March 10, 2010

Phil Windley, identity and security expert, interviews David Siegel on a wide-ranging series of topics. This is especially good for technologists and people working in the semantic web. You’ll find it today on the IT Conversations Network.

March 10, 2010

The UK’s Daily Mail reports that Japan’s “communications minister Yoshihide Suga has announced that the Japanese Government wants to completely replace the existing internet by 2020.” Apparently, he thinks people want something better. We agree. We at Pullnews believe that infrastructure and access shape the way we use a network, and the Internet certainly has plenty of legacy features that aren’t scaling well at all. What do you think?

March 9, 2010

Keyword: Enterprise, Semantic Framework, MIKE2.0, Open Source

For those in the enterprise community who want to incorporate semantic technologies, we are excited to introduce to you the release of Open SEAS by Structured Dynamics. Open SEAS nails the fundamental requirement of the semantic web, which is to establish a coherent interoperable layer across your information assets. It is now part of an open source community named MIKE2.0, an integrated knowledge project with a methodology of defining ways to deliver your information management projects, thus allowing you to be part of a 2000+ members group free to expand its capabilities. Open SEAS adopts the layered semantic enterprise thoughts of MIKE2.0 and is based on the Seven Pillars of Open Semantic Enterprise. There are many more features and a detailed overview at the AI3Blog maintained by Mike Bergman.

March 5, 2010

A year ago, IDC produced an excellent video on the size of our digital universe. It starts out talking about the financial crisis but soon gets into some serious numbers. It’s easy to watch and very informative. Enjoy the IDC Digital Universe Video now.

March 5, 2010

Keywords: NetBase, Funding, Semantic Search

NetBase, a start up firm in the Semantic Search space has raised a third round of funding worth $9 million. NetBase is a company which lets you gain structured insights into the vast amount of data from blogs, news stories, articles and even status updates. NetBase plans to utilize this fund for serving several other markets in marketing and business development initiatives. Read the announcement at paidContent.org and learn more about NetBase’s capabilities at NetBase.com.

March 4, 2010

Image via Wikipedia

We have just learned from blogger Priyank Mohan that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has partnered with several prominent semantic companies to launch ViewChange.org, a semantic-powered hub for charities to build communities and share inspiring stories. The site will launch in June, but be sure to see this exciting video by Danny Glover explaining the project and how you can help now.

March 3, 2010

I love the concept of the fourth party by Doc Searls. It’s the agent software we’ve been dreaming about forever, and the semantic web will enable it. Phil Windley, in his excellent blog, breaks down the concept clearly, and includes a few references to my book as well. Phil’s blog is called Technometria – I recommend you visit often. – DS

March 1, 2010

TechMeMe reported yesterday that Google will acquire PicNik, a browser-based photo-editing software site that makes it easy to edit your photos right online. Many PicNik members use the software on Yahoo’s Flickr site, which Google promises to continue to allow. It’s another pull-based company getting recognition for doing things right. Eventually, Adobe and its flagship product, Photoshop, will have to give way to net-based collaborative design and editing tools. Read more on the PicNik blog. Congratulations to the entrepreneurs and employees of PicNic!

March 1, 2010

Talis has launched Nodalities, a magazine helping to explain the semantic web. The current issue has a great article on GraphOS – the data web as an operating system. Please bookmark the Nodalities page and read it often! 

March 1, 2010

The Advertising Show has just released a podcast featuring an interview with David Siegel, author of Pull. Check it out.

February 26, 2010

Keywords: Eurovoc, Linked Data, Law, SKOS

Eurovoc is a new multilingual thesaurus joining the list of legal resources available as “Linked Data” on the web. It focuses on the law and legislation of the European Union and is available in 21 different languages. Eurovoc is also converted to SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization Systems), a common data model used for linking knowledge organization systems including thesauri, taxonomy and classification systems. There have already been a big list of Linked Data resources available for the legal domain. To learn about the Pull model for the legal domain, read chapter 13 from David’s book Pull. For a detailed list of Linked Data resources for legal professionals, access the list here. You may read about the announcement at Legal Informatics Blog and start accessing Eurovoc at Europa.

