreciate the elegance and mathematical soundness of RDF and OWL. People don't care about math, they care about utility and even more, about fun. What the Semantic Web needs, then, is a killer app.

Whatever it is, it needs to layer an understanding of semantics on top of a consumer application. The consumer application needs to be so cool and so viral that people will be open to learning that it is powered by semantic technologies. In that case, it will be possible to further market applications as Semantic Web apps. Consumers will understand that if one Semantic Web application has potential, so might others. In math, this is called proof by induction. In marketing this is called creating a market. In any case, it needs to be done.

In this post, we analyze several existing and potential applications of semantic technologies and look for the killer app.

Natual Language Understanding

Since the beginning, the Semantic Web has been associated with Artificial Intelligence. The idea of representing information in structured form so that computers can "understand it" and then solve complex problems was one of the keystones of the Semantic Web vision. The problem is that representing billions of existing web documents as RDF is a rather daunting, if not impossible task. An alternative would be to "teach" computers natural language. If an application could read the page the way we read it and interpret what it says, the annotations would not be necessary.

Natural language processing has been the Holy Grail of AI for awhile now. However, it is a very difficult problem, because humans are born with the innate ability to understand language and we learn it not in a vacuum, but in the context of life. Certainly if we could replicate that with computers, it would be amazing and it would be the killer app. The problem is that this is not on the horizon. The Semantic Web technologies of today are not able to represent natural language in its entirety, and this is not really even their goal. Even if we could represent each page completely, there is still the matter of interpreting structure into semantics, which is the magic that our brain does so well and so easily.

Genie In The Bottle

Related to natural language understanding, is another idea that is not on the horizon. John Markoff called it "the perfect vacation." I call it the "Genie in the Bottle" to illustrate the impossibility of this. There is a misunderstanding about the Semantic Web which is floating around, which equates the Semantic Web with ability to solve really hard problems. It is simply not true.

For example, if you go to a new travel agency and ask them to book the perfect vacation for you, the travel agent will not be able to do it, because she does not know you. In order to find the perfect vacation there needs to be constraints: where you've been before, who you are going with, what you like to do, what is your budget, etc. Finding the "perfect" vacation is not a one shot deal, it is a process, which leverages iteration and memory.

True, with the Semantic Web the information is structured, but it does not mean that the computer can necessarily solve complex problems. These are two completely different things. Just because you have a map, does not mean that you know the best way to get from point A to point B. Having a map is necessary, but it is not sufficient, you need the algorithm to find the best path. There is a big difference between asking what is the capital of France and what is the cheapest airfair today to fly from New York to Paris. And the even harder question is: Where should I go on vacation next? Computers are not going to give us an instant, perfect answer to this question anytime soon, if ever. Again, this would be the killer app, it is just not likely to happen.

Semantic Knowledge Databases

So what is realistic and possible today? The first in the list of growing applications are Semantic Knowledge Databases. The two examples that we will look at here are Freebase and Twine. While Freebase is focusing on building essentially a semantic equivalent of Wikipedia, and Twine is focused on a personal semantic database, both are databases, both focus on knowledge management, and both are Wikipedia-like. The advantage of these databases over Wikipedia is that they represent information in a structured way and support queries. To understand the difference, take a look at the Alicia Keys page on Freebase and on Wikipedia. At first glance they are very similar, but Freebase "knows" that Alicia Keys is a blues singer and it then knows other blues singers. For Wikipedia, blues is just another page, not a music genre. So Freebase can potentially answer a question of listing all blues singers, while Wikipedia can not.

This is certainly interesting but the question is will people care? Can the end consumer tell the difference? Unlikely. Today Wikipedia contains definitive references on a vast number of topics. Like Google, it is easy to search and find relevant information, and as a result, people are not likely to be in need of a better Wikipedia. With Twine the situation might prove to be different, because personal knowledge management is an important problem. The first question is: Are their enough people who want to be efficient in managing personal knowledge? I think the answer is increasingly likely to be "yes." And the second question is: Does knowing the semantics of knowledge help you build the best application? At the very least Twine has to beat del.icio.us bookmarks and ideally needs to do for personal knowledge management what Highrise is doing for CRM.

