The Rising Stars of the Semantic Web (SemTech2008 Keynote Panel)
Here's my verbatim-ish transcription of the keynote at the Semantic Technology Conference in San Jose: The Rising Stars of the Semantic Web.
Powerset (Dr. Barney Pell, founder & CTO)
Powerset is organizing and indexing content from Wikipedia and Freebase. First query is Henry VIII. For topical queries, Powerset provides a dossier of. Factz: automatically extracted triples from across Wikipedia articles. For a famous person like Henry VIII, there are assertions all over Wikipedia about Henry VIII. Second query: what did the fda approve? Powerset doesn’t have any special domain knowledge (English history or medicine) that allows it to pull out information from text. Search results are taking advantage of both semantic features and traditional search features. Now off to articles: Tim Berners-Lee. Powerset republishes Wikipedia articles with some additional features, like the Article Ouline that follows you as you browse. By looking at the Explore Factz, you can see all of the concepts in the page and the relations. Clicking on a concept shows all of the Factz in the Article Outline. Final query: what did tom cruise star in? An NL query translated into a Freebase query, which shows all of the movies that Tom Cruise starred in.
AdaptiveBlue (Alex Iskold, founder & CEO)
A network on top of the existing Web. Basic bits of the web are understood by AB’s technology, e.g. books, stocks, addresses, etc. Stop visualizing the Web as a collection of pages but as a collection of things. For example, "The Kite Runner" may show up on both Amazon and Barnes&Noble.com, but they both refer to the same book. Why is this different? Bringing semantics to the Web as it exists now, not creating a new semantic Web. This allows the content to evolve with the Web itself. Two primary products are BlueOrganizer (a browser plug-in) and SmartLinks (semantic improvements to links on your blog).
Twine by Radar Networks (Nova Spivack, founder & CEO)
Actually this was a video made by a high school student who is now an intern at Radar Networks. The video is to the tune of Radar Love and a fast-paced tour through Twine. Unfortunately, there was so much going on that my limited human brain couldn't absorb it all: making new Twines, e-mailing things to a Twine, adding Google videos to Twine, history of video games, oh my! Kids these days. They just click them mice and keyboardz so fast. Video ends with "Twine: How have we lived without it."
Talis (Ian Davis, CTO and creator of RSS 1.0)
Privately owned, well-established and innovative software company that's been around for 40 years,> all of the other companies on the panel combined. Talis wants to be critical infrastructure to the semantic Web, such as applications for libraries, education, learning and community.
Stealth-Company.com (Tom Gruber, CTO and founder)
No particular product to pitch ('cause they're still a stealth company). The killer app isn't search, maps, e-mail, videos, etc. It's intelligent design that brings together all of that cool stuff. The iPhone is an example of this. The killer app is your life (online): applying the best of the internet technologies (intelligently) to your life. It's closer than we think (um gottes willen). Paradigm shift. Paradigm 1 is the hyperlink (user finds links, computer connects). Paradigm 2 is the portal (user chooses your channels, computer delivers). Paradigm 3 is the search engine (user states the query, computer finds relevant documents). But why do we need to find the "magic" words to find what we want? The next level will anticipate our needs. I'm anticipating Stealth Company!
Q&A Session
Powerset (Dr. Barney Pell, founder & CTO)
Powerset is organizing and indexing content from Wikipedia and Freebase. First query is Henry VIII. For topical queries, Powerset provides a dossier of. Factz: automatically extracted triples from across Wikipedia articles. For a famous person like Henry VIII, there are assertions all over Wikipedia about Henry VIII. Second query: what did the fda approve? Powerset doesn’t have any special domain knowledge (English history or medicine) that allows it to pull out information from text. Search results are taking advantage of both semantic features and traditional search features. Now off to articles: Tim Berners-Lee. Powerset republishes Wikipedia articles with some additional features, like the Article Ouline that follows you as you browse. By looking at the Explore Factz, you can see all of the concepts in the page and the relations. Clicking on a concept shows all of the Factz in the Article Outline. Final query: what did tom cruise star in? An NL query translated into a Freebase query, which shows all of the movies that Tom Cruise starred in.
AdaptiveBlue (Alex Iskold, founder & CEO)
A network on top of the existing Web. Basic bits of the web are understood by AB’s technology, e.g. books, stocks, addresses, etc. Stop visualizing the Web as a collection of pages but as a collection of things. For example, "The Kite Runner" may show up on both Amazon and Barnes&Noble.com, but they both refer to the same book. Why is this different? Bringing semantics to the Web as it exists now, not creating a new semantic Web. This allows the content to evolve with the Web itself. Two primary products are BlueOrganizer (a browser plug-in) and SmartLinks (semantic improvements to links on your blog).
Twine by Radar Networks (Nova Spivack, founder & CEO)
Actually this was a video made by a high school student who is now an intern at Radar Networks. The video is to the tune of Radar Love and a fast-paced tour through Twine. Unfortunately, there was so much going on that my limited human brain couldn't absorb it all: making new Twines, e-mailing things to a Twine, adding Google videos to Twine, history of video games, oh my! Kids these days. They just click them mice and keyboardz so fast. Video ends with "Twine: How have we lived without it."
Talis (Ian Davis, CTO and creator of RSS 1.0)
Privately owned, well-established and innovative software company that's been around for 40 years,> all of the other companies on the panel combined. Talis wants to be critical infrastructure to the semantic Web, such as applications for libraries, education, learning and community.
Stealth-Company.com (Tom Gruber, CTO and founder)
No particular product to pitch ('cause they're still a stealth company). The killer app isn't search, maps, e-mail, videos, etc. It's intelligent design that brings together all of that cool stuff. The iPhone is an example of this. The killer app is your life (online): applying the best of the internet technologies (intelligently) to your life. It's closer than we think (um gottes willen). Paradigm shift. Paradigm 1 is the hyperlink (user finds links, computer connects). Paradigm 2 is the portal (user chooses your channels, computer delivers). Paradigm 3 is the search engine (user states the query, computer finds relevant documents). But why do we need to find the "magic" words to find what we want? The next level will anticipate our needs. I'm anticipating Stealth Company!
Q&A Session
- "What is the best opportunity that would get you a quote from Carla Thompson in the New York Times"
- Nova - unsexy=a store of trillions of triples sexy=x-rated "sementic" application
- Alex - intersection of iPhone and the semantic Web, i.e. an application that understands your contexts as you move around
- Tom - "the interface" companies need to address basic human needs.
- Ian - similar answer to above. Concrete example: something around travel.
- Barney - search advertising and publishing.
- "Once you get Carla's attention, what do you do next. How do you get to Gartner, Jupiter, and Forrester to notice?"
- Alex - 2008 is the year of the semantic web, with or without Garner.
- Barney - "I think it's perfectly adequate that Guidewire is here: we don't need Gartner." A big question is: what is the category that we're creating? For example, what happens when we're able to join different pieces of content. . . new interface paradigms. . . new ways of consuming information. 2 or 3 categories will be created by the time of this conference next year. "This conference next year will be twice the size and half of the companies will be consumer companies."
- Nova - these firms don't think of "semantic web" as a space. They just want to know how it's going to help the categories that they already track. Maybe the name "semantic web" isn't really a good term anyway, since there are so many different companies, products, and underlying technologies. Big analysts are playing catch-up. The people in this room should define the category and educate the market.
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Thanks,
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Posted by: Sam | September 19, 2008 at 07:18 AM