Want to know what companies are implementing Semantic Web technologies?

For a while, I have been following David Provost's post on his quest to create a report about industry companies who are using Semantic Web technologies and are on the Semantic Web boat.

And finally it is out! If you want to know how Semantic Web technologies can benefit your company, learn about other experiences, please read David Provost's report: "On The Cusp: A Global Review of the Semantic Web Industry"

Enjoy!

Interview: Is the Semantic Web necessary?

I want to thank GeekAustin and Jana Thompson for interviewing me about the necessity of the Semantic Web. I really enjoyed the questions and it made me think about the Semantic Web in its true reality. I would really enjoy your comments on the interview.

Check it out here.

My article on RDF and Relational Databases in the Talis Nodalities Magazine

This is a big thing for me! My article about RDF and Relational Databases was published in the Nodalities magazine from Talis, "The Magazine of the Semantic Web". I want to invite you all to read the article and I would love to get your comments back.

Somebody just got on the Semantic Web boat: The New York Times

I am impressed! Almost everyday I am reading about big companies and communities that are starting to embrace the Semantic Web. Just found this video where Michael Zimbalist, VP of R&D at The New York Times gets asked about the Semantic Web (min 2:30 of the video). He says "we are very interested [...] in the Semantic Web". Get a sneak preview of what The New York Times is planning to do with the Semantic Web, because "the opportunities are quite vast!"

Predicting the next 5,000 days of the web, a TED Talk

Got a link to this TED talk from @PaulMiller. For a long time, I have been looking for a TED talk that's about Semantic Web. Kevin Kelly gives the talk and gives a great explanation of the future of the web and what the Semantic Web is.

In a nutshell, at the beginning, the internet was just a net: linking computers. We now have a web: linking web pages. What are we moving towards? Kevin Kelly calls it "the one": linking data. And that is what the Semantic Web is about.

Another thing that was very interesting was something Kevin Kelly said about the fax machine. The first guy who bought the fax machine was an idiot, because he had nobody to send a fax too! LOL! But eventually he started to evangelize and more people got fax machines. That is how I sometimes feel in the Austin community. When it comes to me evangelizing about the Semantic Web, it may seem that I am talking to myself, but eventually we all have to get on the Semantic Web boat!

Enjoy the video!

Problems of Social Media/Networks on the Social Web

Just found about Seesmic, and I'm getting really hooked on it. Here is a quick video, where I am asking about problems of social media and social networks on the social web. Thanks to the people how have commented on my previous post. If you are a real social media person, you may be on seesmic and I would love to here your comments about this problem!

Data Portability and the Semantic Web

In the last week, I started emailing back and forth with @michellegreer. After her wuffie blog post, I got in touch with her about social media and stuff, because it is something that is starting to interest me a lot.

At the same time, in the Semantic Web community, the International Semantic Web Conference is coming up and the submission deadlines are around the corner (meaning Friday!). One of the new workshops that are going to take place is "Social Data on the Web", which I am really looking forward to! This workshop puts together my new interest of social media with the love of my research life: Semantic Web.

The last couple of days I started reading about Social Media, Data Portability and the Semantic web and came up on a lot of cool papers. I still of tons of stuff to read, but I am going to recommend one that stands out the most right now: "Data Portability with SIOC and FOAF" (slides of the presentation here). I immediately emailed all this stuff to @michellegreer because I new she was going to be at Social Media Camp Austin, and host a session on Data Portability. (Just this morning we talked about holding the session together, even though I am in Zurich right now. I was able to get my voice across for a couple of minutes, but looking forward to talking more about this at the next Semantic Web Austin meetup.)

Once you understand the interaction between the Semantic Web and Social Networks, you realize that the Semantic Web is THE solution to all this Data Portability problem.

Quoting from the paper:

To better enable a user's access to multiple sites, portability between social media sites is required in terms of (1) identication, personal profiles and friend networks and (2) user's content expressed on each site, whether it is about blog posts, pictures, bookmarks or any type of data. Such portability would allow users to easily exchange content between services, or merge and share their social network between various websites.

So what is FOAF and SIOC?

Two Semantic Web projects SIOC (Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities) and FOAF (Friend of a Friend) can be combined to enable data portability between social media sites:

• The FOAF vocabulary allows us to represent people and their social networks, providing the social network component of data portability. It can be used in a combination with the the OpenID identity system.
• The SIOC vocabulary is an open format for expressing information about user-generated content in an interoperable way. It provides the content object component of data portability. The SIOC Types module can be used to further specify different types of Social Web / Web2.0 objects that we may want to describe.

If you read the paper and look at the slides, you will definitely realize how FOAF and SIOC can solve the Data Portability problem.

I still have a lot more reading to do! But more importantly, I would like to know what common social media users think about the current problems of social network, social media, etc. I would really appreciate your comments.

In a couple of weeks, we will be hosting our next Semantic Web Austin meeting and this will be our first topic! So hopefully I can get a lot of feedback about problems the common users see in the social media world, and see if/how the Semantic Web can help.