But beyond the execution, there is still another problem. For a semantic knowledge base to be the killer app it needs to ignite imagination and capture people's hearts and minds. This is not likely to happen. We appreciate libraries, we can not live without them, but we take them for granted. Knowledge has been commoditized thanks to Google, Wikipedia, and the blogosphere, and is perceived as abundant and unexciting. For this reason Semantic Databases are not likely to be the killer apps -- but they might become a stepping stone towards one.

Semantic Search

An early candidate for the killer app in the semantic web category was search. First Hakia and more recently Powerset marketed the idea that a semantic search engine, one that is based on the understanding of natural language, can beat Google. On top of having the pressure to deliver qualitatively better results, Semantic Search companies also have to, at least approximately, solve the problem of natural language understanding, which as we discussed earlier is a very difficult one.

Where things stand right now, it does not look like search is the killer app for semantics. The understanding of natural language does not seem to give you a noticeable edge in getting better search results. At least in the comparisons that we have performed earlier there is no major difference. The statistical algorithm deployed by Google is precise and good enough, which is why it has been the clear leader in web search for the past 8 years. To unseat Google will require more than incremental improvement in search, it will likely take a paradigm shift and the creation of a different web experience. Below, we discuss how "discovery" could possibly take a bite out of the pie, but as of now Google's algorithm remains good and strong.

Social Graph

After Tim Bernes-Lee posted his thoughts on the Social Graph, a discussion began on the web in which people wondered if the Social Graph is in fact the Semantic Web. This, however, is a gross misinterpretation of the post. The Social Graph is not the Semantic Web, nor is it the killer app of the Semantic Web. They are just two separate concepts. The confusion comes from the fact that they both are Mathematical Graphs or a Network. The underlying structure of both consists of nodes connected by links. Many things in the nature and society are networks, so it is not surprising that meaning and people fall into this category.

If anything, it is more correct to say that the Social Graph is a subset of the giant, all encompasing Semantic Web. Knowing how people are connected is important in order to solve the perfect vacation problem. After all, a perfect vacation should be taken together with perfect friends, right? But jokes aside, the Social Graph is an interesting and important trend for 2008, however, it is not really related to Semantic Web.

Shortcuts

Increasingly, we are seeing a new breed of Semantic Applications, which we generalize as shortcuts. This category includes SnapShots from Snap, BlueOrganizer and SmartLinks from AdaptiveBlue, Shortcuts from Yahoo!, and In-text search from Lingospot. What is common between all these technologies is that they leverage the simple semantics of the content to deliver additional information. In the case of Snap and AdaptiveBlue, the semantics is defined by the URL, while Yahoo! and Lingospot perform text analysis.

Regardless of the method, all of these technologies deliver related information via Ajax popups. That is, they leverage semantics to pull the information from the web. This is essentially discovery or reverse search. When the user is looking at a book there is a preview with a brief description and the cover image, when the user encounters a stock symbol he is presented with a stock chart, analysis and additional links to the company, when the user is looking at a music album there is a play button, and when the user encounters a movie there is an ability to watch the trailer in place. The shortcuts remove the need to search, instead, the related content from the web comes right into the page.

Today's shortcut technologies are simple and still in their infancy, but they are among the most successful examples of semantic applications. However, we can not call them the killer app for several reasons.

First, people perceive them as advertising, which is not the point. Snap certainly made an early push into ads, but this is not a representation of what these technologies will look like in the future. Second, in their current implementation, all of these technologies are utilities. For the same reason that people are not going to get emotional about personal knowledge management, they will not be emotional about shortcuts. Shortcuts will also be taken for granted.

Yet, shortcuts hold the most promise. With a few more iterations these technologies are going to get slicker and more precise. They will leverage content and micro-context to reduce the amount of search. They will become more personalized based on user behavior. And once this happens it will be a big deal.

Full Disclosure: Alex Iskold is the founder and CEO of AdaptiveBlue.

Conclusion

We are still waiting for the killer app for Semantic Web, something that can get viral and turn semantics into a marketing term. Problems like natural language understanding still remain difficult to solve, and the solutions do not appear to be on our horizon right now. It also appears that a semantic search engine, at least based on the ones we have seen to date, does not have a substantial advantage over Google. We are seeing the rise of early Semantic Knowledge Databases, but while we expect them to get better and more interesting, they are more likely to be the stepping stones to the killer app, rather than the app itself.

