BBC World Cup Website Showcases Semantic Technologies

Great explanation of how BBC used semantic web approaches to deliver a dynamic and intelligent experience for the world cup. Via ReadWriteWeb

Written by Richard MacManus / July 13, 2010 5:27 AM / 8 Comments

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The soccer World Cup has now ended, with Spain the victor. England was unceremoniously dumped out before the quarter finals - but if there was a World Cup for the Semantic Web, then the BBC may have lifted the trophy for its country. A post on the BBC Internet site explains how the BBC World Cup 2010 website used "dynamic semantic publishing" technology.

It's an impressive demonstration of how a large, mainstream website can have added meaning and structure.

ReadWriteWeb's Guide to The Semantic Web:

1. Semantic Web Adoption by Facebook, Best Buy & Others
2. It's All Semantics: Open Data, Linked Data & The Semantic Web
3. The State of Linked Data in 2010
4. Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2009
5. ReadWriteWeb Interview With Tim Berners-Lee

The BBC World Cup site featured over 700 webpages and was powered by a semantic publishing framework. The site boasted a comprehensive ontology (a map of concepts), that output "automated metadata-driven web pages" created on-the-fly.

Jem Rayfield, Senior Technical Architect, BBC News and Knowledge, explained further:

"The underlying publishing framework does not author content directly; rather it publishes data about the content - metadata. The published metadata describes the world cup content at a fairly low-level of granularity, providing rich content relationships and semantic navigation. By querying this published metadata we are able to create dynamic page aggregations for teams, groups and players."

The basis of this system was an ontology that described how World Cup facts related to each other. For example, "Frank Lampard" was part of the "England Squad" and the "England Squad" competed in "Group C" of the "FIFA World Cup 2010". The ontology also included "journalist-authored assets" such as stories, blogs, profiles, images, video and statistics.

The publishing platform had both manual and automated tagging features. BBC journalists could, for example, tag Frank Lampard in a story about the disallowed goal from England's last-16 loss against Germany. This is a normal part of most modern-day publishing systems (we tag content in this manner here at ReadWriteWeb). But the BBC World Cup site also automatically analyzed journalist content and matched it "against the World Cup ontology." It did this by using what it describes as a "natural language and ontological determiner process." [Update: IBM wrote in to inform us that the technology behind this was IBM LanguageWare.] This is similar to software such as Thomson Reuters' Calais or the new Extractiv product that we reviewed yesterday. In the BBC's case, the resulting tags were moderated before being published.

The BBC used Semantic Web technologies such as RDF and SPARQL to build their World Cup site. The stated goal was to achieve "intelligent mapping of journalist assets to concepts and queries."

The site reportedly served millions of page requests a day throughout the World Cup. The BBC may use this semantic publishing platform for other parts of the BBC sports site; and it will certainly deploy it again for the the London 2012 Olympics.

The official explanatory post has the technical details, should you wish to follow up. Let us know in the comments about other large scale Semantic Web deployments that you know of.

Update: See also The World Cup and a call to action around Linked Data, by the BBC's John O'Donovan. Thanks Georgi Kobilarov for the pointer.

Web Trends: What's New in 2009, Part 2

Thanks again ReadWriteWeb for this post on what's new in digi in 2009


Last week we discussed some of the new trends we're seeing on the Web in 2009: open data, structured data, apps that filter content effectively, real-time, personalization, mobile (especially location-based), and Internet of Things (the Web in real-world objects). We asked for your thoughts on these trends, along with your suggestions on what we should add. Also we were interested to know what products you've seen this year that are doing something new and 'beyond Web 2.0'. In this post we look at some of your responses, to try to define further what defines this current era of the Web.

So What Else is New?

Other than the trends we've already listed, what else did our readers identify as new this year?

Babak Samii pointed out that in 2009 there has been an increase in "real, defined business models that can actually generate revenue." MacStories agreed, noting that we'll see many innovations in revenue models as a result.

Aaron Fulkerson of Mindtouch commented that "Web Oriented Architectures are redefining ROI and TCO for enterprises." I had to google the second acronym (shows how long I've been out of the corporate world - it means "Total Cost of Ownership"). Aaron is right that enterprises are taking the Web seriously now for business apps - the slow rise in popularity of Google Apps in enterprises is evidence of this.

Willi commented that there is a "new lightweight" about the current Web. "There is a new granularity, atomicity and a kind of chemistry," he remarked. He noted the way that people can "jump in Twitter from persons to hashtags to new interesting persons and their social bubble in real-time." As examples, he pointed to products like Evernote (a note-taking app - our most recent review) and Mir:ror (we reviewed Mir:ror earlier today - it's an Internet-enabled device which enables you to create actions on your computer via everyday objects such as coffee mugs and books). Willi noted that while they may appear to be relatively trivial products, "new use patterns and user benefits emerge" out of them.

Open Data... Except Export

Not everyone in our previous post agreed with the initial set of trends. RWW commenter William claimed that 'open data' is a misnomer, because users mostly cannot export their data from the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Friendfeed, Google, et al. We wouldn't go as far as William and label this "web 1.9.8.4.", however it's fair to say that - as far as users go - the promise of open data far outweighs the reality.

Having said that, the other meaning of 'open data' is that it's open for developers to build on top of. The plethora of Twitter apps built on top of Twitter's API is evidence enough of this. While Jason Barone called this "a one-way stream back to their closed system, in the form of an API," it's better than what we had before - which was fewer APIs and not many Linked Data sets (see the Linked Data graph from just 2 years ago, in this recent post). So overall we're encouraged that API data - or even better, Linked Data sets - will enable more and better connected web apps. This makes for a richer ecosystem of Web apps and social connections, which is a very good thing.

