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Mike Bergman recently wrote a strong defense for the Semantic Web, stating, "There have been some notable attempts of late to make elevator pitches for semantic technologies, as well as Lee Feigenbaum's recent series on Are We Asking the Wrong Question? about semantic technologies. Some have attempted to downplay semantic Web connotations entirely and to replace the pitch with Linked Data (capitalized). These are part of a history of various ways to try to make a business case around semantic

For the 7th time, I-SEMANTICS, the International Conference on Semantic Systems, took place in Graz, presenting latest research outcomes and industry-ready applications to the wider public. Co-located with I-KNOW, the 11th International Conference on Knowledge Technologies, the event proved once again that the interest in semantic information processing is high and of increasing practical relevance.

On Friday, October 14, a group of Semantic thought leaders from around the globe met with their host and colleague, Paul Miller, for the latest installment of the Semantic Link, a monthly podcast covering the world of Semantic Technologies. This episode includes a discussion about schema.org. The Semantic Link panel was joined by special guest, Ramanathan V. Guha, Google Fellow, and one of the principal people behind schema.org.

A new report from the Institute for Global Futures, Global Futures Forecast 2012, lays out the top trends that it believes will shape the coming year. It's looking ahead to a future that it says may be characterized by complex trends, accelerated change, hyper-competition, disruption, innovation and uncertainty, and that will demand a new way of operating. It recommends continuing investment in innovation in the U.S., as that is the central driver of US and global competitive advantage, and a requirement for achieving more stable growth. And it advises that organizations' leaders need to do a better job becoming long-range thinkers given that the accelerated pace of change means that the future is coming at us faster than ever before, and with change comes risk. What do such things have to do with the Semantic Web and semantic technologies? Apparently, quite a lot.

hough they're not specifically branded as such, services such as Apple's Siri , the Wolfram Alpha answer engine, and Google's new Knowledge Graph all use semantics under the hood. The Semantic Web is a movement that aims to add value and utility to online information by structuring data in a way that both computers and humans can understand. The goal: computer systems that can understand and infer meaning - for instance, a computer system that knows the difference between an "organ" that is a musical instrument, and an "organ" that lives inside your body.

The holy grail of the Semantic Web is to have intelligent agents that will be able to do all types of stuff for us, similar to what Siri is starting to do. Imagine my Semantic Web agent knows that I'll be traveling to Bonn, Germany and will make a reservation at a restaurant that it thinks that I would like and that a friend has recommended. Theoretically, this is possible if all the data on the Web was published as Linked Data. Just imagine TripIt data linked to Facebook and to DBpedia which in turn is linked to Yelp and OpenTable. My Semantic Web agent would be able to query all of this data together and pull it off.

Semantic technologies are fundamentally about knowledge representation, not data transfer. The current concept of linked data attempts to place these burdens mostly on the way data is published. While apparently "simpler" than earlier versions of the semantic Web (since linked data de-emphasizes shared vocabularies and nuanced associations), linked data places onerous burdens on how publishers express their data. Though many in the advocacy community point to the "billions" of RDF triples expressed as a success, actual consumers of linked data are rare. I know of no meaningful application or example where the consumption of linked data is an essential component. However, there are a few areas of success in linked data. DBpedia, Freebase (now owned by Google), and GeoNames have been notable in providing identifiers (URIs) for common concepts, things, entities and places. There has also been success in the biomedical community with linked data.

"Search has changed dramatically over the past year and semantic technology has been at the center of it all. Consumers increasingly expect search engines to understand natural language and perceive the intent behind the words they type in, and search engine algorithms are rising to this challenge. This evolution in search has dramatic implications for marketers, consumers, technology developers and content creators - and it's still the early days for this rapidly changing environment. Here is an overview of how search technology is changing, how these changes may affect you and what you can do to market your business more effectively in the new era of search."

Hi, I'm just starting to research semantic web, web 3.0 and RDF…  that post was building a repository of data that pointed to some good content on Semantic Web Learning. 

