This post was written by Liz Brady
Semantic Universe and Cerebra have joined forces to create the Semantic Universe Network, a vibrant online community and communications hub for the global semantic technology marketplace. The Semantic Universe Network will be the professional and educational resource for the people, companies, editorial content, events, products, advertising, research and initiatives within the high-growth semantics sector. The Network will be developed and deployed on a sophisticated semantic application platform to facilitate the highest level of user engagement, contextual relevancy and editorial resource matching.
hakia, the Web’s leading semantic search engine, has launched its Syndication Web Services for Web sites and businesses looking to offer semantic search to their visitors. hakia’s Syndication Web Services deliver the same core semantic technology that powers hakia’s award winning search engine, along with many other applications suitable for portals, search engine marketing firms, mobile applications and document management systems. The services provide an XML feed, and options to customize the feed. hakia offers 30,000 searches per day free of charge and free of advertising that is available to early adopters until the partners’ quota is filled.
Thomson Reuters has revealed enterprise options for its Open Calais web service. Open Calais sends website content to the service, which scans it for keywords and patterns, and meta-tags it automatically. The service goes beyond simple entity identification, and offers semantic metadata by identifying facts and events in context. Open Calais was well received at its launch as a step forward for the semantic web, and Thomson Reuters started developing a commercial version. It can be typically applied in newspapers to automatically create tag clouds around different articles to provide a related article capability.
Radar Networks has announced the 1.0 product launch and general availability of Twine. Twine helps users keep up with their interests, together with friends, family, colleagues and groups. Twine has enjoyed a very successful private beta program, which began in March, 2008. Twine connects users to relevant content, products and people that match their interests, by leveraging the “wisdom of crowds” and next-generation Semantic Web technologies. Twine is the first of a new breed of software; using semantic-based technology. Twine enriches the content within the network to automatically make useful connections and recommendations to users.
Salesforce.com has initiated the platform-as-a-service concept, which company Chairman/CEO Marc Benioff also called Web 3.0, during an event that emphasized deployments of enterprise applications in the cloud. With platform-as-a-service, called Force.com, developers can deploy enterprise applications on-demand without having to provide infrastructure. According to Benioff, although the concept of platform as a service is relatively new, it has already gained traction.
Semanti has offered its new SemantiFind browser plug-in that enables the users of search engines like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft to leverage semantic technologies in order to get better search results. The free tool, sitting on the browser as a toolbar, can help users to almost bookmark the web pages which they find useful. Semanti, thus, joins TigerLogic and Gogimon in the league of software providers looking to enhance research results from search engines with the help of a browser add-on. The difference is that SemantiFind employs semantic search to augment the activity for the Web sites ranked by users useful with one click.
On The Christian Science Monitor, Chris Gaylord says that till now, Ask Jeeves? search engine, which had branded itself as the web’s trusty maître d’ where you can type in your query in the form of a question – and Jeeves suggested where you could find an answer, was the best way to find your answer. But now, the Powerset startup website actually reads what you wrote. The search engine encourages you to write the way you speak, and then uses your phrasing to search entries in Wikipedia. Powerset is an early player in what’s called “semantic search” and Gaylord tells surfers to expect a lot more of these natural-language options to come.
Peer39, a technology company based in New York City, launched a new advertising product, SemanticMatch™ that provides the ability to serve ads based on the meaning of a website page’s content. Unlike contextual targeting which matches ads to pre-selected keywords, SemanticMatch™ uses proprietary algorithms that can glean content meaning and sentiment down to the page level. In addition, unlike behavioral targeting ad methods, SemanticMatch doesn’t need to track user behavior or place cookies, so if effective, this product may be very attractive to advertisers and publishers who want to avoid growing privacy concerns about online advertising.