But point taken William and Jason, today for users the idea of 'open data' is half-realized at best. It won't be truly open until we have data portability - when you own your identity and content on the Web.

Real-time in the Real World

So far much of the focus on real-time as a new(ish) trend on the Web has focused on trendy apps such as Twitter and FriendFeed. However, Andria Krewson pointed out in the comments to our last post that real-time will spread much further than the early adopters:

"Real-time is huge. Many companies are built on timed data dumps, with the timing affecting workflow and cash flow, but the always-on generation will soon pressure businesses to provide real-time online information. Banks that don't post real balances in a timely way, or insurance companies that take weeks or months to process paperwork, or government agencies that don't provide timely transparent data will face pressures from millennials demanding faster, more accurate information."

On this note, a commenter called Joe remarked that we may be mis-using the term 'real-time.' "For the record," said Joe, "none of those sites you mentioned are doing REAL real-time, they are simply doing interval-based polling for new data on the server." Joe advised us to check out http://obama.collecta.com to see a good example of pushing to the browser using long-polling, not interval polling. We did indeed check that out, and wrote up our findings. While we were impressed that the search results were all less than a minute old, we're not convinced that just more speed means a better form of real-time than Twitter or FriendFeed. Time will tell.

Note: for a very mathematical explanation of why Twitter isn't really real-time, read this comment by Falafulu Fisi (made on a recent RWW post).

Conclusion

Well, there is no conclusion because the Web is an evolving beast. We're excited to see open data becoming more prevalant, even if it hasn't fully opened up yet. We're excited to see real-time making such an impact this year. We're excited about mobile and Internet of Things. There is a lot of innovation happening this year, which is pleasing to see.

Once again we invite you to list in the comments any other trends you're noticing - and just as importantly, what products you're seeing that exemplify these trends.

Here's the original 5-minute presentation which kicked this series off:

Image credits: cartoon screenshot from Geek And Poke; nano:ztag by aaron schmidt

How marketers can leverage the semantic web

Via imediaconnection.

If you think semantic is the same as contextual, think again. Here's what you need to know about harnessing the power of words online.

Online advertising is all about relevance -- being in the right place, at the right time, when consumers are most receptive to your message. But as any marketer who's been around the block can attest, that's easier said than done. Keywords are one thing; piecing them together to infer meaning and context is quite another. In this interview, Lori Xeller, senior director of sales for Kontera, discusses the opportunities offered by in-text advertising, as well as the misconceptions and market climate surrounding the technology.

iMedia: At the summit, you'll be discussing the importance of leveraging the semantic web. Can you give me one or two simple examples of how you help clients do this?

Lori Xeller: Our semantic technology enables us to make the most relevant associations between and among the user, the content he or she is consuming, and our advertisers. The key phrases that we highlight in an article can be thought of as predicting what the user would type into a search engine to get to that page. By associating this phrase with a relevant ad, we deliver a very high level of engagement and an extremely qualified user to the advertiser.

There are a few different companies talking about the semantic web today, with networks, for example, amplifying certain takes on relevance and directing search queries to their clients' products. But delivering the most relevant results that anticipate what a given user's query will be within the in-text segment narrows the purchase funnel in ways that no other segment can.

iMedia: What's the biggest danger in neglecting the semantic web and focusing exclusively on keywords when it comes to searches and ad placement?

Xeller: The danger is that you are missing a valuable opportunity to engage with your audience at the moment when they are most engaged -- within the content. In-text provides an additional opportunity to capture your audience further down the consideration cycle, after they've performed a search query, possibly, and landed on the page of interest. Upon user mouse-over, the ad is delivered in the content that they're reading, or where they're doing research -- wherever the user is engaged. Sometimes that can occur in a nonintuitive or hard-to-reach place, and with in-text, you're not competing with banners that are on the side of the page.

Leveraging the semantic web is smart because it anticipates what the user is thinking and will consider. Our campaign data show how powerful this can be.

iMedia: What's the most common misconception you hear from marketers when it comes to leveraging the semantic web? What do these people need to know?

Xeller: The most common misconception is that semantic is the same as contextual. Semantic does not just target keywords -- semantic infers meaning and context. Semantic technologies can then anticipate what the user is thinking and deliver appropriate ads accordingly.

iMedia: On a more general note, how has the recent downturn affected the marketing needs of your clients? What are the most common questions or issues that clients are coming to you with right now?

Xeller: All marketers are more and more accountable for every dollar they spend. They want to know how they can continue to drive toward their engagement, consideration, and revenue goals with either reduced budgets or higher expectations. We provide them with a great solution because our units are user initiated, which requires the user to engage. At the point they see it; the high level of relevancy of the ad to the page encourages their consideration or brand involvement. The result benefits the advertiser, providing them with an extremely cost effective and engaging solution

Our business is doing well, so perhaps the marketing downturn has driven dollars to more accountable segments. Clients are asking about the brand effects of in-text when they're buying clicks. We know they exist because once a user mouses-over and the unit launches, it's impossible to not have a brand experience with in-text. An advertiser receives the brand engagement for no additional charge -- and we're talking about some of the best engagement rates in all of interactive.

iMedia: Beyond the semantic web, where do you see the greatest untapped opportunity for digital marketers? And what is your high-level advice for breaking into this opportunity?

