If you’re one of the bloggers that love to blog but never seem to find the time to do it properly (it all sounds so familiar!), then the Semantic Web may have a treat for you. The Evri semantic web service claims to be able to help bloggers follow trends and developments and deliver curated content to their readers:

The idea is to put into play more elements of its technology, such as its notion of collections that lets users follow entities around topics they’re interested in, so that bloggers can become better curators for their sites. They then get better, that is, at pinpointing streams around their specialty and letting information about that flow to their base.

Of course, as the article claims, curated content is not supposed to be a replacement for original content produced by the blogger. Instead, it can be used more like starting material, on top of which the blogger will add an editorial layer. Sweet!

This will help place the UK at the cutting edge of research on the semantic web and other emerging web and internet technologies, and ensure that government is taking the right funding decisions to position the UK as a world leader. And we will invite universities and private sector web developers and companies to join this collaborative project.

Good news indeed, in light of the recent developments in the Linked Data initiative in the UK.

…you can ask at the Semantic Overflow. A Semantic Web expert will (hopefully) pick this up and give you a straight answer. Give it a try!

Anyway, the data is now available in RDF and can be queried via SPARQL. You can find some useful examples of such queries from Leigh Dodds at the Talis blog. Happy querying!

Chances are anyone who has come across the terms ‘Semantic Web’ or ‘Web 3.0′, has also come across the term ‘ontology’. But what is an ontology anyway? For philosophers it is the study of all existence (including God’s!).

Computer scientists though have a more practical view of an ontology.A recent article in the IT Professional magazine of the IEEE Computer Society examines what an ontology means for the Semantic Web:

An ontology is a method of representing items of knowledge (ideas, facts, things, whatever) in a way that defines the relationships and classifica- tions of concepts within a specified domain of knowledge. It’s this ability to define a variety of useful relationships among items of knowledge, and to implement these relationships in software, that make an ontology such a powerful gadget in the knowledge manager’s toolkit.

You can download the complete article from here.

It’s been fundamental to what we do for a long time. We feel we’re good at it, but our content is an island… This is wholly consistent with our open strategy… to facilitate access to slices of our data for those who want to include it in their applications.

Watch Larson’s announcement:

It’s clear to us that the time for structured data has come. We’re beginning to see it in the current wave of Linked Data sets being released, and in the support that big companies, like Google and Yahoo, are showing for structured data. Who knows, maybe the Semantic Web is nearly upon us too.

He also talked passionately about the future of the web and Linked Data. He believes sharing data on the web can have so many benefits and that everyone should be contributing to this. He even engaged the audience in chanting: “Raw Data Now!”.

Watch the talk here:

Can the Semantic Web improve the way we send and receive email? Yes, according to researchers from the University of Stanford. They propose a novel approach in defining email addresses, called Semantic Email Addressing (SEA). SEA replaces traditional email addresses with ‘semantic’ ones. The idea is that semantic information, such as the Friend-of-a-Friend (FOAF) Resource Description Framework (RDF), should be used to identify individuals and groups as email recipients. For example, if I want to receive updates about the Lost series, all I have to do is add this to my interests in my FOAF file. The Stanford team claims:

In a sense, SEA is the opposite of spam. Although both SEA and spam might involve unsolicited emails, spam goes to everyone, whereas SEA is targeted toward those who’ve publicly announced their interest in the SEA mail topic. SEA is a marketer’s dream come true. Moreover, unlike mailing lists, it requires no discovery for either the sender or the receiver.

Cloud Computing is about replacing desktop-based computing resources with internet-based ones. The driving concept is called Software as a Service (SaaS), according to which software applications are licensed for use as services provided to customers on demand. This is similar to how traditional utilities like electricity or water are charged.

The latest issue of the IEEE Intelligent Systems journal features Cloud Computing and includes an article on Semantic Web applications. The authors claim that the volume of computing resources on the cloud can help deal with the explosion of web data and the scalability problems of the Semantic Web. They describe a number of such initiatives: Hadoop’s MapReduce, as well as the HBase and Yahoo! Pig extensions. The purpose of these open-source platforms is large-scale processing of semantic RDF datasets without any scalability limits.