May 14, 2008 By Myriam Mencke No comments

A Medley of Semantically Related News Snippets


Today witnessed a number of thought-provoking news publications from various sources, from a newspaper in Madrid to ReadWriteWeb. My first observation this morning, in a newspaper circulated in Madrid’s metro, is worth mentioning, as it demonstrates the triumphant transition made by Web 2.0 into the general public’s eye, as well as recognising the need for technologies to aid users in activities such as managing their social profiles and their blog profiles. The daily cartoon sketch shows two female students seated in a university computer lab. One asks the other: “How’s it going?”. Her friend answers: “Ugh……..I’m updating my social profile in 18 social networks, changing my website’s photos, and renewing the contents of my blog”. The response is: “And on top of all that, they expect us to study”. Although the underlying issues provoked in this cartoon have been partly resolved by initiatives such as Google Open Social, there is still significant room for improvement.

Besides the spine-chilling news for Google that Powerset unleashed its test version of a semantic search engine for Wikipedia for public use on Monday (which I will not go into here, as there are currently countless articles floating around the Web discussing what some have coined the “Google Killer”), another search engine, entitled Uptake, was launched today. Uptake, formerly known as Kango, is a travel search engine which extracts information from more than 1000 travel sites in order to construct a database of over 400,000 US hotels and activities. Uptake has built its database from consumer reviews, opinions and descriptions on these sites, and has constructed an ontology from metadata applied to the content of these sources. One of the more recent Natural Language Processing Techniques Uptake applies is Sentiment Analysis, also referred to as Opinion Mining, which uses syntactic parsing to extract words to indicate, for example, favourable sentiment towards a hotel, such as “good time”, “fantastic view” or “relaxed atmosphere”, and distinguishes positive sentiment from negative sentiment.

Today also saw the move of Jeremy Carroll, lead architect on the Open Source Jena Toolkit at HP, to TopQuadrant, a leading Semantic Web company, as Chief Product Architect.

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May 5, 2008 By Myriam Mencke No comments

Optimistic Opinions about the Future of the World Wide Web

 BBC recently interviewed ten of the leading figures of the WWW regarding their opinions about the future of the Web, in honour of the 15th anniversary of the invention of the Web. This post discusses the aspects of the interviews which referred to the Semantic Web, which when combined, contributed an interesting overview of the future of the Semantic Web.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee firstly pointed out a crucial detail concerning the objective of the BBC’s interviews – that it is incorrect to look back on fifteen years of the Web, and rather, that the last 15 years should be viewed as a starting point representing the infancy of the Web. His viewpoint implies high ambitions for the Web and the Semantic Web: he states that the current phase in the growth of the Web will be referred to in a 100 years as a time when all the world’s data was not even available instantly to a user, and the Semantic Web was not even functional. This insinuates that it is theoretically possible that in the next 100 years, these two visions will be completely fulfilled. He also makes an indirect reference to Web 2.0, stating that Web 2.0 is the conception of new systems of social behavior, peer review and regimes.

Nigel Shadbolt makes a similar observation, referring to Web 2.0, pointing out the conquering of the Web by users. He concludes that the future is the Semantic Web as an information broker for the user, assuming the role of document filtering, which was previously carried out by the user.

Professor Wendy Hall, Nigel Shadbolt’s colleague at the university of Southampton, does not make any reference to the Semantic Web, instead giving importance to only one essential characteristic – the Web will no longer be confined to traditional desktop computers, but will be accessible to all through mobile devices such as mobile phones. 

Kai-Fu Lee from Google China similarly does not mention the Semantic Web, but refers to the concept of “Cloud Computing” as a challenge, also alluding to one factor which was broached in the previous blog post; the importance of user confidence in the uses of their private data online, and the fostering of trust between users and online companies.

Dr. David Belanger, AT&T Labs’ Chief Scientist and Vice President in Information and Software Systems Research, does not make a direct reference to the Semantic Web, however, it is evident from his comments that the Semantic Web will play a central role in the future vision he describes. He states that the greatest challenge for the future Web is managing all of the new and different applications which are emerging on the Web, such as image browsers which have video and other interactive media. This scenario demands one characteristic which the Semantic Web can offer: integration of homogeneous data.