Xeller: One thing that in-text does is enable publishers to leverage the newest technologies, while being unobtrusive to users and performing extremely well for performance and brand marketers. It's one of the few new marketing technologies that maintains the triangle of benefit for buyers, sellers, and users, and we expect it to continue growing indefinitely.

There are a lot of new great opportunities out there for digital marketers today. These would range from in-text to mobile, content integration, and so on. My advice to the marketers would be this: Don't be afraid to test them and see the results for yourself, but make sure to have a clear understanding of the vendor's history and experience before signing on.

Lori Luechtefeld is editor of iMedia Connection.

12 Companies Targeting Early Tech Adopters

And thanks again RWW for this on some companies offering real smarts and bringing the bleeding edge to the commercial space.

Our mission at ReadWriteWeb is to explore the latest Web technology products and trends. We're fortunate to have a great group of sponsors who support this goal. So, once a week, we write a post about them; about who they are, what they do, and what they've been up to lately. We hope you'll pay them a visit as a way to show your appreciation for their sponsorship of this site.

Interested in being a ReadWriteWeb sponsor? ReadWriteWeb is one of the most popular blogs in the world and is read by a sophisticated audience of thought leaders and decision-makers. We have several innovative new features in our sponsor packages that we'd love to tell you about. Email our COO Bernard Lunn for all the details.

Ready to learn more about the smart companies that support this site you love to read? Read on...

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Skip to info about: Calais: semantic Web API | Socialtext: enterprise 2.0 | Mashery: APIRackspace: cloud computing experts | Aplus.net: Web hosting | Crowd Science: demographic data | Smub: mobile sharing | Web 3.0 Conference: next-era technology | 2009 Semantic Technology Conference: semantic search and tech | Hakia: semantic search | Media Temple and SixApart: our hosts and blogging software management services |

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Calais

Calais, powered by Thomson Reuters, brings state-of-the-art semantic functionality into your blog, content management system, site or application. Calais 4.0 was released in January, for the first time allowing publishers to connect to the Linked Data Web standard. Calais 4.0 goes beyond meta-tagging and enables publishers to integrate their content with Linked Data assets from Wikipedia, GeoNames, the Internet Movie Database (IMDB), Shopping.com, and others. Calais 4.0 also lets publishers share semantic meta-data about their content with "content consumers" such as search engines, news aggregators, related stories recommendation services, and more.

Check out the incredible work being done at Calais and let us know what you think.

Socialtext

Socialtext provides an enterprise wiki platform for organizations who want to accelerate knowledge sharing, foster collaboration, or build online communities.

Socialtext is currently offering a free white paper entitled "5 Best Practices for Enterprise Collaboration." It explains how collaboration solutions (a.k.a. Enterprise 2.0) can "dramatically reduce enterprise cycle times and costs. These results may be critical to survival in difficult economic times, and the right collaboration solution is the easiest, most cost effective way to achieve them."

Download Socialtext's free white paper at http://socialtext.com.

Crowd Science

Crowd Science gives online publishers reports on the demographics and attitudes of their audience. We at ReadWriteWeb have signed up to this new service, because demographic data is something we've struggled to get in the past. It's important for any online business to know their audience, so Crowd Science is a welcome addition to the stats armory that most of us in the Internet biz use.

You can sign up to get demographic data by clicking here.

Mashery

Mashery is a platform for Web services, allowing companies to manage their APIsMashery's expertise. At the "Business of APIs" conference, Mashery CEO Oren Michelsexplained to the audience that while APIs are a technology, their use is a business decision. He went on to say that Mashery has helped customers such as WhitePages.com, Thumbplay, Compete.com, and Calais. Check out the white paper "Five steps to scaling your business development using Web services" to discover how you can use APIs for your business. using

You can find out more about APIs and their business use at www.mashery.com.

Rackspace

Rackspace is one of the world's largest hosting providers, but it's also competing in the cloud computing arena. In October Rackspace announced two major acquisitions: SliceHost and JungleDisk. Slicehost is a popular cloud computing and hosting provider with about 15,000 users, while JungleDisk is one of our favorite online backup services. JungleDisk used to rely on Amazon's S3 storage solution, but it now also supports Rackspace's cloud storage solution. At the same time, Rackspace also announced a new suite of services, Rackspace Cloud Hosting, which combines a hosting platform (CloudSites) with a cloud storage solution (CloudFS), and, in the long run, a tight integration with Slicehost's services.

Click here to explore Rackspace's hosting and cloud computing solutions.

Aplus.net

Aplus.net offers a variety of services relating to Web hosting, including shared hosting, dedicated server, managed hosting, Web design, marketing and online advertising services, search engine optimization, e-commerce solutions, and domain registration.

You can register for Aplus.net here.

Web 3.0 Conference

The core idea behind Web 3.0 is to extract much more meaningful, actionable insight from information. At the Web 3.0 Conference, taking place in New York City from 19 to 20 May 2009, participants will explore how companies are using the emerging technology collectively known as Web 3.0 for significant bottom-line impact in areas like marketing, corporate information management, customer service, and personal productivity.

ReadWriteWeb readers save 15% with the discount code XRWW.

Smub

Smub is the first truly mobile bookmarking, link-sharing tool. Smub lets you share and save any link easily from your iPhone, Mac, or PC without a plugin or application.

Type smub.it/ to the left of http:// on any link to save or share, and SmubSmub has built-in sharing to Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and more. will automatically take you through the process. Make the link public to share with others, or keep it private just for yourself.

