September 2009 - Industry News

When a client wanted to dip their toes in the semantic web, Rick Jelliffe found himself taking a fresh look at the RDF from the project angle. After checking out several angles, it seemed that the kind of RDF information that was suitable for this project was, in effect, little different from that in ISO Topic Maps: linking pages or sections to topics.

The increased flow of information delivered by social media and what some are calling the Real-Time Web is having an impact that is hard to ignore. However, there is a great need for intelligent extraction of this information in order to realize its inherent value.

W3C has announced the new RDB2RDF Working Group, whose mission is to standardize a language for mapping relational data and relational database schemas into RDF and OWL, which is entatively called the RDB2RDF Mapping Language, R2RML.

Matt Rebeiro, of British social media agency *RMM, reviews a talk by Tim Berners-Lee who discussed the origins and future of the world wide web and in doing so pushed the notion of bringing far more data online.

Peter Nicholson argues, in his “Information-rich and Attention Poor” article, that it has become very inexpensive to produce “knowledge” and as a result very expensive to analyze the mass amount of content that is produced.

Predicting how the Semantic Web will take form in cutting-edge enterprises is a topic that's beginning to see more robust debate.  In the past 12 months, it's moved away from being conceptual to the introduction of viable applications.  The major push seems to be around the ability to put words into context.

The immediacy of a communication channel such as Twitter is a fundamental characteristic of the real-time Web. Because of the demand quite a bit of effort is being made on storing, slicing, dicing, and disseminating information as quickly as possible which means the velocity of information within the Web data system has just increased by an order of magnitude.