Posts for May, 2009

Canadian Business magazine’s criticism of the Green Energy Act misses the mark

May 30th, 2009 by Greg Boutin
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Canadian Business missed the mark in its poorly researched editorial on Ontario’s Green Energy Act and the Emerging Technologies Fund in the June 15 issue.

I support innovative ventures in the cleantech space on a daily basis through my consulting practice at Growthroute, and I recently co-authored an article entitled “Could Ontario be the Next Germany?” with regard to both the Act and the Fund, published in Renewable Energy World Magazine, the most widely-read magazine on clean energy.

As we all know, Ontario has been pouring money by the billion into the car manufacturing industry and other dinosaurs. It is about time some public support be devoted to innovation in cleantech. (more…)

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Search: Statistics vs. Semantics. And so the Battle Begins…

May 26th, 2009 by Greg Boutin

The Semantic Web gang gathered this month to discuss the recent launch of Wolfram Alpha and the endorsement of RDFa by Google.

My impression of Wolfram, to talk about it for a second, is that it fills a clear white space in the search engine arena, a space I would divide up into 2 sub-fields:

  • FIND: when you seek a specific, well-defined piece of information, you’re into FIND mode. IMHO, that’s a task in which Google’s supremacy is fast eroding. If I seek a precise answer to a question, say the names of the different provinces in India or all the movies in which Sharon Stone played (not that I’d ever look for that), I tend to rely less and less on the search engine gorilla. I either go directly to Wikipedia (although it’s a little like Google in that it’s often serving me ‘too much information’), use vertical databases (such as IDMB for movies), or land directly on more targeted search engines such as Powerset or, now, Wolfram, which impressed me.
    Granted, I sometime still use Google to access Wikipedia. But the point is, Google is not my exclusive entry point to the web in that scenario. So Wolfram may well have found a key weakness to exploit, as the statistical approach *may* not be ideally suited to this task. Will Wolfram steal significant volume of clicks from Google? I don’t know, a lot of that comes down to execution, but there is no denying it found a crack in the shiny armor. (more…)

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Launch of the Toronto Semantic Group and First Meeting

May 24th, 2009 by Greg Boutin

I am glad to announce the launch of the Toronto Semantic Meetup Group, at last! My friend William Mougayar, CEO of Eqentia, has taken the initiative to put that together and asked me to join him as a co-organizer, a role I am glad to take on. I had been envisioning the launch of this group for a while but the logistical challenge of running a group in TO while living quite far from the city, coupled with work commitments, had kept me from acting. So I am especially thankful to William, and will support him in any way I can. After the successes of the Palo Alto and New york semantic groups, it became clear that Toronto was in dire need of a forum for our small-but-fast-growing community of interest.

Our first meetup will take place this Wednesday at 6PM at Xtreme Labs, 67 Yonge Street 16th floor, Toronto ON M3H 6A7. After an introduction to the group by William, I will be giving a presentation "Semantic Web 101" and discuss ways start-ups can succeed in the space.  William and I will also report on the recent Web 3.0 conference we both went to. There will be an extensive Q&A and networking opportunity. Please visit the Toronto Semantic Group page on Meetup to register with the group and tell us whether you can make it. Note that space is limited and there are only 15 seats left.

I hope you can make it.

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Great Contributions from Leaders of Companies Using RDF and URIs

May 15th, 2009 by Greg Boutin

Check out the comment section of the part 3 of my blog post series. Very interesting contributions by Sean Martin of Cambridge Semantics and Bill Roberts of Swirrl.

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New Review by ReadWriteWeb of our Series Of Posts on Web 3.0, the Semantic Web, Linked Data and Data Structuring Technologies

May 14th, 2009 by Greg Boutin

Richard MacManus, Founder and Editor of ReadWriteWeb, has just published a review of my last series of posts: it is called Understanding the New Web Era: Web 3.0, Linked Data, Semantic Web, also available through the NY Times, and nicely summarizes and complements my analysis with additional thoughts and examples. I greatly recommend the read, and thank Richard for taking the time. I hope to see interesting discussions emerge from it on RWW's site, on this blog, and at the imminent Web 3.0 and Semantic Technologies conferences.

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