2009 Semantic Technology Conference

What are the big players doing in semantic search? Which startups are challenging them? How does semantic technology change search results? What key advantages and new opportunities does semantics provide in consumer and business search markets?

At the 2009 Semantic Technology Conference, taking place from 14 to 18 June 2009 in San Jose, semantic applications and usage cases will be presented by product developers and technical experts in such fields as advertising, business process management, cloud computing, digital asset management, and e-commerce.

Hakia

Hakia is a general purpose "semantic" search engine that delivers a search experience based on focus, clarity, and credibility. Today's search engines retrive popular results via statistical ranking, but popular websites are not always credible and credible websites are not always popular.

Hakia's semantic technology provides a new search experience based on quality, not popularity. Its search results come from credible websites recommended by librarians; they represent the most recent information available and remain absolutely relevant to the query.

Find out what makes Hakia different.

Our Gracious Hosts and Blogging Software

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If you've ever wondered what ReadWriteWeb looks like behind the scenes, or if you've never seen the Movable Type publishing interface - that's it on the left. We recently upgraded to MT 4.23, which is the latest version. We got onto this release as soon as it was available - in fact our contacts at Six Apart emailed the actual code to us before it was up on their website. That's customer service for you!

The companies above pay our rents or mortgages and we appreciate it. We hope you'll stop by their sites and see what they've got to offer.

Have you got a smart company that could use some more visits by the sophisticated readers of a blog like ReadWriteWeb's? Drop us a line and let's talk.

Thanks to all our sponsors and our readers for your support!

Linked Data

Thanks ReadWriteWeb for this latest on where the web is heading... a useful universe of open, linked data sets. Enjoy

Written by Richard MacManus / May 18, 2009 3:15 AM / 12 Comments

« Prior Post Next Post »

Last week we discussed how the current era of the Web is evolving. One of the concepts we noted was Linked Data, an idea whose time has come in 2009. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, gave a must-view talk at the TED Conference earlier this year, evangelizing Linked Data. He said that Linked Data was a sea change akin to the invention of the WWW itself. We've gone from a Web of documents, via the WWW, to a Web of data. Berners-Lee is now on a crusade for everyone from government departments, to individuals, to open up their data and put it on the Web - so that others can link to it and use it. In this post we give a high-level overview of Linked Data. Read on to stop and smell the roses.

A great place to start to understand Linked Data is Sir Tim's TED talk, embedded below. It's just over 15 minutes and highly recommended if you want to grok where the Web is headed. The slides are also available.

Linked Data: An Idea Whose Time Has Come

Linked Data is an official W3C project. An independent community page for Linked Data describes it as "using the Web to connect related data that wasn't previously linked, or using the Web to lower the barriers to linking data currently linked using other methods."

Tim Berners-Lee described Linked Data as a grassroots movement in his TED presentation. The above image shows you how many participating data sets there are now (it'll have increased even more since then, as that was a March 2009 snapshot). Linked Data is ramping up fast. To give you an idea of how much it's grown over the past two years alone, here is a snapshot of the data sets that were available in May 2007:

Linked Data in a Nutshell

In a W3C memo that Berners-Lee published in July 2007, he described four principles of Linked Data. The Wikipedia paraphrased it as follows:

• Use URIs to identify things that you expose to the Web as resources.
• Use HTTP URIs so that people can locate and look up (dereference) these things.
• Provide useful information about the resource when its URI is dereferenced.
• Include links to other, related URIs in the exposed data as a means of improving information discovery on the Web.

Even that paraphrasing is a bit technical, but we can sum it up like so: Linked Data allows you to discover, connect to, describe, and re-use all kinds of data. It is to data what the World Wide Web was to documents back in the 90's.

W3C: Linked Data: Principles and State of the Art, April 2008

On ReadWriteWeb we've discussed Linked Data a number of times. Alexander Korth wrote a good high level intro last month. He noted that Linked Data builds on and interconnects existing ontologies such as WordNet, FOAF, and SKOS. He went on to explain that the data sets grant access to their knowledge bases and link to items in other data sets:

"The project follows basic design principles of the World Wide Web: simplicity, tolerance, modular design, and decentralization. The LOD [Linking Open Data] project currently counts more than 2 billion RDF triples, which is a lot of knowledge. (A triple is a piece of information that consists of a subject, predicate, and object to express a particular subject's property or relationship to another subject.) Also, the number of participating data sets is rapidly growing. The data sets currently can be accessed in heterogeneous ways; for example, through a semantic web browser or by being crawled by a semantic search engine."

Let A Thousand Flowers Bloom

If there's one idea we want to leave you with about Linked Data, it's that the data is there to be used. Linked Data enables data to be opened up and connected so that people can build interesting new things from it. At TED, Berners-Lee described Linked Data as boxes of data that - when connected via open standards - enable things to sprout from it.

Slide from Tim Berners-Lee's TED talk in Feb 09

Linked Data is one of the most important trends of the Web circa 2009 and we'll be blogging more about it in the coming months. Let us know in the comments if there's something specific you'd like us to explore in the Linked Data world.

The Singularity

Thanks Futurelab

Will Singularity Result in Integration of the Human Nervous System and the Mobile Networks and Interfaces? So You Are Your IPhone.

by: Idris Mootee

Remember what you've read about Singularity? The technological singularity is a theoretical future point of unprecedented technological progress, caused in part by the ability of machines to improve themselves using artificial intelligence. Remember Ray Kurzweil? Inventor. Entrepreneur. Artificial Intelligence. Futurist. Author: "The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence" and "The Singularity is Near."