In the mean time, we are seeing the rise of shortcut technologies, which leverage the basic semantics of the content, like URL and simple context analysis, to deliver relevant information, links, and media directly into the page. While still very early, these technologies hold the most promise because they are simple and useful. We expect that the next generation of these technologies in conjunction with personalization will deliver an interesting alternative to search -- contextual discovery. We will discuss this alternative in more detail in a future post.

Now tell us what you think the killer app for Semantic Web will be? Which of these technologies do you think is the most promising?

Radar Networks Ties Together Web 2.0, Semantic Web With 'Twine'

The online knowledge management service ties together social networking, wikis, and blogging with RDF, OWL, SPARQL, and XSL technologies. By Antone Gonsalves
InformationWeek
October 23, 2007 01:49 PM

Startup Radar Networks has launched in private beta an online knowledge management system that's among the first to use computer-driving semantic Web technologies to find and organize information for people.

Called Twine, the service was unveiled at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco last week. The service has elements of Web 2.0 technologies, such as social networking, wikis, and blogging, but goes a step further with an underlying platform built on Web 3.0 technologies defined by the Worldwide Web Consortium. Those technologies include RDF (Resource Definition Framework), OWL (a markup language), SPARQL (an RDF query language), and XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language).

In general, the service enables a person, or groups of people, to organize information and share it with others. People can upload contacts, pictures, and documents from their desktops, and save text, videos, and images from Web sites. Twine also uses software agents to import content and metadata from other sites, based on the knowledge the system builds about the user.

In other words, Twine is smart enough to discover relationships between information on the Web and the information stored by users. "By analyzing content, it builds what we call a knowledge network for you," Nova Spivack, founder and chief executive of Radar Networks, told InformationWeek.

Data brought into Twine is analyzed and tagged, with the system understanding if the keywords refer to people, places, or things. The tags are listed on a user's Twine page. Clicking on the keyword will bring up all the related information saved by the user or shared by other people in his network.

Radar Networks, funded by Leapfrog Ventures and Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) co-founder Paul Allen's Vulcan Capital, believes that the semantic Web will enable it to build a knowledge network that provides users with a richer experience than other services using older technologies.

The idea behind the semantic Web is to build Web sites that publish information in a form that can be processed and integrated by computers. If the technology takes off, then machines could theoretically perform many of the tasks that today require human direction, such as finding and buying the cheapest DVD, or gathering information on specific topics.

Radar believes marketing teams or other groups in organizations that today may use traditional groupware or other form of collaborative software could eventually use Twine. "If you compare this to a wiki or existing groupware, it's a lot more efficient," Spivack said. "It takes a lot of the load off of individuals, and it sees patterns that they wouldn't see themselves."

The service is currently being offered in private beta for testing and feedback, Spivack said. The company plans to launch a public beta next year. In time, Twine will be offered in two versions: a free, ad-supported version, and a subscription-based premium service. In addition, Radar Networks, which is based in San Francisco, hopes to partner with content providers.

Textwise.com Semantic ad targeting

http://www.textwise.com/semanticSignatures.html is a very interesting page with interesting info. Espcially when you scroll over the images on the left hand side that show data regarding the difference between "contextual targeting" and their "semantic signature matching". Interesting use of the word DNA in reference to content and ads. Similar to our use of

"Dynamic triangulation = particles (behavior,context,tags,keywords,attention data etc) = digital DNA = content/user/ad = relevance targeting "

for the new version of advario to be released going into adtech NYC. Below is some further info from their site.

Semantic SignaturesSM are TextWise's patented contextual targeting technology. They innovate beyond simple keyword-based or category-based models currently used in so-called "contextual advertising" and deliver a new level of context-driven advertisment matching. MEET YOUR PERFECT MATCH, EVERY TIME, AUTOMATICALLY Semantic SignaturesSM is the only contextual advertising solution with: Precision that outperforms our competitors to obtain significantly higher ad-to-web page relevancy Speed/Scalability powering real-time placement Automation to support a dynamic environment Universal Appeal going beyond the English language to capture the global market Semantic SignaturesSM capture meaning through concepts, not keywords — including multiple meanings and topics within a single document. As a fully automated and real-time contextual targeting system for both advertisments and web pages, they provide a robust, scalable, and easily maintainable solution for advertisers. Request a White Paper

Web 3.0 -- Next-Step for Web?