February 26, 2010

Keywords: URIBurner, Linked-data, OpenLink Software

URIBurner.com

Ever wished to be a part of growing linked-data cloud without need to deal with geeky terms of RDF, OWL, etc.?  Here is URIBurner.com, a simple but powerful service  from OpenLink Software that delivers RDF-based structured descriptions of Web addressable resources (documents or real world objects) in a variety of formats through Generic HTTP URIs. When Kingsley Idehen, CEO of OpenLink Software, pointed to this linked-data view of our Book’s page, we were impressed.

February 26, 2010

A few weeks ago, David wrote a blog post explaining that humans are already generating and consuming more than 3.6 zettabytes per year. What is a zettabyte? What is the meaning of the data explosion we’re in the middle of? Two people have tried to measure and put all this information in perspective. First, Roger Bohn at UC San Diego has been working for years trying to measure the amount of data we consume. See his project, How Much Information and tell him we sent you. Second, a guy named Randy has put up a page called Whatisabyte.com, putting all this information in perspective.

February 25, 2010

In Pull, David introduces the concept of the digital birth certificate for products and even services. One of the many benefits of linking this kind of data is to track who owns what, exactly, and that’s very useful in the case of a product recall. Toyota is now in the middle of the largest product recall in history , and the process is messy at best. Last week in the Huffington Post, David Stephenson argued that it’s time for the semantic web to start solving large-scale problems like product recalls. His thoughts are worth reading.

February 25, 2010

Identity Commons, which includes the i-card foundation and OpenID, will have their 10th workshop in Boston, May 17-19. The workshops were started by Doc Searls, Kaliya Hamlin, and Phil Windley, all of whom contributed to David’s book, Pull. They call their work “practical idealism.” Check it out.

February 24, 2010

Keywords: Linked Data, Talis, UK Government

You can now find hot spots for investment in areas including RFID and Advanced Composites with just a single click. Talis has developed an application for the UK government recently which shows the locations of Centers of Excellence for potential industries, by leveraging the ideas of Linked Data. Talis also launched data.gov.uk recently. Access their application at bis.clients.talis.com and read their announcement at Nodalities Blog.

February 23, 2010

Keywords: GE, Healthcare Solutions, Hospital Information Solutions, Electronic Media Records

Patients who are involved in joint treatments from doctors in multiple institutions and locations usually have their health information spread across in several different sources. GE recently launched a business division solely catering towards the development of eHealth solutions to help integrate patients’ data from multiple sources and create a global repository of patients’ health records. This initiative will ensure timely and efficient care, lesser cost and improved productivity for both doctors and patients who can now access complete patient’s data from different sources using a single global framework. David talks about the transition from a Doctor Push model to a Patient Pull model in his book Pull. Learn more about this attempt by GE in their collaboration with eHealth expert ICW trying to efficiently connect patients and care providers at The European eHealth News Portal.

February 22, 2010

Keywords: Faviki, Social Bookmarking, Common Tags

We found a new Social Bookmarking tool named Faviki which lets you tag any web page using the Common Tagging approach. If you are not familiar with Common Tagging, please read the recent informative blog entry by David here. You can add a common tag to any page using the Faviki tool by tagging the page to a specific concept from Wikipedia, thus mentioning specifically what exactly the page talks about. This way, you can eliminate the ambiguity attached to free-word tags. You can also use this tool as a bookmarklet for your browser through which you can continue common tagging pages as you surf the internet. At any time, share the tags with others and search for pages tagged by your friends. Read more at faviki.com, register with their tool and keep adding common tags to pages you view.

February 19, 2010

Keywords: TESCO, RDFa, XHMTL

TESCO has taken a huge leap in an attempt to support the vision of the semantic web by adopting RDFa into its website. With this adoption, UK’s largest retailer TESCO has joined the bandwagon of many websites who are leveraging the benefits of RDFa standard for adding metadata into their XHTML pages. You may read about RDFa at wikipedia.com and also look at a sample web page of TESCO showing its product information to the web using RDFa standard at tesco.com.

February 18, 2010

Keywords: Resource Description Standard, Semantic Web, RDF, Library Cataloguing.

A new standard for describing resources in the digital world has emerged in the collaborative effort process led by the Joint Steering Committee. It has been named as Resource Description and Access (RDA), an idea that emerged from an international conference held at Toronto way back in 1997. RDA lets you harness the full power of metadata that librarians have created over decades. If you want to describe resources, now you can use RDA for meeting user’s need of searching and displaying metadata because RDA has a flexible framework which can fit with existing databases and also adopts cataloguing principles from AACR2R. RDA is set to be released in June 2010 and librarians will soon start cataloguing their data using this standard. Learn more about this first move towards Resource Description Framework (RDF) by accessing the RDA Toolkit here and read more about its capabilities at The Principle Blog.

