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Posts tagged ‘killer application’

How Semantic is Linked Data? OpenCalais Launches Semantic Proxy

September 24th, 2008 by Greg Boutin

Yesterday, OpenCalais launched Semantic Proxy, a tool that identifies metadata such as the people, companies, events in a page. You can find some more information and an enthusiastic review on Paul Miller’s ZDNet’s blog. I commented there and “mix and re-use “my comment here too, as I’d like to ensure maximum exposure to hopefully collect a diverse set of reactions.Image via Wikipedia

Let’s put that in the context of the Semantic Technology Value Chain. This launch comes as a perfect illustration of a company, Reuters –who is behind OpenCalais– seeking to deliver value to the user through a Semantic Application –in this case, one that will enable Semantic Pages– so it can leverage all those user interactions to grow and better their Semantic Metadata Store. Smart.

So does the Semantic Application do the job? (more…)

Tags: killer application, opencalais, semantic web gang, web 3.0

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The Semantic Technology Value Chain

September 23rd, 2008 by Greg Boutin

With the slide below on the Semantic Technology Value Chain, I attempted to present my view of the Semantic Web world(s), to inform the discussion recently started through the latest Semantic Web Gang podcast on the top plays in this space. Mills Davis of the Semantic Exchange is working on a much more detailed version of this market segmentation effort, so this is not intended to represent more than a personal overview.

(click on the picture for a larger view)

Looking at this value chain, my working hypothesis is that the initial semweb killer app is likely to be a synergistic Semantic Data Store fed by a popular Semantic App or Semantic Engine. My rationale is that the Semantic Data Store is where most of the semantic web intelligence will reside (dynamically), massive human input is needed to build that repository, and humans won’t put in the effort unless they personally derive some value from doing so. So the proposed recipe is to build a useful app (or more than one), collect and process all the human input collected, do this in a quick iterative fashion, and give third-party programmers some (restricted) API access to your metadata repository as a way to wet the appetites and keep feeding the metadata beast.

Twine and Open Calais are both interesting contenders, but the competition for the title of semantic champion still suffer from a certain lack of heavyweights, although the game is definitely heating up. Only one thing is sure, the value of metadata is on the rise.