The Business 2.0 Article on Radar Networks and the Semantic Web just came online. It's a huge article. In many ways it's one of the best popular articles written about the Semantic Web in the mainstream press. It also goes into a lot of detail about what Radar Networks is working on.

One point of clarification, just in case anyone is wondering...

Web 3.0 is not just about machines -- it's actually all about humans -- it leverages social networks, folksonomies, communities and social filtering AS WELL AS the Semantic Web, data mining, and artificial intelligence. The combination of the two is more powerful than either one on it's own. Web 3.0 is Web 2.0 + 1. It's NOT Web 2.0 - people. The "+ 1" is the addition of software and metadata that help people and other applications organize and make better sense of the Web. That new layer of semantics -- often called "The Semantic Web" -- will add to and build on the existing value provided by social networks, folksonomies, and collaborative filtering that are already on the Web.

So at least here at Radar Networks, we are focusing much of our effort on facilitating people to help them help themselves, and to help each other, make sense of the Web. We leverage the amazing intelligence of the human brain, and we augment that using the Semantic Web, data mining, and artificial intelligence. We really believe that the next generation of collective intelligence is about creating systems of experts not expert systems.

July 03, 2007 in Artificial Intelligence, Business, Collective Intelligence, Global Brain and Global Mind, Group Minds, Intelligence Technology, Knowledge Management, Philosophy, Productivity, Radar Networks, Science, Search, Semantic Blogs and Wikis, Semantic Web, Social Networks, Society, Software, Technology, The Future, The Metaweb, Venture Capital, Web 2.0, Web 3.0, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Technorati Tags: AI, nova spivack, Radar Networks, semantic web, semweb, Web 3.0

MORE:::Yahoo Debuts Behavior-Based Advertising with SmartAds

What you see is your invention Yahoo has officially unveiled its behavior-targeting SmartAds, reports Search Engine Land. SmartAds combine a variety of factors to deliver a super-relevant ad to the user. Behavioral tracking analyzes the user's location and other information on one side the interface. On the other is the dynamic assembly of material provided by the advertiser. They may upload various backgrounds, text and other individual components. Those components are then assembled on the fly to create endless variations on the same ad that can be targeted to individuals rather than groups. Yahoo is hoping this customization and targeting combination will lift its status as a mere display ad server. The ads were tested on Yahoo Travel and reportedly performed two to three times better than other display ads. Behavioral advertising has become a topic of heated discussion, even as firms like Google, Microsoft and AOL. While some look at it as a gross breach of privacy, others - particularly advertisers - perceive it as a way on improving their services to provide customers with more tailored options. This can be considered a means to improve the online user experience. Behavioral targeting is also expected to be one of the defining characteristics of web 3.0, or the Semantic Web.

THE THIRD GENERATION WEB IS COMING

LIFEBOAT FOUNDATION SPECIAL REPORT

Lifeboat Foundation Scientific Advisory Board member Nova Spivack. Print report!

Also read Minding the Planet: The Meaning and Future of the Semantic Web.

OVERVIEW The Web is entering a new phase of evolution. There has been much debate recently about what to call this new phase. Some would prefer to not name it all, while others suggest continuing to call it "Web 2.0". However, this new phase of evolution has quite a different focus from what Web 2.0 has come to mean. WEB 3.0 John Markoff of the New York Times recently suggested naming this third-generation of the Web, "Web 3.0". This suggestion has led to quite a bit of debate within the industry. Those who are attached to the Web 2.0 moniker have reacted by claiming that such a term is not warranted while others have responded positively to the term, noting that there is indeed a characteristic difference between the coming new stage of the Web and what Web 2.0 has come to represent. The term Web 2.0 was never clearly defined and even today if one asks ten people what it means one will likely get ten different definitions. However, most people in the Web industry would agree that Web 2.0 focuses on several major themes, including AJAX, social networking, folksonomies, lightweight collaboration, social bookmarking, and media sharing. While the innovations and practices of Web 2.0 will continue to develop, they are not the final step in the evolution of the Web. In fact, there is a lot more in store for the Web. We are starting to witness the convergence of several growing technology trends that are outside the scope of what Web 2.0 has come to mean. These trends have been gestating for a decade and will soon reach a tipping point. At this juncture the third-generation of the Web will start.

