BBC adopting the Semantic Web

January 28, 2009 Leave a Comment

Being a major content owner, the BBC is using Semantic Web technologies to efficiently manipulate this content and improve the services offered to the public.

I met Richard Wright of the BBC Archive in the AXMEDIS conference in Barcelona on November 2007. He was showing then a demo of their system, which uses the GATE web services for NLP (Natural Language Processing) on textual news items. News items are analyzed to extract named entities according to an ontology, such as person names, companies, locations, etc. The attributes of the entities are also extracted, e.g. the position of a person within a company. The demo also showed video indexing with the use of various techniques.

The BBC Artists pages were recently launched, using Semantic Web technologies to enrich artists’ profiles and link them to external resources, such as Wikipedia entries. Matthew Shorter, BBC’s interactive editor for music, told CNET UK that “this is part of a general movement that’s going on at the BBC to move away from pages that are built in a variety of legacy content production systems to actually publishing data that we can use in a more dynamic way across the Web.”

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Demonstration for Gaza victims

January 26, 2009 1 Comment

Students at the University of Leeds found a silent but powerful way to demonstrate today about the Palestinian victims in Gaza strip. The pictures speak for themselves (click on them for full size):

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Blogging with Calais

January 23, 2009 2 Comments

The Calais initiative by Thomson Reuters is an excellent example of Semantic Web technologies being smoothly incorporated into common web activities, such as blogging. It uses Natural Language Processing to analyze text and extract named entities (e.g. persons, companies), facts (e.g. employee positions), and events (e.g. mergers, acquisitions).

I have been using Calais in this blog, through the Tagaroo plugin for WordPress. While I type a post, Tagaroo analyzes the text using the Calais web service, and suggests relevant tags and Flickr images. So far, the plugin works very well, without any glitches. Its proposals are usually quite successful and most tags of this blog have been created this way.

Calais can currently analyze texts only in English and French, but more languages are on the way. Let’s hope we see support for Greek soon!

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Licensed to blog

January 14, 2009 Leave a Comment

Today’s User Friendly comic strip brings up a rather intriguing question about blogging:

Well, that’s the beauty of the blogosphere: you don’t have to be certified to express your views, although a bit of authority on the subject you argue about certainly doesn’t hurt ;)

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The Semantic Web vision

January 14, 2009 Leave a Comment

The Semantic Web aims at expressing web content in machine-processable forms, so that it is maintained efficiently by software agents. In this way, the precision of search will be enhanced and logic reasoning on web data will be possible. The Semantic Web vision, as expressed by its main founder Tim Berners-Lee, is “giving information a well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation”.

In the following clip, Tim Berners-Lee explains the main concepts and technologies behind the Semantic Web:

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Our privacy on the Social Web

January 11, 2009 Leave a Comment

How is well is our privacy protected on the Social Web? Of course, you can (and should) take some basic precaution measures, like not giving away sensitive information that can be used for financial fraud against you. However, there are issues beyond our hands that depend on how the Social Web handles our information.

Google recently published a paper entitled “(Under)mining Privacy in Social Networks”. The paper outlines some possible threats and proposes a number of counter-measures. In particular, the issues identified have to do with:

  1. Activity Streams: These are collections of actions we perform on the Social Web, e.g. adding a friend, or posting a video. We may not be aware of all the actions fed into our activity stream. Also, we may not be able to control who sees our activity stream. For example, when Facebook introduced Beacon, purchases that I would make on eBay would be fed into my activity stream and would also be available to my friends.
  2. Unwelcome Linkage: This happens when web links reveal information about us that we did not intend to.
  3. Merging Social Graphs: It is possible to uncover personal information by merging data from different Social Web sites.

Getting complete control over the construction and publication of your activity stream is the key. The authors propose a solution in the form of a privacy warning system. When you upload information on the Social Web, you should be warned whether this information could be used to make connections about you.

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The Social Web in plain English

January 4, 2009 Leave a Comment

The Social Web offers lots of opportunities for social networking. Through sites like Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn, you can connect with friends from real life, make new ones, and keep in touch with them. Also, through microblogging sites like Twitter, you can let your friends know what you’re up to any time of the day. It can get pretty addictive!

The Common Craft channel on YouTube has a series of clips explaining these (and many more) technologies in “plain English”. The following two clips are about social networking and microblogging:

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The Social Web and You

January 2, 2009 Leave a Comment

Web 2.0 can best be described as the accumulation of new web-based collaboration technologies, such as social networking sites, social bookmarking sites, wikis, blogs, and more. The success of Web 2.0 is mainly attributed to the fact that it appeals to the public through services, like syndication and tagging, that allow people to easily publish and share content. The wide acceptance of these technologies has resulted into what is sometimes referred to as the Social Web, a medium for the communication and collaboration of online communities.

A popular way for organizing content in the Social Web is labeling it with descriptive terms, which are called keywords or tags. This bottom-up collaborative process, which is called tagging, has been successfully used in most Social Web applications, where users tag web pages, photos and videos, so that they can later retrieve them, as well as share them with other users having common interests. The sets of categories derived from tagging are commonly referred to as folksonomies.

The Social Web has transformed each one of us from a passive receiver to an active producer of web content. The following video illustrates how:

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New Year’s TV nostalgia

January 1, 2009 1 Comment

Being back in Greece for the holidays, I caught a glimpse of New Year’s programmes on TV. Disappointing, to say the least.

Luckily, I can go back in time with YouTube (way back!) and enjoy some quality TV moments (in Greek). New Year 1988 ladies and gentlemen:

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