Semantic Tools: Giving Meaning to Online Publishing
Whether Tim Berner Lee's vision of the Semantic Web in its entirety will be realized is one question, but the range of Semantic tools now available to end users and software providers continues to expand. In the online publishing and search sphere there are a collection of products and initiatives that continue to drive aspects of this vision.
Nstein (recently acquired by Opentext) can employ semantic technologies such as RDF to automatically tag content with Semantic meta data. Meta data is defined as data about data, whereas Semantic meta data gives context to content. Business publishers and news publishers such as Proquest and News Intl are current customers, both with healthy investment budgets that reflect the critical nature of providing real time salable information.
For those without a large budget they can dip their toes in creating Semantic content by using the Open Calais service, hosted and maintained by business publishers Thomson Reuters. It allows users to upload content which will then have rich semantic meta data extracted from it, analysing it and finding relevant entities using a combination of methods including natural language processing (NLP). The web service is free for commercial and non-commercial use, so it provides an interesting gateway for content producers to experiment with Semantic tagging and then integrate it into their content.
An interesting new search engine has now been moved out of Beta. Yebol says that it uses the Amazon cloud, to build "a knowledge base for about 10 million concepts over 1 billion web pages." Their target is next to build "a knowledge base of 100 million concepts over 10 billion web pages" The search results page is certainly visually attractive and returns intelligent results including everything from tweets to dictionary definitions. It's early, but it looks a competitor to the power of Google, as it seeks to leapfrog keyword search by returning relevant and contextual results.
Elsewhere companies that seek to deliver the Artificial Intelligence component of the Semantic web such as Cyccorp, continue to evolve their product base. They offer a number of Semantic middleware solutions based on a human knowledge database that contains facts, assertions and the relationships between them.
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