In 2045 the human race "breaks the shackles of its genetic legacy and achieves inconceivable heights of intelligence, material progress and longevity." Kurzweil's Law of "accelerating returns." Material progress faster than Moore's Law. The "Singularity" is that postulated point in time when technological progress, led by machine intelligences designing their own replacements at an ever-increasing rate, becomes so rapid that we mere humans can no longer comprehend or control it. It is no sci-fi,many think it is real.

Microsoft started early playing with the idea and the singularity project in now its 5th year. One focus of the project has been to throw away the past- the OS we have today (Linux, Windows) evolved from designs in the 60s and 70s when computers were limited in resources and not very networked. What could you get if you design for today’s CPU power?

Some believe that this point will eventually be reached in the real world. I think that those people are drastically underestimating the other limits to progress, such as bandwidth limits for data gathering, the difficulty of comprehension, and the inverse relationship of speed to reliability in data analysis. They're also confusing exponential growth curves (which lead to arbitrarily high growth rates) with S curves, which apply to real-world situations in which growth rates increase for a while as key limits are overcome, then slows again.

But while we're waiting for God to emerge from machines, some of the people promoting the concept of the Singularity are looking for practical ways to turn technological progress into social progress. The questions are when will artificial intelligence out-compete humans? Or when computers can have personalities? Or when I can transfer my knowledge as well as personality traits to a computer? Or will artificial intelligence eventually manifest themselves as brands and run all marketing activities (who needs an ad agency?) These are interesting questions. What other technologies and applications, which may take us to Singularity:

• Computer software endowed with heuristic algorithms (heuristic is an algorithm that is able to produce an acceptable solution to a problem in many practical scenarios, but for which there is no formal proof of its correctness). It means computer can provide answers to right and wrong without formal logic. I can see computers become political.
• Our real life is simulated by computers in a virtual world so if we die, our virtual self lives on. So if you are being murdered, they have to do it twice. It brings new meaning to what is defined as murder of the first degree. May be you can sue someone's virtual self and the real person as part of the collateral damage.
• Artificial entities generated by evolution within computer systems, need some imagination to think about what are those entities? Stephen King loves this.
• Integration of the human nervous system and computer and mobile connectivity and interfaces. You are your iPhone. Just hope it doesn't crash. Interface designers have a bright future ahead of them. Apple Care has new meanings.
• Dynamically organizing social networks so the system help you to pick, manage and organize your social life. The next Facebook?

All these ideas are disruptive and scary in some cases. But we are moving towards that direction. Many are pushing that idea and they include Ray Kurzweil, Peter Diamandis (X Prize Foundation), and Google co-founder Larry Page. They formed a Singularity University aimed at both students and executives in various technology disciplines (including Space & Physical Sciences, Biotechnology and Bioinformatics, Nanotechnology, Neuroscience & Human Enhancement, AI, Robotics, & Cognitive Computing, Energy & Ecological Systems and Future Studies), the objective is to close the gap in understanding and applying fast-developing technologies to solve what they called humanity's grandest challenges...such as poverty, hunger, and pandemics. In another word, applying Singularity to safe the world.

I don’t think the answers to many of these problems will come from technologies alone. My biggest concern whether the top-down, capital intensive management systems will dominate the thinking and cloud the visions of people who might make other choices if they only saw the potential for them. And technology is always a double-edged sword. Same as Singularity. The future is always dangerous…and exciting.

Have a great weekend.

Original Post: http://mootee.typepad.com/innovation_playground/2009/02/will-singularity-results-in-integration-of-the-human-nervous-system-and-the-mobile-networks-and-inte.html

Tags:

• Idris Mootee
• progress
• singularity
• technology

A Guide to The Contextual Web

Thsi article is long, but so good i had to copy the whole thing. Big thanks to ReadWriteWeb... oh and a great xmas/new years to all.

Written by Alex Iskold / December 22, 2008 9:00 PM / 18 Comments

« Prior Post Next Post »

It's the end of 2008 and everyone on the Web is hurting due to the economy. But we know that things will get better, because slow-downs eventually bury the old and give birth to new evolutionary ways of doing things.

One of these evolutions started quietly in 2008. We are witnessing the rise of a new kind of web: contextual. You might not have heard or thought about it much yet, but you are already using it today. Search remains the killer app on the web, but context is quickly become a viable contender. Why? Because context is what happens instead of search.

What Is The Contextual Web?

Until recently on the web, most sites have not been software - only data, a bunch of flat HTML pages. The software that you used to look at them was, of course, the web browser. The problem was that the browser had no idea what the pages contained, and it did not know what you were doing. Because the browser could not infer your context, it could not help you explore related and relevant information.

The contextual web experience is fundamentally different because there is an understanding of what the user is doing. The combination of the information on the page and the user's behavior creates the context. Once you understand the user's context, you can be more helpful. So, contextual technologies have the potential to bite into the pie that today belongs to search, because it is able to bypass search.

Consider the difference between looking at the IBM home page and a movie page on Netflix. The context is very different, and so likely is the user's intention. The user may be looking at IBM because she is looking for a job or researching IBM products. When the user is looking up a movie, it is because she is thinking about renting it.

The Key Properties of The Contextual Web

The Contextual web will happen when browsers and websites evolve to recognize what users are trying to do. It is the web with less choice and more meaning, where instead of Googling all the time, we Google once and then the rest of the information is available to us automatically, based on our current context.