The chairman of the Mozilla Foundation, Mitchell Baker (She of the famous “Firefox” hair) propounded a similar viewpoint to the other interviewees in relation to the growth of communities on the Web, and the Web’s mobility and thus its consequential filtration into every aspect of life.

The president of the Palo Alto research center, Mark Bernstein, does not make any reference to the Semantic Web, neither directly nor indirectly, mainly mentioning that the Web represents communities. 

Robert Cailliau was one of the people responsible for the creation of the Web with Tim Berners-Lee at Cern. He reveals some important aspects for the future of the Web which until now have not been given adequate attention, such as the fact that all of the communities emerging on the Web (which was the main focus of many of the other interviewees), will fundamentally need the laws, economics and social norms required by any community. He states the important point that the Web is controlled by ontologies, therefore, who controls the construction of the ontologies, and thus, the data the user sees? Given that he states “Because it (the Web) works by ontologies…”, this gives implicit recognition to the fact that the Semantic Web already controls a significant volume of the data on the Web. 

Robert Scoble, well-known blogger and head of Fast Company TV, concludes that ultimately the Web is about communication, corroborating the viewpoint of many.

Tim O’Reilly, one of the leading figures of the Web, focused on the sensor aspect of the Web. He summarized the Web as a concept rather than a concrete technology, which in the future will not just be the Web as it is today, but a part of an interconnected network of mobile phones, sensor networks, and even power networks, comprised of independent devices. He refers to this scenario as a “global brand”, which raises interesting questions, one being: Who will own this global brand?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7373717.stm

      

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April 30, 2008 By Myriam Mencke No comments

The Benefits and Drawbacks of Profile Information on Social Sites

On Monday 28th April, cnn.com published an article highlighting the possible privacy threats for social network users, and the potential destinations of their profile information, which in many cases are not the locations intended or desired by the user. http://edition.cnn.com/2008/TECH/04/28/social.networking.privacy.ap/index.html User profile information has been available to third parties since the emergence of social networking sites, clearly those profiles which are most freely available being those which are Public. However, since the rapid growth of “Applications” on social networking sites, even the users who set their profiles as Private provide their information to developers; either companies or private developers with the required technical skills. That is, if the user decides to download an Application from the site. Which, should be added, is highly probable, given the number of user-oriented applications available on social networking sites. When a user wishes to download one of these applications, they must check a box which gives developers permission to access their profile information.In particular, two of the most prominent sites, FaceBook and MySpace, give developers access to the profiles of users who download their applications. MySpace provides applications such as “Stickers” (In the “Photos” category of applications), which allows the user to “Choose from over 25,000 FREE stickerz to add your profile and show to your friends!” and “Sketch Me” – “Let our artists create personal sketches of you from you pictures.” The benefits of such sites are obvious – users avail of a network of contacts selected by them, personalized services, such as the growing number of Semantic Web applications tailored towards a personalized user experience, which combine aspects of Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 – Twine, Baagz, Friendfeed, Twitter, etc. In summary, they profit from the communicative aspects in a revolutionary way which has not been previously witnessed since the advent of the Web. However, there are other more sinister uses (or should that be “re-uses”…) of profile information, accompanied by the fact that the legal specifications for this field are scarce and unclear. Uses include, for example, matching profile information with public records, or targeted advertising. These are two of the possibilities mentioned in the CNN article, however, it is not illogical to suspect that there are many other possible uses which have not yet been tapped into by developers or brought into the public eye. What about calculating the amounts of money a user spends on online purchases, grouped according to article type? Ultimately, the advantages and disadvantages depend on the users point of view – some users may embrace the idea of third parties having access to their profiles, to aid the creation of many positive services characteristic of Web 3.0 – recommendation and personalization of products and advertising, avoiding the nuisance of unsolicited advertising. See, for example, FaceBook’s most recent “App Endorsements”, which allows users to opt for receiving advertisements only endorsed by the user himself. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/identified_hits_facebook.php#comment-53373?referer=sphere_related_content

