Planeta Web Semántica

Over on our Xiphos blog, I’ve just published a podcast conversation I had with Herbert van de Sompel earlier this week.

It’s a nice example of the synergies between issues discussed here on Panlibus and those we’re exploring within Project Xiphos. Have a listen, and see what you think.

Share This

Powerset+Microsoft hosted another Lunch 2.0 this year.  We seved delicious food, including sliders and cupcakes.  There were lots of people from many different companies present and we all celebrated the Microsoft acquisition of Powerset with our commerative shot glasses.  Andrew Mager of ZD Net did a great writeup of the event (and he tooks some rockin’ pictures). Terry Chay was there with his huge camera and took a gorgeous set of pics with his fancy camera.  In the photo is Marie Williams of SHIFT, Linda Chan of Powerset, and me.

Expect Powerset+Microsoft Live Search to be hosting more events like this in the future, so subscribe to our blog or check our Twitter feed for details. 

In fact, keep on the lookout for us at TechCrunch50 next week!

We join others and applaud Google as one of the pioneers of search – a company with a solid stance about its choices and guiding principles. Since search engines control the way we access the Internet, we receive many questions about our algorithm and the choices we make. I was intrigued when I recently read a paper by James Grimmelmann, an Associate Professor of Law at the New York Law School, with the title “The Google Dilemma”. He questions some of Google’s choices and poses an interesting question: Where is the line between a search engine’s First Amendment right to build its system as it likes, and its responsibility as a public corporate citizen guiding users in the Web jungle?

James takes the reader through five seemingly harmless cases and questions how search engines:

• Organize information on the Internet and rank search results – for example, searches for Mongolian gerbils and talentless hack (for more you should read the paper)
• Deal with the dilemma of controversial searches such as a search for jew
• Intervene with human oversight when their algorithms are intentionally tricked, as was the case for Search King
• Customize search results by accommodating local laws and regulations which explains the different images that one sees for the search “Tiananmen”: in Google.com vs Google.cn?

We, architects of search engines, make choices when building our algorithms. These choices are extremely important, as searchers usually look only at the first page of search results and our development decisions limit them to see what the Internet has to offer through our lenses. Naturally, we are guided and grounded by our beliefs and how we perceive the world. Hence, our corporate values directly impact the Internet’s information seekers, which is a huge responsibility. For instance, Google has built a very elegant search solution that assumes that people will not “be evil”. But some of us are acting for self-promotion and as a result, the search eco-system is suffering from evil-doers who have:

• Made statements with search bombs. Google’s trust that people who link to other sites will use an actual word or phrase or meaning in the linked Web text was not returned in a small percentage of cases.
• Built link farms that unfairly boost the rank of commercial sites
• Used the Internet for political, racist and other extremist propaganda

We at hakia believe that searchers suffer from information pollution, and the time for a guided search experience has arrived.

We believe in letting computers do the work without human interference and have algorithms extract meaning from Web text directly, and refuse to consider link statistics. If there is an economic benefit, simple rules will always be violated and it is not humanly possible to monitor mischief.

We believe the Internet is in a mature stage and information scientists- the librarians- can point users to credible Web sources- an effort already under way with great projects like the LII, IPL and more.

I think it is best to demonstrate what we mean with an example. Before we do that, I have three disclaimers: 1) We are still in development and are rendering credible content recommended by librarians to our QDEX system. Our credible content universe is limited to health and medical sources recommended by the Medical Library Association for now; 2) We will not touch upon the superior relevancy performance of semantic search technology. 3) We will not discuss hakia’s immunity to search bombs to keep this blog entry to a manageable size.

We ran the query: “what prevents migraine” both at Google and hakia. When you view the hakia SERP, you will note that we have identified PubMed, MayoClinic and Clinicaltrials.gov as credible source picks and Wikipedia as user generated content. We would like to assist the searcher to identify relevant and fresh information from credible sources as the searcher is not expected to be an expert in every field to make this determination. In this case, the medical librarians were the experts. You can compare the same SERP of Google. Google has made a different choice.

As hakia matures, credible sources will be surfaced – when they are the most meaningful match to the query- in every search. We will always visually mark the credible search results. We believe that our approach will offer searchers a different way to access the vast Internet. This is hakia’s way of using its First Amendment right and filling its public corporate citizen shoes.

As said, we all make choices when we set out on a given journey. Google has made theirs, and we have made ours. But the most important traveler on the Internet’s road is the searcher - you. What will your choice be? Or, can you afford seeing only one perspective and ignore the other?