Here are the key properties of the contextual web experience:

• Relevancy: understanding the user's context better drives content relevancy.
• Shortcuts: contextual shortcuts reduce the need for raw search.
• Personalization: context is based on user intentions and history.
• Remixing: relevant information from around the web is instantly available.

What are some specific examples of contextual technologies that are improving our web experience right now?

Markup Technologies

One of the keys to inferring user context is understanding the underlying information that the user is looking at. This is why the contextual web is related to -- and, to be more precise, is powered by -- semantic web. We have written a lot here on ReadWriteWeb about semantic technologies. Notably, we discussed the difference between the top-down and bottom-up approaches to semantic web, both of which are important for understanding the contextual web.

The bottom-up approach to context is about annotating pages. For example, all modern browsers can detect if the page you are looking at contains an RSS feed. This happens because the browser looks for a tag in the head of the page, which declares type . The fact that the page offers an RSS feed creates an obvious context: subscription. So, the browser then invites you to subscribe using your favorite RSS reader.

Another form of markup that has been discussed recently is microformats, which offer an XHTML-compliant way of embedding metadata about people, places, events, and reviews in existing web pages. Even though microformats are not ubiquitous today, there are clear benefits to using them. The image below is from an excellent post by Mozilla UI lead Alex Faaborg about leveraging microformats in the browser.

Building on the hAtom microformat are Web Slices, introduced by Microsoft in Internet Explorer 8. Web Slices enable publishers to notify users when the information in their web pages changes. For example, Weather.com can create a Web Slice that tells the user when a local weather update is available. eBay can deliver a Web Slice that notifies the user when the price of an auction changes. Similar in concept to RSS, Web Slices focus on updates in part of the web page, enabling publishers and users to communicate directly via the browser.

There are other markup formats that help provide context. For example, popular add-on Cooliris[disclosure: this is the company I founded], is called ABMeta. This format allows publishers to annotate pages that contain information about books, music, movies, wine, restaurants, stocks, and other everyday things. offers a markup format for signaling that a site contains images. By placing a bit of XML code in their home directory, site owners enable users to experience their images using the stunning 3D visualization developed by Cooliris. Another markup format, developed by AdaptiveBlue

All of these markup-based approaches face the same issue: publishers have to do the work of actually annotating the pages. And while the semantic web community has been very vocal about the benefits of annotation, the majority of the web is still flat HTML.

Widgets

In the meantime, we are seeing a surge in applications that deploy a top-down approach to inferring user context and being helpful. Instead of relying on markup in pages, these applications use heuristics and APIs to recognize the information that the user is interacting with. Based on their recognition, these smart tools then offer contextual shortcuts to the relevant bits of information. Speaking broadly, today there are two primary categories of top-down contextual applications: blog plugins and browser add-ons.

Blog plugins offering a contextual experience have been around for some time, starting with preview technologies. One of the first recent unsuccessful attempts at a preview technology was delivered by Browster. Despite its failure, its successors, CoolPreviews, SnapShots, and Apture, have done much better. While CoolPreviews literally focuses on a preview of the page, SnapShots and Apture deliver a compact summary of the information behind the link. The basic premise behind the previews is sound: if the user is not interested in what is behind the link, the preview can save the user an unnecessary click. Because the user context (in this case, the link) is known, relevant information can be brought to the surface and delivered to the user instantly.

Closely related to previews are widgets that offer contextual shortcuts. Like previews, these widgets work by being anchored to links. Examples of this technology include Yahoo! ShortcutsSmartLinks from my company AdaptiveBlue. Instead of providing a preview of the underlying content, these technologies offer links to related content around the web. The example below shows a SmartLink on a New York Times movie page, which invites the user, for example, to buy the movie on Amazon or rent it on Netflix. and

Our last example of contextual widget technology comes from Colorado-based Lijit. Lijit has developed a search technology that focuses on the individual. You claim your presence around the web, on blogs, Twitter, Flickr, etc., and then others can search your pages on specific topics. Say you are on someone's blog and want to do a search on that person; it makes the most sense to search through this person's pages first; after all, you are in this person's context.

Remarkably, Lijit offers another contextual nugget, called Re-search. It is simple, but a great example of the power of context. If you search for a term on Google and end up on a blog that has a Lijit widget, a header appears with additional results and a prompt to search for more. Lijit automatically infers your context, does a search, and offers additional helpful shortcuts.

Browser Add-Ons

Widgets and markup technologies are making inroads into the contextual web, but an even bigger inroad is being made by browser add-ons. Since Firefox introduced its platform for delivering additional features to the browser, many thousands of browser extensions have been developed. A lot of these extension focus on enhancing the browsing experience by leveraging context. Probably the granddaddy of them all is Greasemonkey, an extension that allows users to install bits of JavaScript that alter the look and content of web pages they visit. We wrote an introduction to this popular add-on and recently followed up with a post on 7 New Greasemonkey Tweaks.

While Greasemonkey scripts are mainly regarded as experimental tools for power users, quite a few other extensions are aimed at building a business around contextual enhancements to the browser. One example is a company called WebMynd, which focuses on enhancing Google search results. WebMynd's extension automatically pushes down Google ads (clever!) to insert its contexual gadget. It allows users to simultaneously search posts on Twitter, book matches on Amazon, video matches on YouTube, and many other sources. An example of what shows up when searching for "semantic web" using the gadget is shown below.

