Today I found a very interesting video discussing the term of the Semantic Web, not only in a technical way. Have a look at the following video:

What do you think? Do you think the Semantic Web is going to happen as many people think?

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I have just added a new site to my this weblog called “Web Science Reading List“. This reading list collects a lot of interesting information on web science and similar topics. Since I do not have time to read all of the articles immediately I am going to collect them on this site and bookmark them on delicious too. If you are interested in this topic as well do not hesitate to contact me or to subscribe to my delicious bookmarks and to the feed of this weblog.

US President Obama enforces the use of Semantic Web Technologies. David Peterson posted on SitePoint the follwing:

In a revolutionary move, Obama’s administration is set to utilise next generation web technologies to bring an unprecedented level of transparency to government. In this case it will shed light on how the roughly US $800 billion dollar economic stimulus will be spent. The recently launched recovery.gov website (powered by nothing other then Drupal) brought with it the promise that citizens would be able to view where the money was going and how it was going to be spent.

To enable the citizen masher to do their wizardry, the administration will be opening up a veritable candy store of goodies: Semantic Web, RDF, Linked Data, SPARQL, RDFa, SIOC, ATOM, RESTful APIs, JSON, Widgets, Wikis, XForms, P2P Networks. Wow. They only forgot the lions and tigers and bears oh my… This is an unbelievable stack of technology. I didn’t think the government even knew what an RSS feed was

This is a great step forward for Semantic Web Technologies. Gaining broader attention will force other administrations as well to make use of Semantic Web Technologies. One really great and interesting facette of Semantic Web is Linking Open Data.

(via mhausenblas)

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For everybody who is asking: “What’s the next step in internet evolution?” This presentation of Tim Berners-Lee could give you the anser. Linking Data is one of the most exciting initiatives going on right now. Enjoy the presentation!

(via TED)

SEAmail is a prototype e-mail system implemented by Stanford University Logic Group lead by  Michael Genesereth, an associate professor of computer science at Stanford University. The interesting and innovative part of this e-mail system is the use of semantic technologies in order to determine the recipient of an e-mail message. Users don’t have to bother on keeping track of e-mail addresses, they just type in the real name of the recipient letting the system searching the right recipient address.

MIT‘s Technology Review writes:

E-mail addresses are an artificial way of directing messages to the right people, says Michael Genesereth, an associate professor of computer science at Stanford who works on SEAmail. “You want to send messages to people or roles, not to strings of characters,” he says. Semantic technologies are aimed at making just this sort of thing possible. The idea is to create programs that understand context, so that users can interact with the software more naturally. Technical details, such as the need to specify an e-mail address, get hidden inside the system, so that everyday users no longer have to pay attention to them.

In SEAmail, a user selects recipients for a message in much the way that she would set up a search query. The parameters can be as simple as a person’s name, or as complex as sets of logical requirements. But the system is limited by how much information it has about potential recipients. “To realize the full potential, we need to have rich data about the people who are sending messages to each other, their interests, and so forth,” Genesereth says. Within an organization, he says, there’s usually a lot of available data. The technical challenge is setting up an integrated version of the data that SEAmail can access easily. The data needed to fulfill the request for professors who graduated from Harvard, for example, would probably come from several databases, Genesereth says. His team is currently researching ways to pull together existing databases without affecting how they’re already being used.

These existing databases should be part of the Linking Open Data Movement, which aims to semantic interlink existing open data sets in order to build useful new applications and to support a Web of Data.

Furder information can be found in an article published by Standford University Logic Group, called Semantic Email Addressing (PDF).

Für die Lehrveranstaltung “Einführung in das wissenschaftliche Arbeiten” bei Prof. Dr. Klaus Tochtermann habe ich einen Artikel zum Thema “Linking Open Data – Anwendungen für Endanwender” geschrieben.

Auszug aus dem Abstract:

Dieser Artikel beschäftigt sich mit Anwendungen, die das Linking Open Data Konzept verwenden. Zuerst wird auf das Open Data Movement eingegangen und anschließend auf das W3C SWEO Linking Open Data Community Project. Es sind zahlreiche Anwendungen entstanden, die Linked Open Data verwenden und daraus einen Mehrwert für Benutzer erzielen. Eine dieser Anwendungen ist Freebase, die von der Firma Metaweb Technologies Inc. entwickelt wurde. Weitere Anwendungen sind aus dem MIT SIMILE Project hervorgegangen und werden hier auch aufgelistet.

Der Artikel: Linking Open Data – Anwendungen für Endanwender

Weitere Informationen zu dem Thema:

• Linked Data (Tim Berners-Lee, 2006)
• Interlinking
  open data on the web (Bizer et al., 2007)
• RDF Primer (Manola and Miller, 2004)
• SIMILE: Practical metadata for the semantic web (Mazzocchi et al., 2006)
• MIT SIMILE project (François Huyn, 2008)
• Freebase

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One of the highlights of October’s Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco was the emergence of ‘Semantic Apps’ as a force. Note that we’re not necessarily talking about the Semantic Web, which is the Tim Berners-Lee W3C led initiative that touts technologies like RDF, OWL and other standards for metadata. Semantic Apps may use those technologies, but not necessarily [ReadWriteWeb 2007].

ReadWriteWeb has published a great list of 10 interesting semantic apps at the end of 2007. Now in year 2009 some of them have matured. Check out Freebase which let’s you access a huge space of linked open datasets.

SMOB is a prototype developed to enable semantic microblogging. It can be seen as Twitter enriched with semantic data.

John Breslin writes in his blog post:

The prototype uses FOAF and SIOC to model microbloggers, their properties, account and service information, and the microblog updates that users create. A multitude of publishing services can ping one or a set of aggregating servers as selected by each user, and it is important to note that users retain control of their own data through self hosting.

I think it is an interesting prototype whith future perspectives in the semantic web. Check out the SMOB Project Website for more information.