i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

I don't know much about Kwaga (http://kwaga.com/) except that it's a tool that performs semantic analysis on your Gmail in order to fill your calendar with dates, remind you to follow up when someone hasn't replied quickly enough, and warn you if there are passwords or other sensitive strings in a message.  None of this should disturb me--after all, mail is inherently insecure--and yet there is something unsettling to me here.  It runs your Inbox through its servers to do the semantic analysis, although it assures you that it would never share any of your email statistics.  T

Can't believe I didn't know about this site before: http://metavid.org/wiki/

It allows you to search video of members' speeches before Congress with some interesting features. In addition to searching by keyword (I think through transcripts, which are provided by Congress), date, speaker, category (setting off 202 alarms), bill name/number, there are also some featured semantic queries.

"The odds an adult believes there is a chance that Elvis Presley is still alive are 1 in 12.5". Answer to, is Elvis Presley alive? Website called "book of odds" is answering questions like these using semantic search. Its about applying semantic technology to simpler much simpler problem. Read further details in follwing article:

http://boston.bizjournals.com/boston/stories/2009/10/12/daily23.html

Book of Odds: http://www.bookofodds.com/

 I was looking up Reommind, one of the companies at the career fair from yesterday, and low and behold they have a software platform offering automatic categorization of enterprise documents based on context as their stored.  hmmm this sounds an awful lot like semantic classification to me. 

Check it out: http://www.recommind.com/technology/core

Coding Horror, one of my favorite blogs, has an article on Xanadu, a vaporware software project envisoned by Ted Nelson in 1963 and still not quite in beta.

In the essay "Three Tweets for the Web" for the Wilson Center's Wilson Quarterly, Tyler Cowen considers how the web has truncated our cultural output and our attention spans. One example he gives is how the LP has become the iTunes single. He argues that the way we pull together our personal information streams from the vast array of resources, both online and offline, is a unique expression of who we are.

Hakia is a company that uses semantic search, taking into account word context and a hiearchy of categories that a search term might fall into.  Supposedly Microsoft's Bing's category designations are based on Hakia.  The company also recently (about a month ago) came out with a commercial ontology product called Contexa to help advertisers better connect with relavent web content.

 According to this article, it looks like there is some movement on creating a semantic web search, though the article writer seems a bit skeptical of its ability to deliver. T2 (a new project by the makers of Twine), which may come out by the end of the year, is hoping to index the top few dozen sites in major categories. Interestingly, T2 will be adding the semantic tags, not the owners of the sites themselves.

... though are we willing to keep the "Web x.0" terminology alive?

 In this blog post from 2007, Time Berners Lee describes how the semantic web is the next step in the evolution of the Internet. The paper that we read for class focused more on applications and the ontologies and agents they depended on. The blog post looks at it from a different perspective.