Wednesday, January 28, 2009

State of the Semantic Web

Danny Ayers, a well known Semantic Web developer, has the first of a three-part article on the state of the semantic web in the latest issue of IEEE Internet Computing.
Danny Ayers, "Delivered Deliverables: The State of the Semantic Web, Part 1," IEEE Internet Computing, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 86-89, Jan./Feb. 2009.
He writes in the Nodalities blog:
"Well finally I got around to starting this write-up, and the first instalment has appeared in the excellent IEEE Internet Computing. I foolishly thought I’d be able to cover the main ground in one column, now it seems like I’ll need at least three. In Delivered Deliverables I look mostly at the output of the W3C. The provisional plan is to cover infrastructure & backend tools in part two (with comments of the notion of linked data), and move on to real-world applications in part three. Suggestions are very much welcome."
It's a good summary of the standards that have been developed by the W3C to support the Semantic Web.

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Semantics-Empowered Social Computing

Here's another interesting looking article from the current issue of IEEE Internet Computing.

Amit Sheth and Meenakshi Nagarajan, Semantics-Empowered Social Computing, IEEE Internet Computing, v13n1, 2 pp 76-80, 2009.
"User-generated textual content on social media has unique characteristics owing to the interpersonal and interactional nature of the communication medium. Web 3.0 applications that aim to automatically create accurate annotations from user-generated content to common reference models will have to invariably deal with the informal nature of this content. In this article, the authors discuss opportunities in addressing challenges posed by this content by supplementing traditional statistical and NLP techniques with domain knowledge."

Semantic Email Addressing

The current issue of IEEE Internet Computing has an article titled Semantic Email Addressing: The Semantic Web Killer App? by Michael Kassoff, Charles Petrie, Lee-Ming Zen, and Michael Genesereth.
"Email addresses, like telephone numbers, are opaque identifiers. They’re often hard to remember, and, worse still, they change from time to time. Semantic email addressing (SEA) lets users send email to a semantically specified group of recipients. It provides all of the functionality of static email mailing lists, but because users can maintain their own profiles, they don’t need to subscribe, unsubscribe, or change email addresses. Because of its targeted nature, SEA could help combat unintentional spam and preserve the privacy of email addresses and even individual identities."
You can get the full pdf here.