The Semantic Web

There has been quite a lot of talk of the Semantic Web on this blog and we still believe it's the future. This is what will make Skynet become aware: giving all the data out there some meaning.

Anyway if you don't know what the Semantic Web is and what all of this means for you, this brief article and video will explain the Semantic Web to you.

http://mashable.com/2010/05/10/semantic-web-documentary/

Will the web get clever on our streams?

An interesting article on social network data streams and the semantic web. I think it's all about creating standards and the data-mining after.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/activity_streams_poetry_or_nihilism.php

Wolfram hype builds

The excitement surrounding the new way to search from Stephen Wolfram: Wolframalpha is building as they show special persons in private, and now in public.

He claims the search will be a new "paradigm for the web", by answering your questions more directly. Using various Natural Language Processing algorithms it tries to give you a direct answer to your question, rather than a bunch of sites that happen to mention those words.

I believe that this is another step towards a semantic web, as I've previously blogged about. This being the search end of things, whose job can only be made easier by good mark-up, and well-structured and organised data on web-pages. The future of online is about giving all this data out there on the web some meaning.

Any Question Answered may soon be a thing of the past, if we've all got the web on our phones and Wolframalpha!

BBC article explaining more about Wolframalpha.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8026331.stm

The search engine:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/

The crazy genius that is Stephen Wolfram:
http://www.stephenwolfram.com/

Local Global News

An interesting approach to local news, getting it globally. It doesn't quite work yet, as not much news is geo-tagged. However - tag everything up properly on the web, a step towards the semantic web, then this could become a really useful site / idea.
And it follows on my theme of giving the web meaning and then mining that data to produce useful information.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/mar/23/netbytes-topix-local-news

WeFollow launched - user generated directory

Kevin Rose, founder of Digg, has just launched a WeFollow.

All this talk of searchable twitters, hashtags, and nicely packaged 140 character messages has led me to think about how all this information is starting to be structured and searching can be really powerful. If people stick to some conventions, or are made to, then we could be let to some kind of "semantic web" of information.

If we can just get the normal web (internet) to follow suit then we're talking real power. However maybe limiting people to 140 characters is a better place for information - it means all the waffle is left out. An intelligent search of twitters could very soon be a better place to find information than a web search.

http://mashable.com/2009/03/15/wefollow/