MORE INTELLIGENT WEB The threshold to the third-generation Web will be crossed in 2007. At this juncture the focus of innovation will start shift back from front-end improvements towards back-end infrastructure level upgrades to the Web. This cycle will continue for five to ten years, and will result in making the Web more connected, more open, and more intelligent. It will transform the Web from a network of separately siloed applications and content repositories to a more seamless and interoperable whole. Because the focus of the third-generation Web is quite different from that of Web 2.0, this new generation of the Web probably does deserve its own name. In keeping with the naming convention established by labeling the second generation of the Web as Web 2.0, I agree with John Markoff that this third-generation of the Web could be called Web 3.0.

TIMELINE AND DEFINITION Web 1.0. Web 1.0 was the first generation of the Web. During this phase the focus was primarily on building the Web, making it accessible, and commercializing it for the first time. Key areas of interest centered on protocols such as HTTP, open standard markup languages such as HTML and XML, Internet access through ISPs, the first Web browsers, Web development platforms and tools, Web-centric software languages such as Java and Javascript, the creation of Web sites, the commercialization of the Web and Web business models, and the growth of key portals on the Web. Web 2.0. According to the Wikipedia, "Web 2.0, a phrase coined by O'Reilly Media in 2004, refers to a supposed second generation of Internet-based services — such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies — that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users." I would also add to this definition another trend that has been a major factor in Web 2.0 — the emergence of the mobile Internet and mobile devices (including camera phones) as a major new platform driving the adoption and growth of the Web, particularly outside of the United States. Web 3.0. Using the same pattern as the above Wikipedia definition, Web 3.0 could be defined as: "Web 3.0, a phrase coined by John Markoff of the New York Times in 2006, refers to a supposed third generation of Internet-based services that collectively comprise what might be called 'the intelligent Web' — such as those using semantic web, microformats, natural language search, data-mining, machine learning, recommendation agents, and artificial intelligence technologies — which emphasize machine-facilitated understanding of information in order to provide a more productive and intuitive user experience." Web 3.0 Expanded Definition. I propose expanding the above definition of Web 3.0 to be a bit more inclusive. There are actually several major technology trends that are about to reach a new level of maturity at the same time. The simultaneous maturity of these trends is mutually reinforcing, and collectively they will drive the third-generation Web. From this broader perspective, Web 3.0 might be defined as a third-generation of the Web enabled by the convergence of several key emerging technology trends: Ubiquitous Connectivity
Broadband adoption
Mobile Internet access
Mobile devices Network Computing
Software-as-a-service business models
Web services interoperability
Distributed computing (P2P, grid computing, hosted "cloud computing" server farms such as Amazon S3) Open Technologies
Open APIs and protocols
Open data formats
Open-source software platforms
Open data (Creative Commons, Open Data License, etc.) Open Identity
Open identity (OpenID)
Open reputation
Portable identity and personal data (for example, the ability to port your user account and search history from one service to another) The Intelligent Web
Semantic Web technologies (RDF, OWL, SWRL, SPARQL, Semantic application platforms, and statement-based datastores such as triplestores, tuplestores and associative databases)
Distributed databases — or what I call "The World Wide Database" (wide-area distributed database interoperability enabled by Semantic Web technologies)
Intelligent applications (natural language processing, machine learning, machine reasoning, autonomous agents)

CONCLUSION Web 3.0 will be more connected, open, and intelligent, with semantic Web technologies, distributed databases, natural language processing, machine learning, machine reasoning, and autonomous agents.

What's next for the Internet

Nova Spivack is racing to bring meaning and order to the chaos of the Internet. And he's not alone. Business 2.0 reports.

By Michael V. Copeland, Business 2.0 Magazine senior writer

July 3 2007: 4:44 PM EDT

(Business 2.0 Magazine) -- After taking one of the first Internet companies -- EarthWeb -- public in 1998, Nova Spivack joined some friends at a weedy airstrip deep inside the new Russia for a trip into Earth's stratosphere.

Having space travel on your resume is de rigueur for Internet entrepreneurs these days, but this was 1999, and not even the Russian pilots were sure how the flight would turn out. As Spivack was being strapped into a MiG-25 and prepped for his trip at Mach 3, about 20 miles straight up, he looked around for an ejection button or lever in case things went south.

To build a smarter Web, Nova Spivack is finding ways for machines to do more of the work.