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February 9, 2008 By Myriam Mencke 1 Comment

The Dynamics Between Web 2.0, Semantic Web, and Financial Markets

A theme which has recently been gaining increased importance for both Web 2.0 companies and financial investors alike is the interaction between Web 2.0, Social Networks, and Wall Street. The Semantic Web also has a role to play in this scenario. This post will give some insights on this topic, being based on concepts presented at the O’Reilly Money:Tech conference, which was held on 6-7 February in New York. One of the most relevant events for those working in the Semantic Web was Tim O’Reilly’s interview with the upcoming CEO of Reuters, Devin Wenig, who emphasized that the Semantic Web will play a pivotal role in Reuters’ future.

Tech

The Money:Tech conference was aimed towards a diverse audience: on the financial side, hedge fund managers, equity, financial and investment analysts, investors, managers, and entrepreneurs, and on the technological side, technologists, as well as academics. The main focus of the conference was to highlight that Web 2.0 is a useful source of data for investors, and more specifically, the tools to extract meaning from this data for money management. Focusing on this topic shows the utility of Web 2.0 and Social Networks to expose trends in financial data. The coming together of financial experts and Web 2.0 innovators and the fusion of their ideas provides insight and value creation for technology advances in the investment industry. An example of a presentation which discussed such issues was: “Main Street Research Meets Wall Street: How Social Networking is Transforming Online Investing”.

Moving from Web 2.0 and Social Networks to the Semantic Web, in his blog, Tim O’Reilly discusses some developments in how information will be delivered to the consumer, which were presented by Devin Wenig in his interview at Money:Tech. Changes in the methods of data delivery are relevant for all types of news, but particularly financial news sources, as they are volatile. A first point which Wenig highlighted was his awareness that textual information has been replaced by the formats of data desired and controlled by consumers of Web 2.0, such as video and interactive applications. Secondly, Wenig claimed that we are coming to the end of an era where the company with the least time delay in delivering news held a competitive advantage. This second point exposed a very important trend for the future of news data: that the timing of news is no longer a crucial factor, but rather the sources of the news and the information which can be derived from connections between them. In other words, the processing of the data. This is where the Semantic Web steps in. The aim is not just to mark data with semantic metadata, but to use the semantic data to derive added-value additional information from the original data for the consumer, where the consumer may be another news company, or the end consumer. Thus, the focus is on making insights from the data through semantic technology.

O’Reilly’s discussion of Devin’s point is of essential importance. Why? Because he emphasizes the purpose of adding metadata to news items for further processing. Semantic annotation itself is useless if it cannot be reused by Reuters, other news companies or financial investors. For example, it could be used to determine the connection between a news item about the fall in the share price of a particular company and a fall in oil prices.

O’Reilly agrees with changes in consumer media impacting on the structure of professional media. However, he does not see the end of exploiting opportunities for zero-delay information delivery to the consumer, and even more importantly, getting access to the correct sources of data to extract overlooked information. This provides the consumer with more relevant information. But, the process is still contingent upon a degree of human interaction with the data (the curation process). Subsequent semantic annotation of this data may then unlock previously concealed connections.

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2008/02/reuters_semantic_web_moneytech.html

http://en.oreilly.com/money2008/public/content/home

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December 14, 2007 By Myriam Mencke No comments

Google’s OpenSocial Open to Competition

Yesterday InternetNews.com, a website owned by the JupiterMedia Corporation, announced that this week competitors to Google’s OpenSocial Platform emerged. Four social networking sites, FaceBook, Bebo, LinkedIn, and Friendster, stated the launch of a set of API’s compatible with other social networks. Facebook announced the launch of the Facebook Markup Language (FBML), available to developers to integrate applications with other social networks using the Facebook Platform.

Bebo held an official launch of its Open Application Platform, which conforms with Facebook’s Platform and Google’s OpenSocial. Within the same week, both LinkedIn and Friendster publicized the launch of their available APIs, based on OpenSocial. No doubt that we will soon see other social networking sites following suit.

http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3716366

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