The W3C Semantic Web Deployment Working Group and XHTML2 Working Group have published the Proposed Recommendation of RDFa in XHTML: Syntax and Processing. RDFa is a specification for attributes to express structured data in any markup language that can be extracted to produce RDF data. The group has published an implementation report as part of the Candidate Recommendation phase. Comments are welcome through 03 October.

Powerset has always suspected that college students love Powerset because it’s such a great way to search and browse Wikipedia content.  However, the only evidence we had was from Powerset parents and glowing feedback e-mails from .edu domains. 

Last week, we conducted a study of 200 college students through Peanut Labs, which confirmed our suspicion: college students are huge fans of Wikipedia.  Here are some of the highlights of the study.

• Though 90% of students have used Wikipedia to complete an assignment, a surprising 73% of students have been explicitly told by their professor not to use Wikipedia.
• Also, about a quarter of students always use Wikipedia when they’re completing an assignment.
• Not surprisingly, the most common use for Wikipedia is initial research.  However, about half of the respondents said that they use Wikipedia as a link to secondary sources of information.  That suggests that the reference section at the bottom of a Wikipedia article is an extremely valuable starting point for many topics.  Also, a third of students say that they’ve used Wikipedia as a primary research source.
• Students find Wikipedia very valuable.  28% of students thought that Wikipedia was a very valuable resource, 49% thought that Wikipedia was relatively important, and 23% through that Wikipedia was only marginally helpful.

If you have any questions about the survey or you’d like to talk to someone at Powerset about why it’s better to read Wikipedia on Powerset, drop us a note at press@powerset.com.

The blogosphere is restless about Chrome, the new open source browser developed by Google. But I´m not going to discuss its software design, its performace or it usability, there are many people talking about it. I´ll talk about a technical detail: it prefers XHTML instead the classic HTML.

How to know it? As probaby you know in HTTP there is a header called Accept to specify format types which are acceptable. Requesting this service developed by Richard Cyganiak with Chrome, we can get the value of that header:

text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,
text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5

Saltlux, Korea, has just published a SW Use Case and a SW Case Study. The Use Case describes a mobile content recommendation system at Korea Telecom Freetel, that analyzes the user’s use history and provides content recommendation based on, eg, the user’s situational information. The Case Study describes a Metadata Management and Information Retrieval System at the National Archives of Korea, based on a triple store containing over 10 million RDF triples.

September 1st is launch day for the new library web site and catalogue for Darien Public Library – John Blyberg has been working hard over the last few months to get things ready.   It is more than just the launch of another good looking library web site and catalogue though.  John has been working on a total rewrite of his SOPAC (Social OPAC) that had it’s first outing at Ann Arbour, one of the poster children of Library 2.0 OPACs..

As John explains in this Talking with Talis podcast, SOPAC 2.0 has been produced so that he can release it’s component parts under an Open Source license so that others can take advantage of it.   The components, as he describes in his blog ‘SOPAC 2.0: What to Expect’ post on the subject, includes a separate social repository layer (Insurge) which not only could be used in most any OPAC, but also enables the sharing of social data between libraries.

This conversation was recorded a few days before the launch.

Share This

Calais developers have built some great stuff - please make sure it doesn't break when we roll out Release 3!

Visit the R3 Technology Preview page to see what's coming and to learn how to test your application with R3. It's as easy as changing the domain name you point your application to.

R3 will go into production this coming week. 

The Semantic Web Deployment Working Group has published the Group Note of Best Practice Recipes for Publishing RDF Vocabularies. This document describes best practice recipes for publishing vocabularies or ontologies on the Web (in RDF Schema or OWL). It is intended for the creators and maintainers of vocabularies in RDFS and OWL (vocabulary and ontology are used interchangeably in the context of this specification). It provides step-by-step instructions for publishing vocabularies on the Web, giving example configurations designed to cover the most common cases.

The Semantic Web Deployment Working Group has published the Last Call Working Draft of SKOS Simple Knowledge Organization System Reference. This document defines the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS), a common data model for sharing and linking knowledge organization systems via the Web. The SKOS data model provides a standard, low-cost migration path for porting existing knowledge organization systems to the Semantic Web. SKOS also provides a light weight, intuitive language for developing and sharing new knowledge organization systems. It may be used on its own, or in combination with formal knowledge representation languages such as the Web Ontology language (OWL). Comments are welcome through 03 October. The group has also published an update of the companion SKOS Primer.