John Giannandrea, Danny Hillis, and Robert Cook founded Metaweb Technologies with the goal of building a semantic Web structure -- think of it as a semantic Wikipedia -- for all the world's knowledge.

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There wasn't one. "'Don't worry about eet,' the pilot told me," says Spivack, mustering his best Russian accent. "At the speed you will be going, even if you could eject, first your body would explode into vapor, then the vapor would freeze into ice crystals, and then the crystals would burn up on reentry."

With that, they taxied down the runway for a quick ride to the edge of space.

Spivack returned in one piece ready to launch more startups, but the image of his body exploded into ice crystals and skittering into the stratosphere never left him. And in fact, it's not a bad metaphor -- in reverse -- for what his newest venture is trying to do.

The Next Net: 25 startups to watch

If you think of the World Wide Web as a cloud of largely undifferentiated information, the mission of the company he's about to unveil, Radar Networks, is to take that cloud and impose order on it. Not just any order, but a very special kind known to experts by one of the hottest buzzwords in computer science today: the semantic Web.

For all the wonders that today's Web can deliver to your fingertips -- the Norwegian word for ice cream, a seat on the next flight to Paris, the best price for a Clash CD -- it has a fundamental flaw.

It's basically a compendium of billions of text documents designed to be read by humans. You can search it for keywords, but the results aren't much use until you sort through them to find the page that has the info you want.

To take the Web to the next level -- to move from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 -- the information in those documents will have to be turned into data that a machine can read and evaluate on its own. Only then will computers be able to take over tasks we now do by hand: find the nearest restaurant, book the best flight, buy the cheapest CD.

Think of it as the difference between two dimensions and three dimensions. "People will see the Web start to become smarter," Spivack says. "Eventually it will have some reasoning capabilities built into it."

We'll get to how that happens in a bit. For Spivack, however, the semantic Web begins now with the data engine and user applications he and his team are prepping for launch -- and ends somewhere in the future with artificially intelligent software agents handling all the online drudgery of your business and professional life.

Radar Networks isn't the only company exploring the potential of the semantic Web. It's a disruptive technology with the power to unseat today's Internet titans -- especially search engine giants like Google (Charts, Fortune 500) and Yahoo (Charts, Fortune 500) -- and it's being vigorously pursued by startups like Garlik, Metaweb Technologies, Powerset, and ZoomInfo, as well as big corporations like Citigroup (Charts, Fortune 500), Eli Lilly, Kodak (Charts, Fortune 500), Oracle (Charts, Fortune 500), and Google and Yahoo themselves.

One estimate pegs the market for products and services stemming from semantic Web technologies at $50 billion by 2010, up from about $7 billion today.

But for all the entrepreneurs ready to spin gold out of the semantic Web, there are as many skeptics convinced that it's a pipe dream -- a fancy name for a problem that will never be fully solved. Spivack, with the confidence of a man who has been to space without a safety net, is determined to prove them wrong.

The 50 Who Matter Now

Radar Networks is housed in a renovated warehouse not far from the ballpark where the San Francisco Giants play. Inside, massive redwood timbers span the high ceilings alongside thick clusters of data cable. A Nintendo Wii and a shiny new De'Longhi espresso machine are the only outward signs of anything being done here but mind-bending work.

There are 20 people at the company now, but there's space for 50, and with just a bit less than $10 million in venture funding, Spivack and his senior executives are busy hiring.

The background of the Radar team includes deep expertise in statistics, bioinformatics, and artificial intelligence. Radar's chief architect, Jim Wissner, is a Java ace. Chris Jones, director of products and operations, is a design and user interface whiz. CTO Lew Tucker got his start by mapping neural transmitters in the brain. Tucker and Spivack go back to the late '80s, when they both worked for Danny Hillis at Thinking Machines.

Given all the firepower assembled at Radar Networks, you get the sense that this is not your typical Web startup. And it's not. The task the company has set for itself -- bringing the power of the semantic Web to the Internet -- is not easy to describe. Even the man who invented the Web, Tim Berners-Lee, needs a little room to explain why it's important.

Watch The New Disruptors channel

The term "semantic Web" first gained prominence in a 2001 article by Berners-Lee and two coauthors, James Hendler and Ora Lassila, in Scientific American. In it they described software agents roaming across the Web, making travel arrangements and doctor's appointments and muting the stereo when the telephone rings.

