Paul Miller offers insight and analysis on the Semantic Web, dissecting the news and showing why it matters to the wider business world.
Paul Miller provides consultancy and analysis services at the interface between the worlds of Cloud Computing and the Semantic Web.
I've written before about the importance of events that move us past introspection and academic debate, and bring the real benefits of semantic technologies to a wider business audience. As the Semantic Web Gang discussed recently, North America has had the excellent Semantic Technology Conference for several years, and this year gained Linked Data Planet (now transmogrified to become Web 3.
July's episode of the Semantic Web Gang discussed some of the work being done to ensure that data made addressable by the Semantic Web is actually usable via intelligible interfaces.Subsequently, David Huynh released a video showing 'a novel browsing interface' designed to sit on top of the growing body of content stored inside the Freebase offering from Semantic Web startup Metaweb.
UK-based telecoms (and more) provider, BT, has been interested in the Semantic Web for a long time, as a brief conversation I recorded with the company's Head of Next Generation Web Research back in January 2007 illustrates.John Davies appears in silicon.
So says Vincent Maher, in a recent post that suggests he's sat in one too many of those meetings;"There is nothing more frustrating than a gaggle of geeks sitting in your boardroom talking about simple concepts in an unnecessarily obfuscatory manner because their revenues are tied to your inability to understand what they're saying or the bills you're paying.""One of the prime targets for this confusion [he continues] is the Semantic Web.
No, not a comment on the weather in East Yorkshire this 'summer,' but rather a reflection on the recent eruption of content related to Cloud computing. Having taken a long weekend away from the computer, punctuated by occasional iPhone-powered checking of my feeds to sate the addiction, it really did feel as if there was a new Cloud computing post near the top of the pile every time I looked.
Kris Bradley over at InfoSpace got in touch recently, to show me some of the work they've done to pull content from Semantic Web resources in order to enrich results displayed at webcrawler.com.
Like most of us at Talis, I'm a big fan of the TED videos. There's always a wow moment lurking in each of these recordings, and many of them do a great job of challenging assumptions.
Technology web site TechCrunch is one of those staples (like ZDNet, of course) to which we all turn for news and analysis on the companies shaping the Web. Their CrunchBase directory provides a wealth of information on the companies and people featured in their stories (and elsewhere, as it's editable by anyone), and they recently took the step of opening up an API to the data.
I commented on UK-based True Knowledge and their search for finance at the start of this month, and tonight Venture Beat breaks the news that they've concluded a $4 million funding round led by existing investor Octopus Ventures.This funding, which brings the total raised by the company in the past twelve months to $5.
One of the most interesting sessions at the consistently engaging Semantic Technology conference in San Jose back in May was the 'Semantic Venture Panel: Investor Opportunities and Pitfalls.'Alex Iskold did a good job of capturing the essence of the session for ReadWriteWeb and I recommend a read of his post, which freed me from having to write up the detail of this excellent discussion.