Our book widgets are especially popular with authors who are releasing a book due to the ability of the widget to offer a single promotion and transaction point. We’re constantly in communication with these authors and a recent email from Laurel Snyder had me thinking that the release of a book is similar to a product launch.

Here are some similarities that I noted:

1) Hard work and perseverance are required to reach the release date. 

Laurel spent eight years “writing and revising and submitting and re-revising and workshopping and copyediting and agonizing.” Good things take time to create and hard work to polish. Transitioning from idea to release date requires a deep passion for realizing the outcome.

2) The work before the release expands beyond the core task.

Hard and required: writing the book or coding the program. Also hard and also required: editing, securing a publisher, marketing plans, tour itinerary, jacket art, … and debugging, marketing plans, UI designing, testing, …

3) The release date is only the start of the hustle.

The NextNY mailing list is constantly discussing best practices on landing press coverage, collecting end-user feedback, and any number of other data points following the launch of a product. There are bugs to correct, features to implement, and a business to be built. There are just as lively mailing lists for authors that offer advice on a wide range of tasks that need to be completed after the book’s released. The release date is simply a milestone and much work remains.

4) There’s an overwhelming sense of joy the moment it’s released.

The release date brings a joyous feeling that, as Laurel says, has you “dancing around in pajamas.”

[note: we’re still working towards the release and are happy for more individuals who want to see a preview of the product. If you want to, drop me a line fraser@ourcompanyname.com]

El título viene de la frase tan conocida de “papa noel (o los reyes magos) no existe, son los padres“.

La evolución que ha tenido la Web desde su creación hasta nuestros tiempos ha sido lineal en cuanto al destino: el usuario. Hemos pasado de una web completamente estática a la evolución que traía consigo generar contenido. La Web 1.0 ya era una web dinámica, cambiaba de contenido para informar, y ahora el dinamismo se ha extendido hasta llegar a un complejo sistema de interacción entre generadores y receptores.

Y dicen  que esto seguirá evolucionando. La Web 3.0 se avecina, o no.

Yo creo que aún no hemos llegado al tope de la web en su versión “beta”, la 2.0. Cada día se crean nuevos servicios desconocidos para este tipo de web. Creo que como mucho llegaremos en un breve periodo de tiempo a algo llamado Web 2.5, donde todos los servicios llegan a su punto álgido de consumo por parte de los usuarios de la web.

La Web 3.0 será la aplicación del concepto de Web Semántica a todos estos servicios. Haciendo una analogía con la frase del principio, la Web Semántica será el padre/madre de la Web 3.0 en sus inicios.

No sé que opináis vosotros sobre estos temas, y este sería un buen punto de encuentro para comentarlo.

Google ha mejorado su sistema de traducciones online añadiendo la posibilidad de que le pidas lo que te quiere traducir y, desde el primer enlace, llevarte a un diccionario online especializado.

El modo de uso es pedirle al buscador Google que te traduzca una palabra del modo “translate entrepeneur to spanish” y te ofrece un enlace a sitio especializado, desde el primer enlace, desde el que hacer traducciones en varias direcciones, con sugerencias, incluso imágenes relacionadas.

Lamentablemente no se le puede “hablar” en español, sino solo desde el inglés, y hacia unos cuantos idiomas: Francés, Alemán, Español, Italiano, Portugués, Chino, Coreano e Indi. Tampoco hay una dirección específica para ir directamente al diccionario, pero siempre puedes guardar la URL de un resultado y desde ahí usarlo para traducir otras expresiones en cualquier momento.

Vía

We hope to meet as many members of the OpenCalais community as possible.  Toward that end, here is a list of the September events where we are presenting and/or holding workshops. 

We would love to see you there, so let us know if you can make it!

1. SDFORUM - Wednesday, September 3rd - 6:30 p.m. PT - Palo Alto, CA
2. PAWS MEETUP - Thursday, September 4th - 6 p.m. PT - San Francisco, CA
3. MESH SUMMER SCHOOL ON MULTIMEDIA SEMANTICS - September 1 - 5, Crete
4. ONLINE NEWS ASSOCIATION (ONA) - September 11 - 13, Washington, DC
5. MIT's EMTECH '08 - September 23 - 25, Cambridge, MA

Please find details (and some special Calais discounts) below. 

SDFORUM - Wednesday, September 3rd - 6:30 p.m. PT - Palo Alto, CA 

We're holding an interactive session on the Calais Web service at the SDForum Semantic Web SIG in a session titled "Emerging Semantic Ad Platforms". 