Semantics can enhance a broad variety of information processing - search, integration, analysis, pattern extraction and mining, discovery, situational awareness, and question-answering. Consider search: a search system that could distinguish between "Merry Christmas" as a greeting and one of the 60 or so songs named "Merry Christmas" as cataloged in MusicBrainz (a community-created music encyclopedia; http://musicbrainz.org) would have a powerful semantic search capability.

 Tim Berners Lee recognized the problematics of the messy web early on and proposed the Semantic Web to overcome messiness and apply a semantic structure to bring order (read: computer logic) in the chaos (read: human expression). Pierre Levy, French philosopher and leading expert on collective intelligence, is on a similar mission. While driven by, arguably, a similar set of goals, his approach takes a step further. The problem with Berners Lee semantic structure is that implies a universal ontology, which might prove out to be the Achilles heel of the protocol. Levy's approach overcomes these problems. Levy is currently working on a research program, called IEML (Information Economy Meta Language). IEML is a metalanguage and proposes itself as the language of collective intelligence. 

The crowning achievement of the semantc Web is the simple use of URIs to identify data. Further, if the URI identifier can resolve to a representation of that data, it now becomes an integral part of the HTTP access protocol of the Web while providing a unique identifier for the data. These innovations provide the basis for distributed data at global scale, all accessible via Web devices such as browsers and smartphones that are now a ubiquitous part of our daily lives. Yet, despite these profound and simple innovations, the semantic Web's designers and early practitioners and advocates have been mired in a muddled, metaphysical argument of at least a decade over what these URIs mean, what they reference, and what their actual true identity is. These muddles about naming and identity, it might be argued, are due to computer scientists and programmers trying to grapple with issues more properly the domain of philosophers and linguists. But that would be unfair. For philosophers and linguists themselves have for centuries also grappled with these same conundrums [1]. As I argue in this piece, part of the muddle results from attempting to do too much with URIs while another part results from not doing enough. I am also not trying to directly enter the fray of current standards deliberations. (Despite a decade of controversy, I optimistically believe that the messy process of argument and consensus building will work itself out [2].) What I am trying to do in this piece, however, is to look to one of America's pre-eminent philosophers and logicians, Charles Sanders Peirce (pronounced "purse"), to inform how these controversies of naming, identity and meaning may be dissected and resolved.

A new language, S3QL has been published for controlled semantic integration of life sciences data.

Dr. Bernhard Haslhofer works as instructor on Web Information Systems at Cornell Information Science. Just recently he gave a course which examined technologies for building data-centric information systems on the World Wide Web. Semantic Web Company (SWC) had the opportunity to talk with Dr. Haslhofer to examine the question "How to teach Linked Data?".

Mike Bergman presents an overview geared to laypersons for why semantic technologies make the best choice for knowledge applications

Ontologies are to the Open Semantic Framework what humans were to the Mechanical Turk. The hidden human in the Mechanical Turk was orchestrating all and every chess move. However, to the observers, the automated chess machine was looking just like it: a new kind of intelligent machine. We were in 1770.

The opening keynote sessions at SemTech this week made one thing abundantly clear: Semantic technology is for business, and it's time to start putting it in practice there.

A new search engine allows users to search for good news. According to the article, "Jurriaan Kamp editor of Ode Magazine in San Francisco has created a new search engine. Ode Wire, available here in its beta form uses semantic search technology to spot optimism on the web, and delivers users news stories from an 'uplifting' angle.

While there may not be a semantic application that can go to work on every issue that requires grappling with Big Data, it certainly has a role to play in many of them. Throw out outliers such as using power grid data to optimize power distribution, and "the lion's share of big data problems are semantic problems," says Dachis Group CTO Erik Huddleston.

"Silk is an app for the web that helps you collect, sort and view the information that you need without making you comb through the data yourself. It also allows content creators to provide their content in a more structured manner on the web. This is an app that will allow you to better navigate the semantic web seas, also known as Web 3.0."