Semantic Web takes big step forward

The Semantic Web, a concept tossed around for years as a Web extension to make it easier to find and group information, is getting a critical boost Tuesday from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). W3C will announce publication of SPARQL (pronounced “sparkle”) query technology, a Semantic Web component enabling people to focus on what they want to know rather than on the database technology or data format used to store data, W3C said. The potential of the Semantic Web cannot be underestimated. By scanning the Web on behalf of users, even Google’s ad-based business model could be impacted, an analyst said. SPARQL queries express high-levels goals and are easier to extend to unanticipated data sources. The technology overcomes limitations of local searches and single formats, according to W3C.

Site – http://news.yahoo.com

The Singularity Summit 2007

In futures studies, the singularity represents an “event horizon” in the predictability of human technological development past which present models of the future cease to give reliable or accurate answers, following the creation of strong AI or the enhancement of human intelligence. Many futurists predict that after the singularity, humans as they exist presently won’t be the driving force in scientific and technological progress, eclipsed cognitively by posthumans, AI, or both, with all models of change based on past trends in human behavior becoming obsolete. While some regard the singularity as a positive event and work to hasten its arrival, others view the singularity as dangerous, undesirable, or unlikely. The most practical means for initiating the singularity are debated, as are how (or whether) the singularity can be influenced or avoided if dangerous. The Singularity Summit 2007 will explore these nuances. We invite you to join us.

Site – http://www.singinst.org

What’s next for the Internet

If you think of the World Wide Web as a cloud of largely undifferentiated information, the mission of the company he’s about to unveil, Radar Networks, is to take that cloud and impose order on it. Not just any order, but a very special kind known to experts by one of the hottest buzzwords in computer science today: the semantic Web. For all the wonders that today’s Web can deliver to your fingertips — the Norwegian word for ice cream, a seat on the next flight to Paris, the best price for a Clash CD — it has a fundamental flaw. It’s basically a compendium of billions of text documents designed to be read by humans. You can search it for keywords, but the results aren’t much use until you sort through them to find the page that has the info you want. To take the Web to the next level — to move from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 — the information in those documents will have to be turned into data that a machine can read and evaluate on its own. Only then will computers be able to take over tasks we now do by hand: find the nearest restaurant, book the best flight, buy the cheapest CD.

Site – http://money.cnn.com

Web 3.0

The Third-Generation Web is Coming, Web 3.0, expected to debut in 2007, will be more connected, open, and intelligent, with semantic Web technologies, distributed databases, natural language processing, machine learning, machine reasoning, and autonomous agents.

Site – http://www.kurzweilai.net

Google exec challenges Berners-Lee

A Google executive challenged Internet pioneer Tim Berners-Lee on his ideas for a Semantic Web during a conference in Boston on artificial intelligence. On Tuesday, Berners-Lee, the father of the Web and the current director of the World Wide Web Consortium, gave the keynote on artificial intelligence and the Semantic Web at a conference sponsored by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).

Site – http://news.com.com

tagthe.net

What is this? tagthe.net is a webservice intended to provide you with tags for your texts. You can use it in your applications, in other webservices or just play around with it. Why is it so different? In contrast to other services it uses the information that is present in the text, it analyses the content and tries to find out words that could be useful as tags. Currently it works with english, german and french texts.

Site – http://www.tagthe.net

Why the World is ready for the Semantic Web

Some people argue that although the Semantic Web technologies are all in place, the world isn’t ready for the Semantic Web vision yet; that we’re still a couple of years away from fully embracing and adopting Semantic Web principles and attitudes. Perhaps, though, the opposite is closer to the truth: that some of the biggest and best projects on the web today are based on Semantic Web principles – they just don’t happen to be using Semantic Web technologies.

Site – http://www.oreillynet.com

The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project

FOAF is a way to describe people and relationships to computers. FOAF stands for Friend Of A Friend. Technically, it is an RDF/XML Semantic Web vocabulary. Because of this, FOAF data is easy to process and merge.

Site – http://www.foaf-project.org

Pentagon sets its sights on social networking websites

New Scientist has discovered that Pentagon's National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking, is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks. And it could harness advances in internet technology – specifically the forthcoming "semantic web" championed by the web standards organisation W3C – to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals.

Site – http://www.newscientist.com

Smart sites to power semantic web

Much of the talk at the 2006 World Wide Web conference has been about the technologies behind the so-called “semantic web”. Phrases like “increased intelligence”, “next generation” and “bringing meaning to the web” are being bandied around by researchers, exhibitors and delegates alike. But like many big ideas behind the hype and evangelising finding a concise definition of what the semantic web is and what it will do is more difficult.

Site – http://news.bbc.co.uk

Wikipedia³

Wikipedia³ is a conversion of the English Wikipedia into RDF. It’s a monthly updated dataset containing around 47 million triples. The creation of the dataset is motivated by several factors, one being the desire to have more real-world RDF datasets of reasonable size. Wikipedia assembles a wealth of information created and maintained by people all over the globe – opening up that rich pool of data or even only a small part of it to the semantic web seems like a worthy pursuit. The Wikipedia³ dataset currently combines structural information like link and category relationships with basic per-page metadata. The dataset is based on the Wikimedia dump of the English Wikipedia (enwiki, currently from 2006-03-26) and consists of roughly 47 million triples (47′054′407). We provide Wikipedia³ in all major RDF serialization formats: RDF/XML, Turtle and N-Triples.

Site – http://labs.systemone.at

TopBraid

TopBraid Composer™ is a new modeling environment from industry experts for creating and managing domain models and ontologies in the Semantic Web standards RDF Schema and OWL. Design and implementation of Composer are lead by Holger Knublauch, TopQuadrant’s Product Technical Director. Holger was formerly the designer and developer of Protégé-OWL, the leading open-source ontology editor from Stanford University. TopBraid Composer leverages the experiences gained with Protégé and other tools into a professional modeling toolset. Composer is based on the Eclipse platform and uses Jena as its underlying API.

Site – http://topbraidcomposer.com