February 17, 2010

Keywords: Google, Google Goggles, Android, Visual Search

Take a photo of that bridge in front of you, then pull all the information about that bridge from the internet. Or, take a picture of the street you are walking on and learn what’s around you. That’s the goal of Google Goggles, an innovative visual search technology introduced by Google for android phones, which lets you pull relevant information from the web by just clicking a snap of any object wherever you are.  It automatically does image recognition and presents relevant information. Now, you can take a picture of a business card and pull that person’s profile from the internet on your mobile.  Look at reviews of a book by just taking a picture of the book. Open the book and capture the text of a page by taking a picture of it and using OCR. We don’t expect it to be perfect, and it’s not really semantic, but it’s a start to recognizing the world around us and bringing in relevant information. Read more about Google Goggles at limcorp.net and google.com.

February 17, 2010

Image via CrunchBase

In David’s book, Pull, he mentions i-names, which are designed to give us a chance to create public profiles online and manage them. We hope they succeed. In the meantime, if you have a Google account with a Gmail address, you can create a profile and use it for many different Google applications. Now, according to Dr. Michael Hausenblas at DERI, if you choose to make your profile public, it will present your information in – gasp! – XRD and FOAF! Yes! If you understand what that means, you’re a definite identity geek. For the rest of us, it means that public Google profiles will be available online in a standard open format that is already part of the semantic web. This is extremely important, ladies and gentlemen. To learn the ramifications, read chapters 7 and 8 of Pull. It could lead to a world of services available via i-cards on our mobile phones. This is part of what we’re hoping to see from Google. A small but important step forward. People at Facebook should take notice. If you really want the details, read Michael’s blog entry.

February 16, 2010

Keyword: Open Data, TSO, Williams Lea, Garlik, RDF

TSO, an information management solutions provider, has taken a major leap into the Linked Data initiative by partnering with Garlik. This partnership will enable the UK Government in engaging the local public to capture, enhance, transform and deliver semantic technologies. TSO and Garlik aim to set up the world’s most scalable, secure RDF framework for public to be able to participate and access published data stored in form of RDF Triples. This will encourage people to develop tools which will format and structure the data later to be placed as Linked Data on the web for access by machines. This partnership helps realize the Semantic Web of Linked Data. Learn more on the TSO web site.

February 16, 2010

Keywords: Linked Open Data, Linked Data Semantic Repository, SPARQL, RDF Search

The Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud today has several independent datasets including DBPedia, Freebase, and Wordnet. Imagine integrating all these datasets to create a single body of knowledge. The Linked Data Semantic Repository (LDSR) is an integrated dataset making this a reality, along the lines of David’s ideas on Linked Data in his book Pull. Now you can query data from multiple data sources semantically, rather than using keywords. Go ahead, search the LOD cloud and pull your answers using either a web interface at ldsr.ontotext.com or structure your own SPARQL query at ldsr.ontotext.com/sparql. Learn more on this capability which provides a reasonable view of the web at OntoText.com.

February 12, 2010

Image via CrunchBase

One of David’s predictions in Pull is that all apps will migrate to the cloud, and they will be different from today’s desktop (and even iPhone) apps. They will cooperate. Like the apps at SalesForce.com, apps for many different industries will go to a cloud-based platform and, once there, many small apps will come together to solve different problems as necessary. In effect, the larger app will be custom built on the fly as needed, and new modules will be built constantly to solve new problems (or solve old problems in a better way). We’ve always admired online photo/image editor Aviary and thought it could be such a platform, but they needed to develop a marketplace for the mini apps. Now, with money from Spark Capital and Jeff Bezos, Aviary’s main product and file hosting will be free. The company hopes to encourage developers to build small apps and create a marketplace for the mini apps. The next step would be to operate on files anywhere, rather than only those on the Aviary servers. We’ll be watching and hoping for great things from Aviary as they pursue their dreams. They may just give Adobe a run for their money (or get bought by Adobe and change the company from push to pull). Learn more in the TechCrunch article.