It was a great vision, but it couldn't be achieved with today's Internet.

For the semantic Web to work, online information needs to be made readable by machines. Services like Google do a great job of sifting through all those webpages, but it's up to people to recognize the things they want when they see them in the results. It's also up to people to combine information to, say, plan a long-overdue ski trip.

The Web just isn't very smart yet; one webpage is the same as any other. It might have a higher Google ranking, but there's no distinction based on meaning.

The semantic Web in the Berners-Lee vision acts more like a series of connected databases, where all information resides in a structured form. Within that structure is a layer of description that adds meaning that the computer can understand. ("Semantics" is the branch of linguistics concerned with meaning.)

On the semantic Web, a person -- Nova Spivack, for example -- isn't just a name that comes up on webpages when you google him. He's a fully described object endowed with certain well-defined properties: a date of birth, a job title, a home address, specific hobbies, the fact that he is the grandson of legendary management thinker Peter Drucker.

People on the semantic Web have unambiguous connections to the places they work, the people they're related to, their friends, their calendars, and the things they're interested in. Being able to connect those properties in seen and unseen ways is what gives the semantic Web its power.

Consider this scenario: Say you want to arrange a dinner at an upcoming conference. Today you might go through your address book and ping folks by e-mail to see who's attending. Then you probably send out e-mail invitations to dinner. You go back and forth with the group on the place and time, somehow you all agree, and then somebody makes a reservation. Files fly back and forth, with humans at the center.

In the semantic Web, your software agent will "know" in advance what's involved in arranging a dinner. Instead of you sending out a flurry of e-mails, the agent could cull the conference attendees and make a list of potential invitees.

It might also look through your address book to see which of your friends live in the city where the conference is being held. Once a list of potential dinner guests has been approved by you, the agent would negotiate the date and time with everyone else's agents via a calendar database, pick a restaurant from another database based on availability and your personal preferences, make the reservation, and send out directions. In a GPS-enabled world, it could even let you know how far a guest who is running late has to go.

The future of Web TV

Of course, it's been six years since Berners-Lee put his vision out there, and you still can't get that sort of service. Tagging is a start, and services like Flickr offer a sort of crude Web 2.0 version of the semantic Web. Google Base is another stab at bringing semantic technologies to the wider Web, serving as a place where anyone can enter data and have it searched, but it doesn't use the semantic approach from start to finish.

Bringing a true semantic Web to the world is a chicken-and-egg problem. Until there's enough data rendered in computer-readable form (resource description framework, or RDF, is the leading standard) with enough metadata attached to it to make it meaningful, nobody is going to be able to create any interesting services.

The agents of the semantic Web need the raw ingredients before they can make their soufflés.

But you can do some interesting things within subsets of the Web. Large pharmaceutical companies like Eli Lilly (Charts, Fortune 500) have been experimenting with adding a semantic layer on top of their drug discovery databases to help scientists see connections between drug molecules and diseases.

Amazon.com (Charts, Fortune 500) is keen on using semantic technologies to help customers search its databases. Kodak wants semantic tagging to help photographers organize their snapshots online. The CIA has been loading its databases of overseas phone taps into semantic "mills" to make it easier to sift for connections between people, places, and incidents -- hoping to spot terror threats before it's too late.

"But how do you make this thing really useful for ordinary people?" asks Radar CTO Tucker. "Not everyone is a CIA analyst."

Spivack's answer grew out of conversations he had with Drucker in the summer of 2001, about four years before the professor's passing. "We would meet for two hours a day and talk about organizations vs. organisms," Spivack says. Drucker was particularly interested in what he called the intelligence of organizations. "My grandfather helped me think about group minds," Spivack says. "How groups get more intelligent, and how connections play into that."

The quest for the perfect online ad

Since bringing the semantic Web into the world is a chicken-and-egg proposition, Radar Networks has built both the chicken and the egg. The chicken is the underlying engine the team has created that not only turns data into simple but meaningful digital objects via RDF but also scales up to hold hundreds of millions of objects that can be searched, swapped, and connected to one another. The egg is the user application that rides on top of it all.

The first consumer app Radar plans to launch is a sort of personal data organizer. It will allow you to bring in e-mail, contacts, photos, video, music --anything digital, really -- from anywhere on the Web, turn it into RDF, and access it in one place.

