Linked Data, Web 3.0 and the Semantic Web

Some exciting things have been happening on the Web. One of them you're probably already familiar with: the so-called "Web 2.0" revolution with the growth of blogging, wikis, tagging spaces and social networking. However, somewhat in the background another set of technologies, has been growing, and even the Web 2.0 crowd is starting to take notice. In the past year, a number of startups have been becoming increasingly successful and visible in the Web world. These companies include Metaweb, which builds Freebase, "an open, shared database of the world's knowledge," Powerset, a semantic search company which was recently acquired by Microsoft for a reported S100M, Radar Networks, whose Twine tool is billed as a means to "leverage and contribute to the collective intelligence of your friends, colleagues, groups and teams." Using similar technologies, others in the space include Garlik, a UK company working on the control of personal information on the Web, Joost, an online television provider, and Talis, a company focused on tools to make data "available to share, remix and reuse." There are many more, and the theme that emerges from all of these is the use of "semantic" technologies to bring new functionality to such Web staples as search, social networking, multimedia sharing, and many more. Further, some of the really big players such as Oracle, Microsoft and IBM, all of which are starting to support tools in this technology space. In short, there is clearly something happening in this area, and it's starting to generate a growing wave of attention. What is happening is that a new set of Web technologies appears to be transitioning from toys and demos to tools and applications. Basically, a new bloom of Web applications, which New York Times reporter John Markoff called "Web 3.0," have started to come to the public's attention. Companies like the ones mentioned above, and many more, are taking advantage of years of development behind the scenes, and it looks like the technology is beginning to transition through that knee in the curve. The Semantic Web, the technology that powers these new applications, is starting to be realized and there is a growing excitement in the commercialization of what, till now, has been a slowly expanding wave of activity. These companies are combining the Web data resources, standard languages, ever-better tools and (mostly simple) ontologies into new applications that exploit the power of this new breed of semantic technologies. The entrepreneurs behind these efforts are able to take advantage of the covergence of Semantic Web capabilities to embed small amounts of reasoning into large-scale Webapps, with exciting potential. This talk will explore these new technologies and some of the emerging areas of excitement.