A semantic web future - Intelligent internet
The social media market is crowded and growing faster than anyone can follow. We only have to look at the recent estimated value of Twitter to grasp it's popularity.
After reading Ravit Lichtenberg's RWW article on the 10 changes she envisages in social media for 2009 I was driven to combine two planned blog posts into one.
I was going to write my first foray into the semantic web, well that's not quite true as I have mentioned semantics before. I was also considering writing about the data overload we can all suffer from when delving into the social media world.
The RWW article talks about the refocusing of the industry, as we all scramble to make sense or gain value from the sheer volume of information that is being passed to us. I now scan information from RSS feeds, friendfeed & Twitter streams and several other aggregative services such as Social Median or Noovo.
One of the subjects covered is talk of how the sector will, once refocussed, start to make real headway in generating revenue from social media. But for me, and the article points to this, it will be the increased integration of semantic technology into the web that will allow us to extract the information we want from the mess the social media world is fast becoming. Allowing us to gain from the real value of social media, the value content can provide.
The semantic web will create vastly more complex connectivity between content on the internet. In it's most simplest form, when viewing an article or search result on a certain subject matter or term, semantic web apps will allow you to find other references to the same subject elsewhere on the internet. Creating a vastly detailed breakdown of that subject in its various locations and formats.
A good place to start if you want to learn more about the semantic web and how it all ties together is the W3C site, where there is an ever growing wealth of information.
So far my exploration of the web apps out there that are providing software solutions to the semantic market is quite restricted, there are several making headway, but the small number is indicative of the complexity of the task at hand. In the background semantic technology is being invested into heavily in the private sector to assist with the interoperability of existing data within data dominated industries.
On a web app basis, focussed more around the social aspects of the internet, I've done some playing around with headup and Twine. I am also hoping to spend some time looking into Freebase.
Talking to headup briefly, they effectively break down the content and then link entities within that content to specific categories, such as person, product, music, image etc and then relate them to popular services such as Amazon, Twitter, YouTube. This is currently running as a plugin for Firefox.
But its not the web apps I want to talk about this time, its the concept of the semantic web and how I see this adding enormous value to internet content. Combined with the current popularity in cloud computing that the big providers are investing more time in, the internet is going to enter our lives like we've never seen before.
We are all on-line far more than we used to be, with the advent of smart phones, netbooks and other smaller devices and also the proliferation of wifi, the internet is becoming far more portable and also far readily more available.
The semantic web should start to tie up this convoluted stream of information that we are currently receiving. Allowing us to start looking for specific information and improving our "time spent to result" ratio when it comes to sifting through the vast amounts of available information around specific topics.
It will be interesting to see how this affects the keyword/adword business as we all become more semantically operative. With a focus on the content of web pages, accessibility or more importantly good accessibility practice should become more important.
It will also be interesting to see how the search giants start to integrate more semantic features into their services offerings. Search engine already effectively work within the semantic web world, many have been altering their search algorithms or at least investigating altering their search algorithms to have more semantic search capability rather than the traditional heuristic/ statistical frequency search.
As you'll see from the dates on some the articles I've linked to, the application of true semantic facilities to the web is no easy task. The talk and investigation into semantics has been around for several years now, but I think the dramatic uptake in social media and also the availability and portability of the internet will see a significant increase in the investment in these technologies this year, certainly in the social applications market.
I see this as a semantic year for the internet, the year the internet begins to teach itself. The intelligent internet.
Related links:
Semantic Web - The foundations - Digital Signals
http://www.digital-constructions.com/blog/2009/02/semantic-web-foundations.html
Interview with Mike Darnell of Headup - Digital Signals http://www.digital-constructions.com/blog/2009/02/interview-with-mike-darnell-of-headup.html
Headup - Semantic browser integration - Digital Signals http://www.digital-constructions.com/blog/2009/03/headup-article-semantic-browser.html
After reading Ravit Lichtenberg's RWW article on the 10 changes she envisages in social media for 2009 I was driven to combine two planned blog posts into one.
I was going to write my first foray into the semantic web, well that's not quite true as I have mentioned semantics before. I was also considering writing about the data overload we can all suffer from when delving into the social media world.
The RWW article talks about the refocusing of the industry, as we all scramble to make sense or gain value from the sheer volume of information that is being passed to us. I now scan information from RSS feeds, friendfeed & Twitter streams and several other aggregative services such as Social Median or Noovo.
One of the subjects covered is talk of how the sector will, once refocussed, start to make real headway in generating revenue from social media. But for me, and the article points to this, it will be the increased integration of semantic technology into the web that will allow us to extract the information we want from the mess the social media world is fast becoming. Allowing us to gain from the real value of social media, the value content can provide.
The semantic web will create vastly more complex connectivity between content on the internet. In it's most simplest form, when viewing an article or search result on a certain subject matter or term, semantic web apps will allow you to find other references to the same subject elsewhere on the internet. Creating a vastly detailed breakdown of that subject in its various locations and formats.
A good place to start if you want to learn more about the semantic web and how it all ties together is the W3C site, where there is an ever growing wealth of information.
So far my exploration of the web apps out there that are providing software solutions to the semantic market is quite restricted, there are several making headway, but the small number is indicative of the complexity of the task at hand. In the background semantic technology is being invested into heavily in the private sector to assist with the interoperability of existing data within data dominated industries.
On a web app basis, focussed more around the social aspects of the internet, I've done some playing around with headup and Twine. I am also hoping to spend some time looking into Freebase.
Talking to headup briefly, they effectively break down the content and then link entities within that content to specific categories, such as person, product, music, image etc and then relate them to popular services such as Amazon, Twitter, YouTube. This is currently running as a plugin for Firefox.
But its not the web apps I want to talk about this time, its the concept of the semantic web and how I see this adding enormous value to internet content. Combined with the current popularity in cloud computing that the big providers are investing more time in, the internet is going to enter our lives like we've never seen before.
We are all on-line far more than we used to be, with the advent of smart phones, netbooks and other smaller devices and also the proliferation of wifi, the internet is becoming far more portable and also far readily more available.
The semantic web should start to tie up this convoluted stream of information that we are currently receiving. Allowing us to start looking for specific information and improving our "time spent to result" ratio when it comes to sifting through the vast amounts of available information around specific topics.
It will be interesting to see how this affects the keyword/adword business as we all become more semantically operative. With a focus on the content of web pages, accessibility or more importantly good accessibility practice should become more important.
It will also be interesting to see how the search giants start to integrate more semantic features into their services offerings. Search engine already effectively work within the semantic web world, many have been altering their search algorithms or at least investigating altering their search algorithms to have more semantic search capability rather than the traditional heuristic/ statistical frequency search.
As you'll see from the dates on some the articles I've linked to, the application of true semantic facilities to the web is no easy task. The talk and investigation into semantics has been around for several years now, but I think the dramatic uptake in social media and also the availability and portability of the internet will see a significant increase in the investment in these technologies this year, certainly in the social applications market.
I see this as a semantic year for the internet, the year the internet begins to teach itself. The intelligent internet.
Related links:
Semantic Web - The foundations - Digital Signals
http://www.digital-constructions.com/blog/2009/02/semantic-web-foundations.html
Interview with Mike Darnell of Headup - Digital Signals http://www.digital-constructions.com/blog/2009/02/interview-with-mike-darnell-of-headup.html
Headup - Semantic browser integration - Digital Signals http://www.digital-constructions.com/blog/2009/03/headup-article-semantic-browser.html
Labels: intelligent internet, semantic web, semantics, social media, web 3.0
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posted by Ed Richardson at
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