alexmikro.net » web content

Blogging with Calais

Alexander Mikroyannidis — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 15:45:43 +0000

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!

The Semantic Web vision

Alexander Mikroyannidis — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 11:38:18 +0000

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:

The Social Web and You

Alexander Mikroyannidis — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 09:17:29 +0000

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: