The implementation of Sir Tim’s “Raw Data Now” vision is well under way in the UK. UK government data are being released and the process is open for input from developers that may want to contribute. Open except from the fact that they have to join a closed Google group (a bit ironic don’t you […]
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 […]
Newly launched semantic search engine HealthBase has listed “Jew” as a cause for AIDS. The official explanation is that this was caused by homonymy (words with the same spelling but different meaning): The showcase was not configured to distinguish between the disease AIDS and the verb aids (as in aiding someone). This was corrected shortly […]
Who says the Semantic Web exists only in the minds of academics? Last week, at the closing keynote of the Semantic Technology conference, Rob Larson and Evan Sandhaus of the New York Times unveiled their plans of embracing the Semantic Web by releasing their corpus in the form of Linked Data. The vast amount of […]
Good news from the Raw Data Now front. Tim Berners-Lee has been asked by Gordon Brown to help open up access to government data in the UK. Let’s hope this is not just a publicity stunt to boost Mr Brown’s plummeting popularity, but a true effort in creating a more transparent government. If this works, […]
Greg Boutin, founder of Growthroute Ventures, recently posted a series of articles about the latest trends on the web: Web 3.0, Linked Data, and the Semantic Web. Greg attempts an in-depth analysis of these concepts, the technologies and innovations behind them, and how they can be combined to form the next generation web. Richard MacManus […]
Tim Berners-Lee, father of the World Wide Web and the Semantic Web, talked in TED 2009 about the origin and evolution of the web. He described how he first came up with the idea of hypertext on 1989 and how difficult it was to communicate this to his boss. Fortunately, he was allowed to work […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]