We have mentioned Cooliris several times already. The most popular Cooliris product is the browser add-on that shows stunning 3D views of photos and videos around the web. Cooliris works contextually by automatically recognizing popular photo sites like Flickr, Google Images and Photobucket. Another contextual add-on that works by recognizing content on pages is Glue. This add-on shows you friends and other users who have visited the same book, music, movie, restaurant, wine, and other pages around the web. The context here crosses the content you are viewing with your social graph. Unlike lifestreaming applications that deliver you information about your friends out of context, Glue only brings to the surface information that is relevant to your current context.

A very different example of a contextual web add-on comes from Slovenia-based Zemanta. Its add-on makes it easy for publishers to add contextually relevant links, photos, and video to their posts. Zemanta works by applying its semantic engine to the body of the post and automatically recommending related content. Using Zemanta, bloggers are able to instantly add relevant content to their blog posts, in turn creating a relevant web experience for their users.

Our last two examples of contextual add-ons are Zentact and App Discover, both recently launched. Zentact -- developed by the folks who brought us another contextual phenomenon, MyBlogLog -- aims to solve a problem of staying in touch with people who matter to you. First, you import and tag your email contacts with different tags that reflect their interests. Then, as you browse, Zentact pops up a reminder to contact a person if it deems the page relevant based on the tags. It is a simple yet powerful example of the contextual web.

App Discover works by recommending related applications to the sites that you are visiting. Today, it requires publishers to add markup to their sites, but one can easily imagine how this technology could work top-down. The example below shows App Discover recommending TweetDeck when the user navigates to Twitter.

Browsers

Without a doubt, web browsers are in the best position to deliver the user's contextual web experience. While add-ons are taken in a variety of directions, the two dominant browsers, Internet Explorer and Firefox, have already incorporated the basic contextual experience: shortcuts. Internet Explorer 8 features technology called Accelerators.

According to Microsoft, Accelerators give you ready access to the online services you use everyday, from any page you visit. Accelerators are defined as little chunks of XML based on pre-defined variables and defined by the browser. Some examples of variables available to Accelerator are the active URL, the active domain, and selected text. The most common action that Accelerators do is perform contextual search based on the user's selection. Another common Accelerator function is the in-place lookup, such as looking up a map based on a given address.

The problem with Accelerators is that they are not really based on a selection; that is, they lack semantics. When you highlight an address, you still have to decide which Accelerator to use. If you have dozens of Accelerators installed, this quickly becomes hard to manage. Firefox has recognized the issue with the menu-driven approach and instead offers its contextual technology via text. Called Ubiquity, this contextual technology is still only available as an add-on today but is likely to be a part of Firefox core soon.

Marketed as user-generated mashups, Ubiquity is actually a contextual technology based on language. As with Accelerators, the user is able to select a piece of text and then invoke Ubiquity and type a command. In the screenshot above, Ubiquity is used to insert a map into an email. Hundreds of Ubiquity commands have been implemented to date. ReadWriteWeb has already written about Ubiquity commands.

Will Context be the Future of the Web?

So where is all of this heading? Are these technologies signal or noise? We believe we are witnessing the birth of a fundamentally new kind of web, a smarter one, a contextual one. Unlike the old web we are used to, this one understands what we are doing and helps us. It is a web in which we search less and find relevant content faster. This new contextual web is still very young and unevenly distributed, but it is definitely here.

The fact that these contextual technologies are springing up is not accidental. The Contextual web is made possible by our push into semantic web and the rise of web services/API culture. The combination of basic semantics and API is fueling all of these contextual applications. Bit by bit, the web is getting smarter, friendlier, and more enjoyable.

Web browsers are in the best position to deliver these new contextual experiences to users because of their wide reach. The fact that Microsoft made Accelerators its flagship feature for Internet Explorer 8 and that Mozilla is putting much effort into Ubiquity tells us that contexual browsing is a priority. This is really good news, because these technologies bring great benefits to the user.

It is great to see that in these tough economic times, evolution is brewing. The tremendous effort that all of these companies are making with contextual technologies is beginning to come to fruition. It may be that we are seeing glimpses of what the next generation of the web will be like.

And now, as usual, let's turn the tables. Tell us examples of your favorite contextual browsing technologies. Do you think context will be play significant part in the next evolution of the web?

top 10 Semantic web products

Thanks ReadWriteWeb. Hoping to make 09 the year BMF releases some semantic powered activity.

n 2008 we saw the Semantic Web gain traction, giving us plenty of choice when selecting the 10 best Semantic Web products of 2008.

This is the first in a series of posts we'll publish over December, listing our choices for the top web products of the year. Then at the end of December, we'll post a Top 100 list - which we'll be promoting over 2009 and opening up at some point for public voting. Without further ado, let's jump into the top 10 Semantic Web products of 2008.

Earlier this month we posted an update to 10 Semantic Web applications that we have been tracking for a year now. Some of those make this list, as well as some from our follow-up post 10 More Semantic Apps to Watch. We also have a couple of other products in this list, which for one reason or another didn't get mentioned in our watch-lists.

You may disagree with our selections, so do tell us in the comments what you think.

