GroupSwim: SaaS-Style Collaboration – ReadWriteWeb
GroupSwim is a new Enterprise 2.0 social collaboration platform. The semantic application makes searching different types of things easy. Semantic technologies can offer powerful applications for enterprises and the use of social platform keeps things easy without any training required. Saves cost 😉
Metawebs Freebase Now 60% Larger Than English Wikipedia – ReadWriteWeb
Wow! that’s impressive. Freebase is really growing into a huge machine readable database of the world’s knowledge. Freebase is growing rapidly because bulk uploads are possible and scrapers are automatically feeding data into it. It will be interesting to see other serious applications besides Powerset making use of Freebase data. However, it is true that the interface is still complicated for the ordinary human users. Wikipedia is far simpler, user friendly and popular. Moreover, entering data into Freebase is not so flexible due to the strict data types required. Users may not always have perfect data to enter. That is why I intend to keep StYLiD interface simple and flexible for input. It is not at all intended to be another world’s database. Rather it is intended to be a simple platform to enable ordinary users to share a wide variety of structured data.
The Linked Data community is really gaining high momentum with effective campaigns. The campaigns seem to be increasing aggressively now with a wish list for possible Linked Data sources.
List on this page sites/datasets that you want to see published as Linked Data. This list may form the basis for some campaign/action to encourage these data publishers to embrace Linked Data.
Confirmed: Microsoft Acquires Powerset – ReadWriteWeb
The software giant has finally acquired Powerset. I hope the technology of Powerset will be expanded to span the entire web instead of just Wikipedia which is the case now. It will be interesting to see how effective that will be compared to keyword and page rank based robust technology of Google. It is important that giants like Microsoft and Google demonstrate semantic applications rather than conservatively sticking to simple keyword based technologies. However, I am not sure if natural language querying will be more effective and appealing than keyword search. I think it is much easier to do keyword queries than typing in full questions.
I am just back from the Linked Data Planet. Flying all the way from Tokyo, New York seemed to be as far as another planet for me. It was a great opportunity to be in that planet, thanks to the Semantic Web Company for providing me this opportunity by selecting me in the Linked Data Vision competition. I had the honor of meeting Andreas Blumauer, CEO of the Semantic Web Company and having a talk with him. He also talked about StYLiD and offered me some good suggestions.
The Linked Data Planet was really the place to be for the Semantic Web people that time. I had the opportunity to listen to great keynote speakers including Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Kingsley Idehen, Ian Davis, Atanas Kiryakov and Anant Jhingran. I also had an opportunity to talk to Michael Bergman, CEO of Zitgist. I am a frequent reader of his AI3 blog. I also talked with people from Calais and watched a demo from TopQuadrant. Other exhibitors included OpenLink Software, Inc., Franz Inc. (AllegroGraph), Ontotext Lab and others. It seems that interest is growing in the business community about the Semantic Web and Linked Data.
Just created my first Facebook application.
http://apps.facebook.com/stylidplugin/
This one is quite simple though. It shows the StYLiD concept cloud in your Facebook page so that you can browse different types of data in StYLiD directly from Facebook. It would be interesting to make more powerful interface to StYLiD in the future – for eg, submitting data to StYLiD thru Facebook, sending the posted data to friends, inviting friends to submit new data, etc.
Reconciliation : Freebase – The Worlds Database
A REST API to handle the reconciliation problem, summed up as “Tell me which freebase topic, if any, some data corresponds to.” I think reconciliation in Freebase is mainly duplicate detection. It would be nice if the system could automatically reconcile and merge multiple instances or types.
Finally, the myOntology prototype is online. I was eager to see it long since i learned about the ambitious project. The interface looks quite impressive. Lets play with the features 😉
Just came across this. This is a cool visualization of freebase data as nodes and edges. The nodes have icons depending on their types. Nice to play with.
Aman\'s Blog 