Tom will focus on how Calais can be used to produce computable semantics from any text and feed them into any new search service, Semantic Web application or semantic ad platform. 

All are welcome, and the fee for non-SDForum members is $15 at the door.  There is no charge for members, and no pre-registration is required.

PAWS MEETUP - Thursday, September 4th - 6 p.m. PT - San Francisco, CA 

Tom will provide a look at Calais' underlying technology, and offer insight into the Calais roadmap going forward, in a special 'field trip' Meetup of the Palo Alto Semantic Web (PAWS) group.

The Calais team is hosting the event at Thomson Reuters downtown San Francisco office at 425 Market Street.  There are only 12 spots left for this free Meetup, so sign up today.

MESH SUMMER SCHOOL ON MULTIMEDIA SEMANTICS - September 1 - 5, Crete

On Thursday, September 4th, Barak Pridor, ClearForest CEO, will offer an overview of the Calais initiative and discuss the value it brings to publishers and journalists. 

ONLINE NEWS ASSOCIATION (ONA) - September 11 - 13, Washington, DC 

On Friday, September 12th, Tom will participate in the "Hello! Semantic Web!" panel alongside Tristan Harris, CEO of Apture, and Tiffany Shackelford, Semantic Marketer and consultant.

MIT's EMTECH '08 - September 23 - 25, Cambridge, MA 

The Calais team will be out in force at the Emerging Technologies Conference @ MIT, with a booth, a developer luncheon, and discounted conference pricing for members of the OpenCalais community. 

The luncheon takes place Thursday, September 25th, from 12:30 - 1:50 p.m. ET.  Tom will share "Five Easy Ways to Add Value with Calais" to provide developers with helpful tips and ideas to kick-start their efforts.

Click on the OpenCalais community discounts page from MIT to register.  The options are as follows:

1.  $49 if you want to enter the conference solely to attend the Calais developer luncheon on Thursday.
2. 15% off on a one-day pass if you want to come for a full day of conference sessions on either Wednesday or Thursday.
3. 15% off on the full conference pass.

We hope to see you there!

…will be the 1st September. I sincerely apologise for the delay; due to technical difficulties (we needed a signup mechanism in place), my holidays during the first two weeks of August, and settling into the new job.

To enter, you should sign up for a user account at data.sioc-project.org; we will ring to confirm your details; then after your account is enabled, you will be able to access the data sets from the 1st September. We will also have an entry submission system available from that date (in case you make something really cool on the first day)! You can make as many submissions as you wish, but use of the data sets is restricted to the duration of the competition and during the demonstration period in November…

The Calais team is heading to some great events this fall, including the Defrag Conference in Denver, Colorado, Nov. 3 - 4, 2008.

Time Sensitive Defrag Discount: The Defrag gang has kindly offered a special discount for the OpenCalais community.

The discounted rate -- $100 off the early bird registration fee (so $895.00) -- is only available through the end of this month.   

Sign-up this week if you want to get the best price.  You can register here by entering our discount code, "tr1" (t r and the number one).

What is Defrag all about?  Data!

Producer Eric Norlin says, "As online data is growing and fragmenting at an exponential pace, individuals, groups and organizations are struggling to discover, assemble, organize, act on and gather feedback from that data."

"In the largest sense, we're all looking to augment the pace at which we achieve insights on raw data - to accelerate the 'aha' moment."

We will have a booth there to share demos, and Calais lead Tom Tague will be speaking on the 'Next-level Discovery'  panel alongside Amit Kumar of Yahoo! Search.

Hope to see you there!

Cuando aún nos bombardean acerca de si es mejor Mac, PC o Linux parece ser que estas viejas discusiones son … eso, caducas y no son relevantes en la situación actual de la Web 2.0, y mucho menos lo serán en el futuro.

Todo apunta a que, por fin, nos dirigimos a  una situación de computación online, donde lo importante son los contenidos, y no el continente ni la aplicación que lo creó. Con las cada vez mas abundantes aplicaciones web es difícil encontrar situaciones en las que se justifique instalar una aplicación de escritorio en el ordenador.

(hay mas…)

Library 2.0 Gang Member and Ex Libris Chief Strategy Officer, Oren Beit-Arie joins Richard Wallis in conversation about the recently announced Ex Libris Open Platform Strategy.

In the first part of this Talking with Talis conversation, they discuss the ramifications of the recent change of ownership when Francisco Partners sold their investment in Ex Libris to Leeds Equity Partners.   This sets the background for he rest of the podcast in which they go on to discus the motivation behind, and the details of the Open Platform Strategy.