Note: the products listed below are in no particular order

1. Yahoo! SearchMonkey

In May this year Yahoo! launched an open developer platform for searchSearchMonkey. Yahoo hasn't had the happiest of years, but its willingness to innovate in search is to be commended. As we reported at the Web 2.0 Expo in April, SearchMonkey is a component of a major overhaul at Yahoo! across all of its properties to "rewire" for the social graph and data portability. SearchMonkey allows developers to build applications on top of Yahoo! search, including allowing site owners to share structured data with Yahoo!, using semantic markup (microformats, RDF), standardized XML feeds, APIs (OpenSearch or other web services), and page extraction. called

We think this is the best use of Semantic Web by an Internet bigco this year. So for that reason SearchMonkey makes our top 10 list. Related: The Story of SearchMonkey.

2. Powerset (acquired by Microsoft in '08)

Powerset (see our initial coverage here and here) is a natural language search engine. It's fair to say that Powerset has had a great 2008, having been acquired by Microsoft in July this year.

At the time of the acquisition, Powerset said that it needed a bigger partner to expand its product beyond its current state of only searching Wikipedia - something we had speculated about when the rumors of the acquisition first appeared. In its own statement, Microsoft stressed how useful Powerset's technology will be for improving Microsoft's own search products and to "take Search to the next level." In our analysis of the deal, we noted that it was a "bold play requiring exact execution" by Microsoft.

3. Open Calais (Thomson Reuters)

At the end of 2007, ClearForest had been recently acquired by Reuters and at that point it had a Web Service and a Firefox extension. What a change a year brings! ClearForest went on to release Calais, a toolkit of products that enable users to incorporate semantic functionality within their blog, content management system, website or application.

Since launching the Open Calais API early this year, over 6,000 developers have registered with it and the service is doing more than 1 million transactions a day. Version 3.0 was released earlier this month and version 4 is expected by January 09.

4. Dapper MashupAds

In November we wrote about the recent improvement in Dapper MashupAds, a product we first spotted over a year ago. The idea is that publishers can tell Dapper: this is the place on my web page where the title of a movie will appear, now serve up a banner ad that's related to whatever movie this page happens to be about. That could be movies, books, travel destinations - anything. We remarked that the UI for this has grown much more sophisticated in the past year.

The company believes that its new ad network will provide monetary incentive for publishers to have their websites marked up semantically. We think this has plenty of promise, so it makes our year-end list.

5. Hakia

Hakia is a search engine focusing on natural language processing methods to try and deliver 'meaningful' search results. Hakia attempts to analyze the concept of a search query, in particular by doing sentence analysis. Over the past year Hakia has been busy extending its reach - licensing its proprietary OntoSem technology to other companies in March and announcing a Semantic APIutilize Yahoo! BOSS, by integrating their semantic parsing with the Yahoo! search index. in June. It was also one of the first companies to

We think Hakia has made good progress getting its technology into the hands of third parties and making use of Yahoo's broader index, so for that reason it's among our top 10 for the year.

6. TripIt

Tripit is an app that manages your travel planning. With TripIt, you forward incoming bookings to plans@tripit.com and the system manages the rest.

Over the past year TripIt has continued to iterate on its feature set - introducing LinkedIn integration, better mobile functionality, more social networking features, and other goodies. In short, it's user experience continues to rock!

7. BooRah

BooRah is a restaurant review site that we first reviewed earlier this year and has come on in leaps and bounds over 2008. BooRah uses semantic analysis and natural language processing to aggregate reviews from food blogs. Because of this, BooRah can recognize praise and criticism in these reviews and then rates restaurants accordingly. BooRah also gathers reviews from Citysearch, Tripadvisor and other large review sites.

BooRah also announced last month the availability of an API that will allow other web sites and businesses to offer online reviews and ratings from BooRah to their customers. The API will surface most of BooRah's data about a given restaurant, including ratings, menus, discounts, and coupons.

8. AdaptiveBlue

Disclosure: AdaptiveBlue's founder Alex Iskold is a feature writer at RWW.

AdaptiveBlue are makers of the Firefox plugin, BlueOrganizer. As we wrote in January this year, the basic idea behind BlueOrganizer is that it gives you added information about webpages you visit and offers useful links based on the subject matter.

Over the past year the company has been working on a new product, called Glue. Launched last month, Glue is a more social networking oriented version of BlueOrganizer - it connects you to your friends based around things like books, music, movies, stars, artists, stocks, wine, restaurants, and more. We think the company has diversified smartly in 2008, by integrating social networking and mobile functionality into its products.

9. Zemanta

Zemanta is a blogging tool which harnesses semantic technology to add relevant content to your posts. While it didn't make either of our 'Semantic Apps to Watch' lists in November, a number of commenters pointed it out as something they use. In September we covered a major upgrade to Zemanta's service, allowing users to specify the sources they want to see in the suggestions list that Zemanta provides. Users can now incorporate their own social networks, RSS feeds, and photos into their blog posts. As we noted, this makes Zemanta a lot more appealing to established bloggers who are in less need of suggestions and more in need of automation.

Zemanta's API is also being used by startups, including semantic bookmarking service Faviki - which we mentioned in our second Watch-list. So all up, we think Zemanta has done enough this year to be included in our top 10 list.

10. UpTake

Semantic search startup UpTake (formerly Kango) aims to make the process of booking travel online easier. In our review in May, we explained that UpTake is a vertical search engine that has assembled what it says is the largest database of US hotels and activities - over 400,000 of them - from more than 1,000 different travel sites. Using a top-down approach, UpTake looks at its database of over 20 million reviews, opinions, and descriptions of hotels and activities in the US and semantically extracts information about those destinations.

And now please let us know in the comments what you think of our selections. Do you think we've picked the best 10 Semantic Web products of the year?