It seems like it is a daily dose of semantic web on the tech blogs of late. Today it was Textwise’s Million Dollar Semantic Hacker Challenge and a few days ago it was Yahoo opening their search platform to support a wide variety of semantic web standards. This has lead to a good bit of proselytizing, mostly in the comments, that this heralds the arrival of the Semantic Web, or Web 3.0 or the Next Generation Web. All of which sounds like the circling of the marketing band wagons.

Unfortunately when the wagons circle everything starts picking up the label – in this case semantic. This is especially dangerous when you have a word like “semantics” that can be defined, so many different ways. Just look at the definition tree created by Wikipedia:

*Semantics is the study of meaning in communication.
*In computer science semantics reflects the meaning of programs or functions.
*The Semantic Web refers to the extension of the World Wide Web through the embedding of additional semantic metadata

More often I see folks labeling things semantic that are really syntax. “Syntax” being the rules to construct and define something like a sentence or line of code and “semantics” the meaning of those rules or definitions. Syntax is fairly easy and semantics are fairly hard, as most folks in artificial intelligence would argue. Even going so far as saying all programming languages other than LISP are syntax and not semantic.

This is a bit more clear with an example. Lets take the Textwise announcement – a technology that will parse plain text on a website or elsewhere and categorizes it to predefined topics. One example in the Techcrunch comments was the following:

input text:
Call us crazy, but we think there are some brilliant minds out there that can find some really amazing uses for this incredibly powerful and scalable technology. Think you’re up to the Challenge? We think you are!

categories (ranked from 0 (worst) to 100 (best)):
Shopping/Health/Alternative/Hypnotherapy/Audio_and_Video 43 Business/Telecommunications/Services/Wireless/Software 33 Arts/Music/Bands_and_Artists/311/Tablature 28
Computers/Internet/Consultants/Research 26 Shopping/Health/Alternative/Meditation/Audio_and_Video 25

The output is really not telling me anything about the meaning of the text just setting up rules to provide categorization. So I would definitely put this in the syntax and not semantic category. I would also say what Yahoo! is doing is really more syntax than semantics although there is the possibility of building truly semantic technologies on top of what they are enabling. They’ve created a set of rules based on rich standards to allow applications to be built. Remains to be seen what will come of it, but in rush of market buzz I think it is easy to miss that building truly semantic technologies is quite hard. Some folks in AI (the Chinese room) would argue machines are not even capable of semantic meaning or understanding.

From this perspective I think we’ll see a lot of people building applications based on syntax that reorganize and categorize content by giving the “page web” a bit of structure. Oddly its like we’ve gone full circle back to DMOZ. While these technologies may be clever and useful I do not think they will fundamentally change the Web. In the other category I think we’ll see a few companies pushing towards something more sophisticated (call it a semantic, implicit, computational web) where new data and services are mixed with existing web content to provide answers to users questions.

Popularity: 15% [?]

After coming across Freebase’s blog post about using their data for map generation I thought it would be fun to dig in a little deeper. According to the post Jamie Taylor of Freebase teamed up with Jonathan Lowe of GisWebsite. A very clever pairing and I’m interested to see the final results.

In the mean time a bit of hypothesizing. From the photo -

It looks like they are using Jonathan’s Giswebsite platform which looks to be a combination of UMN’s Mapserver and probably PostGIS. From the post all the data on the map comes from Freebase, so we can infer that Freebase is support polygons, points, and most likely polylines. This alone is great to see because it means that Freebase geo-support is for more than just lat/long features. A little digging on Freebase itself confirms this. On Jonathan’s data “types” page there are schemas for:

# FeatureCollection,
# Feature,
# GeometryCollection,
# Box,
# MultiPolygon,
# MultiLineString,
# MultiPoint,
# Polygon,
# LineString

Of these only “polygon” and “linestring” had descriptions and examples. For instance when you click on polygon you get a set of results for mostly commons and ponds in the UK, which look much like this result for “Eagle Pond“. Lots of possibilities in this framework, and we are beginning to see some simple and effective ones implemented already – like this mashup up buildings by famous architects pulled from Freebase. Look forward to learning more when it is presented at Where 2.0.

Popularity: 7% [?]

We came across a small blurb in the MIT news today about the release of “MIT GeoWeb”

“… a new interface to the MIT Geodata Repository, enables users to access Geographic Information Systems (GIS) data, once accessible only in ArcGIS, through a standard web browser.”

The MIT GeoWeb provides a Google Maps interface to their extensive repository of geodata in shapefile format. In short you can search the MIT repository of data by geographic region, keyword or browse, then visualize the file that you find on Google Maps in the same browser. If you like what you find you can check out the metadata and/or download the shapefile. While the user interface is not the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen it looks to be effective with has a nice array of data you can browse. The quick visualization of lines, points and polygons is also a very nice feature.

On the downside you can’t click on the data rendered in Google Maps to see the information behind it. You also can’t download the data in a file format other than shapefile, so accessing the data is still restricted to GIS applications. Although the biggest kicker is to access to the application at all you have to be a MIT student or employee. That puts a bit of a damper on the whole thing, but still a clever implementation further pushing the frontier of open data access.

There is a nice screencast of the application here.

Popularity: 11% [?]

Chris Spagnuolo’s GeoScrum posts results from the 2008 Agile Adoption in GIS survey. The survey found that 32% of organizations had adopted agile practices, but 68% said they had not. This compares to 69% of the mainstream development world that has adopted agile practices according to Scott Ambler’s survey asking the same question in 2007.

Windows Vista does not like the idea of portable GIS, at least according to Jo Cook at Archaeogeek.

A recent article in FCW caught the eye of James Fee, who discusses the idea of “open GIS” for the U.S. Navy.

Remixing web maps as demonstrated by Into the Pudding.

Some “really cool news maps” are shown by Contentious.com, highlighting maps that mix storytelling and information from National Geographic and some local cities.

Platial News and Neogeography gives us the 2007 winners of Movement Mappers, an award designed to highlight users who use social tools to do important work and spread critical messages, making it easier for people to make life-changing decisions.

Popularity: 7% [?]