In this revealing interview Oren describes how the strategy will influence the way Ex Libris develops and delivers its products in the future.

To accompany this podcast, we have made available a transcript of the interview.

Share This

Creative Commons has published a member submission by W3C: "ccREL: The Creative Commons Rights Expression Language". The document introduces the Creative Commons Rights Expression Language (ccREL), the vocabulary recommended by Creative Commons for machine-readable expression of copyright licensing terms and related information. The language is based on RDF and the document also includes recommendations on how to encode ccRel information in different formats.

W3C’s Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER) Working Group has published five Working Drafts. The purpose of the Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER) is to provide a means for individuals or organizations to describe a group of resources through the publication of machine-readable metadata. The following documents have been published:

• Description Resources (Last Call); which details the creation and lifecycle of Description Resources (DRs), which encapsulate metadata
• Grouping of Resources (Last Call); which describes how sets of IRIs can be defined such that descriptions or other data can be applied to the resources obtained by dereferencing IRIs that are elements of the set.
• Formal Semantics (Last Call); which describes how the relatively simple operational format of a POWDER document can be transformed for processing by Semantic Web tools
• Primer (First Public Draft)
• Test Suite (First Public Draft)

Last Call comments are welcome through 14 September.

Martin Marlmsten is from the LIBRIS department of the Royal Library of Sweden – LIBRIS being the discovery interface for the library.

Since joining as a software developer has been absorbed in to the world of library search and discovery.  He played a major part in the build and launch of the latest LIBRIS search interface which has introduced under the surface some Semantic Web and Linked Data features.

We discuss his career, the use of User Centered Design & Iterative Development methodologies, the Semantic Web techniques and technologies he used, and their future applicability to the library domain.

Items discussed in our conversation:

•  LIBRIS
• User-centered design and the next generation OPAC – a perfect match?
• RDF / Linked Data representations of cataloged data via LIBRIS:
  • URI for the Royal Library - http://libris.kb.se/resource/library/S
  • URI for the subject heading "Mödrar" (Mothers in English) - http://libris.kb.se/resource/auth/154863
  • URI for August Strindberg - http://libris.kb.se/resource/auth/94541
  • URI for the book "The difference Engine" - http://libris.kb.se/resource/bib/5060570
  • The book "The difference Engine" in OpenLink RDF browser - http://demo.openlinksw.com/DAV/JS/rdfbrowser/index.html?uri=http%3A%2F%2Flibris.kb.se%2Fresource%2Fbib%2F5060570
• Cool URIs for the Semantic Web

Share This

Calais R3 Technology Preview Now Available

Release 3 of Calais is now available for testing. Given the enormous increase in the number of production users of Calais we have modified our release process to incorporate a Technology Preview of new releases to allow for testing and experimentation. Of course, the
production Calais service remains up and fully functional during the R3
Technology Preview period.

The details on accessing the technology preview are located here. 

This is a long post, so I’ll highlight the significant changes right here:

• Many new entities and events
• A REST interface to the Calais web service
• Document level categorization into standard news categories
• Exhaustive extraction
• A variety of miscellaneous bug fixes
• Higher performance

Some details on R3….

What’s in R3?
First, as with every release we are expanding and enhancing the universe of entities and relationships extracted by Calais. While the details are located in the R3 Forum – a few highlights:

• New entities include Sports League, Programming Language, Operating System, Medical Treatment and Company Ticker

• New events include Movies Releases, Album Releases and a variety of
  business related items such as Bonus Shares Issuances, Types of
  Business Relationship and others.

Second, after many requests we have implemented a REST interface to Calais. This should simplify access to the service from a variety of environments.

Third, a preview of our new document categorization capability.
Categorization examines your text and attempts to place the document as
a whole into one of a number of news related categories. This
capability will be significantly expanded in the future – but will
provide immediate benefit to anyone aggregating news content today. The
initial categories supported are Business, Sports, Entertainment,
Health, Politics and Technology.

Fourth, depending on what you’re using Calais for this could be a big deal. In R3 we’re releasing a Generic Relations capability. Generic Relations will expose all
relationships in your document as long as one of the members of the
relationship is a known entity type. Generic Relations is sometimes
called Exhaustive Extraction – extracting all the relationships that
involve at least one entity, even if the relationship type hasn’t been
predefined. This capability is designed for semantic processing experts
who know what they are doing. The volume of output can be quite large –
but the ability to do in-depth information discovery is enormous.

And finally, we’ve done our best to solve any extraction related
issues that have been reported to us. We can’t promise 100% - but you
should see significant improvement.

