At ReadWriteWeb, we look for more commercial Web apps - whether they be consumer or enterprise. So here are 5 of those we'd like to see emerge and/or grow during 2009:
Microsoft makes a very bold play with Powerset technology and starts to challenge Google in search (despite Google's attempts to use semantic web technology, we'd love Microsoft to ramp it up in search - competition is good for consumers!).
Semantic Web advertising apps for publishers - we have our eye on Dapper MashupAds in this sector, but we'd like to see others take up this challenge too.
Semantic apps for managing your finances - makes connections between transactions, things that you wouldn't normally pick up.
Semantic apps for health industry - there are many opportunities here, but in general there is much the Semantic Web could do to organize the maze of data in the health indsutry.
A Personalized Memetracker - Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera would be astonished if this happens, but we'd love to see a product that can give a Techmeme-like organization and layout to one's RSS feeds. So at a glance, you can see which stories in your own set of RSS feeds are hot and who's linking to them. Whether Semantic Web technology can achieve that, we don't know ;-)
Zoltán Andrejkovics, who suggested this topic, is a PhD student at Corvinus University of Budapest and his 5 wishes as a researcher are:
Smart notes; easy to find/browse notes, using NLP search.
Smart RSS; automatic article-collecting app based on my own interests.
Mind writing; using not only words, but "thought" objects, that the NLP engine puts into words.
Assistant; "my mirror", learns from my words, behavior on the net, and supports my work, handles calendar, etc.
Smart bookmarks; works like smart notes.
david derouen on 21 Jun 09By Ralph Nader & Carl J. Mayer New York Times, April 9, 1988 Our constitutional rights were intended for real persons, not artificial creations. The Framers knew about corporations but chose not to mention these contrived entities in the Constitution. For them, the document shielded living beings from arbitrary government and endowed them with the right to speak, assemble, and petition. Today, however, corporations enjoy virtually the same umbrella of constitutional protections as individuals do. They have become in effect artificial persons with infinitely greater power than humans. This constitutional equivalence must end. Consider a few noxious developments during the last 10 years. A group of large Boston companies invoked the First Amendment in order to spend lavishly and thus successfully defeat a referendum that would have permitted the legislature to enact a progressive income tax that had no direct effect on the property and business of these companies. An Idaho electrical and plumbing corporation cited the Fourth Amendment and deterred a health and safety investigation. A textile supply company used Fifth Amendment protections and barred retrial in a criminal anti-trust case in Texas. The idea that the Constitution should apply to corporations as it applies to humans had its dubious origins in 1886. The Supreme Court said it did "not wish to hear argument" on whether corporations were "persons" protected by the 14th Amendment, a civil rights amendment designed to safeguard newly emancipated blacks from unfair government treatment. It simply decreed that corporations were persons. Now that is judicial activism. A string of later dissents, by Justices Hugo Black and William O. Douglas, demonstrated that neither the history nor the language of the 14th Amendment was meant to protect corporations. But it was too late. The genie was out of the bottle and the corporate evolution into personhood was under way. It was not until the 1970's that corporations
