No, no, I haven’t
disappeared, in spite of my promise of resuming this blog back in January. In
the past few months, I have devoted most of my time and efforts to the start-up
I work at. The good news, I think it is coming together nicely. We have gone
through a rebranding effort to align ourselves with our market, and are now named Primal Fusion. How do you like it? The bad news is, we are still
stealth, so I can’t do much more than direct you to the nice logo on our website for now. But no worries, this is all in line with our plan and timeline, and as things progress we hope to be out of stealth pretty soon.
So, as you can imagine, I
have learned quite a bit about the semantic web and some other adjacent spaces
during all that time: there is so much I want to talk about here, but I’ll try to
stay focused! The big thing is that the semantic web has come a long way in those past few months,
and it now looks close to reaching a tipping point, with much increased public
recognition and a landmark announcement by Sir Tim Berners-Lee that it’s now “open
for business”.
In that respect, I was recently invited by Paul Miller of Talis to participate
in the “Semantic Web Gang”, a group of discussion on the semantic web. Both a
great honor and a terrific experience. For our first podcast, we commented on the readiness of the semantic web. You can find it here on Paul Miller's blog. And more information here on ZdNet.
It is also syndicated on ReadWriteTalk.
We are to repeat the experience monthly, and I will announce our new podcasts on this blog, so do subscribe to the RSS feed if you want to be kept posted. Note: due to vacations, I won't make the next podcast, but I should be back for the one in May.
So what did I learn during that podcast? Well, all of us around the virtual table seemed to agree that the technologies on which to build the semantic web have
reached the “1.0” stage. Sure, they will continue to evolve dramatically
in the coming months and years in response to market needs, but the point is: the initial
foundations are in place. What is needed now is for those technologies to be leveraged
further into compelling value propositions for mainstream end users. The recent
Yahoo announcement about the incorporation of semantic metadata into their search
engine certainly is a key milestone in that direction, and towards a truly “self-organizing”
web as TechCrunch put it nicely.
There was also the increased openness of Twine, which points to the birth of a
mainstream semantic web application, “at last”. Not all is perfect, Twine was
welcome with some disappointed reviews, mostly regarding the investment it
takes to extract real value from the application.
And so were Hakia and Powerset.
Yet there is now an optimistic feel that the move towards the semantic, “implicit”,
“shadow” web, has become unstoppable. All that is needed for these sparkles
to ignite into a full-blown blaze seems to be THE killer value proposition.
I’d bet that the winning
application is going to look a lot like a virtual machete and a map. With all
the metadata that is going to be generated as a result of the “semantization”
of the web, it looks as if the world of information is about to turn way denser.
If you liked the forest, get ready for the jungle!