What’s Coming?
Let’s limit ourselves to the very short term – things you can expect to see in the next month or less.

• Company Disambiguation. This is a big deal and the first step
  toward richer entity disambiguation throughout Calais. With company
  disambiguation we will use everything from the name of the company to
  the names of people to the geographies mentioned to return a single
  authoritative name for the company. A simple example: “IBM”,
  “International Business Machines”, “IBM Professional Services” will all
  be detected as companies – and will all be linked back to a single
  definitive reference for “IBM”.

• Geo Disambiguation. The same effort as applied to geographies. No
  longer will we be confused whether we talking about Paris, TX or Paris,
  France.

• A super secret skunkworks project. Just think of it as putting a semantic layer on top of the web. The whole web. Right now.

We tried to bring it together in a way that wouldn't impact users - but that's not going to happen.

Utilization of Calais is expanding at an amazing rate. To date we've been able to deal with that growth in a transparent fashion - but we've reached the point where we need to actually unplug some wires and get things reconfigured for significantly higher volumes.

All of the pieces have come together to make this happen this evening from 12:00 - 1:00. We've notified the East and West coast power grid coordinators, have the forklifts warmed up and a few dozen people trained in rapidly unplugging and plugging ethernet cables. So - it's a go. 

When we're done we'll have the infrastructure in place to scale to tens of millions of transactions per day and thousands of transactions per second.  That should last us for at least a few months.

Next week marks the kick-off of several upcoming events for hakia, beginning with Search Engine Strategies (SES) in San Jose. As the technology world begins it’s Fall tradeshow extravaganza, we too are gearing up to showcase some of our own considerable progress as we continue to work towards finishing development of the hakia search engine.

This Monday, hakia’s Chief Architect, Kartal Guner, will speak on a panel entitled “Semantic Search: How will it change our lives?” Along with other distinguished colleagues in search, Kartal will discuss hakia’s QDEX technology and the implications of semantics for the future at search. If you plan to attend SES, we strongly encourage you to stop by at the panel on Monday at 11:15 a.m. PT.

Also in September, hakia’s Chief Scientific Officer Dr. Christian Hempelmann will travel to Vienna, Austria to deliver a speech on the “Doing Semantic Internet Search Semantically,” at the European Semantic Technology Conference. Christian will provide a general overview of our OntoSem capabilities, as well as discuss the key issues facing Web search today. Down the road in October, hakia will exhibit at SMX East, right here in our backyard of New York City. Stay tuned for more details and exciting news about our booth presence at this particular event!

All three events promise to deliver valuable insight into the business aspects of search, an area in which we are working diligently, particularly through the availability of our technology licensing program and Syndication Web Services. We’re looking forward to seeing some familiar faces and meeting new search fanatics, from the West Coast to Europe.

Cuando oyes la palabra “semántica” seguramente la asocies actualmente a la Web Semántica - la que se espera sea la nueva iteración de Internet que contenga datos estructurados y protocolos específicos que ayuden a ofrecer una red inteligente.

Pero el concepto de la semántica no tiene, necesariamente, que aplicarse solo a la red, también puede adecuarse a otros aspectos como, por ejemplo, tu escritorio … es mas, incluso a tus hojas de cálculo de Excel, como es este caso.

(hay mas…)

LibraryThing have followed the opening up of their Common Knowledge API with the A million free covers from LibraryThing announcement:

A few days ago, just before hitting thirty million books, we hit one million user-uploaded covers. So, we’ve decided to give them away—to libraries, to bookstores, to everyone.

Get yourself a LibraryThing Developer Key (any LibraryThing member can get one), and you can retrieve up to 1,000 covers per day.  As they encourage local cashing of images, even this is not really a limit.

Tim Spalding openly admits that this service competes with Amazon web service, but LibraryThing’s Terms of Service are far more open it also competes with other commercial services (which are on average better) but without their costs.

The folks at LibraryThing have been promoting the open use of data for a long time, it is great to see them continuing to practice what they preach – lets hope their bandwidth can support this, as I can see it becoming very popular.

Share This

A group of experts from the municipality of Zaragoza and the CTIC foundation published a new Semantic Web Use Case, as part of the SW Case Study and Use Case collection. It describes an eTourism application: users can personalize their city tour using a specialized service (called “CRUZAR”) that integrates relevant databases (with RDF and specialized Ontologies), and that translates the users’ wishes and profiles in a set of rules on those data. A matching algorithm is then run to produce a personalized itinerary.