Semantic tags are added manually, or automatically if the item is a photo from Flickr or a video from YouTube. "We add a new level of order to connect and interact with these things at a higher level than is possible today," Spivack says. "We are letting you build a little semantic Web for your project, your group, or your interest."

When it's done, it should be like the best wiki you've ever used. To illustrate, Spivack flips open his computer and pulls up his own Radar-enabled page. On it are groups of people he knows and interests he's pursuing, including the space industry, alternative energy, physics, Internet-related technology, and skiing. In each of these categories are objects that Spivack has collected and tagged or, if it is a topic that has multiple people included, that they have collected and tagged.

In the skiing topic, for example, Spivack has posed a question: Where should we go skiing? One of the responses is Alta, Utah. When Spivack clicks on that item, the Radar engine goes out and finds all the things in the Radar Networks database related to Alta. It "knows" that Alta, in this case, refers to a place (as opposed to the Spanish word for "high"), so there are hotel suggestions. There are also photos, videos, trail maps, and comments from people in his group who have skied there before.

In a sense, what Radar allows Spivack to do is build a database around any question, project, or interest he may have and then start looking at it from different perspectives: cost, distance from San Francisco, snow conditions in March, nearby restaurants, what his friends liked about a particular resort.

And if they liked Alta, what other places did they like? "You start to see new ways to look at the information," Spivack says. "What gets me excited is what we can do when we have billions of objects and 10 million people using them."

For that to happen, of course, people need to start adding their own digital stuff to the mix. The digital life organizer is the bait Spivack and his team are using to try to draw them in. The team will also open Radar Networks to outside developers to write their own applications. Those might involve travel, food, or a better way to manage large projects.

Radar hopes to be the engine powering all that, providing a massive, meaning-filled Web of data that can be infinitely poked and prodded and leveraged. The company will make its money from advertising and premium subscriptions; the basic service will be free.

But don't expect a sci-fi software agent that takes care of your every whim -- Spivack is quick to say that's not what Radar is launching. "Those people who think we will be offering Hal 9000 when this goes public in October will be disappointed," he says. "We've had the problem of overpromising in this industry; a lot of us who were working on semantic Web technologies early on saw the potential and got a little excited. It has taken much longer to realize than we thought. One thing Web 2.0 has taught everybody is that simpler is better. Find something useful and iterate on that."

Tom Coates, whose day job at Yahoo involves working on just these issues, thinks the Web 2.0 crowd is already taking care of the problem. He points to tagging and microformats that add some of the same metadata to webpages that semantic technologies offer.

"I call it the dirty semantic Web," Coates says from his London office. "It may not be the pristine Berners-Lee view of the world, but it is headed in the right direction."

On a lark, Coates and a colleague created a site called Astronewsology that demonstrates the power of a semantic approach by combining news reports and horoscopes. Using it, you can search the news by the sign Capricorn and see whether that day's horoscope had any bearing on what happened to people born between Dec. 22 and Jan. 20. Coates's point is that you can extract meaning from the data without adopting the exacting standards proposed by Berners-Lee.

Growing in the shadow of Google

Things get even more interesting when the data starts to become interconnected.

"It's in the combination that the real power of this comes out," Coates says. "The mashup is an early example of the Web that is to come. Semantic technologies have not taken off as much as we'd hoped because people are finding more utility in other Web 2.0 technologies at the moment. The goal is the most important thing: reusable, repurposable, and reconnectable data. How we get there is not as important."

The shift to a semantic Web is still in its very early days. Spivack envisions a time line of five to seven years. But the shift is clearly under way. James Hendler, one of the coauthors of that seminal Scientific American article, sees the same dynamics he did when the Web was first forming.

"Those of us who were involved saw little islands of the Web being created," he says. "To most people, the Web seemed to happen overnight, because they hadn't seen the first six to eight years of effort. We're in that early phase of the semantic Web."

Radar Networks, Google Base, and even Flickr are the first islands to pop into public view. Larger islands are being formed by corporations and government agencies. Many more will rise.

Spivack is counting on those islands to eventually coalesce. That's when the potential becomes reality. That's when we can all kick back and let our software agents go out and bring some order to the chaos of our digital lives.

Michael V. Copeland is a senior writer at Business 2.0.