This post was written by Liz Brady
Ahead of Semantic Technology Conference, Powerset announced the public availability of a service that adds a whole new dimension to searching for information from Wikipedia. Whilst much of the functionality has been visible to those granted access to the company’s Powerlabs for some time, the Powerset team has clearly been busy optimizing code and ensuring that the various components work together much better. Powerset places much store by their ability to ‘read and extract meaning’ from a user’s query; and from the resources that they are searching. Although today’s beta is targeted at articles from Wikipedia, Powerset’s ambitions are obviously larger.
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5min has announced its VideoSeed semantic syndication platform for instructional and knowledge video programming now reaches more than 110 million unique users a month via its vast network of comprehensive knowledge and information syndication partner sites. 5min pairs brand advertising with tens of thousands of professionally-produced, niche-specific “how-to” titles produced and licensed from hundreds of content partners for semantic delivery via the VideoSeed platform. 5min has closed syndication deals with horizontal sites such as Answers.com, wikiHow, Wikia and Articlesbase as well as vertical sites including Tim Carter’s Ask the Builder, Recipe4Living and Pregnancy.org.
Franz Inc. has released version 3.0 of AllegroGraph, the industry’s first RDF database that combines very efficient geospatial data capabilities, temporal reasoning and social network analytics for storing and querying billions of RDF statements. The demand for new RDF databases is expanding rapidly with the growth of social networks, the emergence of the Semantic Web (3.0) and as companies seek more sophisticated tools to help them take advantage of their existing unstructured knowledge. AllegroGraph offers solutions for customers to address the challenge of storing and combining unstructured and structured data for new Web 3.0 style applications as well as new types of Business Intelligence for the Enterprise. Jans Aasman, CEO of Franz, said
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.
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.
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.
Expert System has released two semantic Web products in the U.S., COGITO Monitor and COGITO Focus. COGITO Monitor is a semantic-based analyzer of consumer opinions and sentiment from online forums and blogs. It searches throughout the Web, measuring and graphing ‘customers’ feedback about your companies’ products and services. On the other hand, COGITO Focus is a semantic indexing, search and analysis tool that manages strategic internal and external information.
Radar Networks has recently launched Twine, an application that organizes information and connects people, places, companies, products, Web pages, videos and photos. Along with Metaweb’s Freebase, Powerset, Hakia, Reuters’ Calias, AdaptiveBlue and a few other start-ups, Radar Networks is trying to crack the code on building a piece of the semantic Web. Twine attempts to build a “semantic graph” of relationships between content, tags, people and Twines (the collection of items of an individual or group on the service). Radar Networks CEO Nova Spivack said that each piece of content is a “semantic object” that uses Twine’s underlying ontology and database, which applies semantic technologies such as RDF for storing data.