MMMeeja

The semantic web starting to make progress with new, useful applications appearing everyday.Add to that Microsoft’s purchase of Powerset hitting the headlines and you can bet that you will need to know about semantic technologies before long.

We’re here to help get you started with this run-down of really useful tools.

The Operator Firefox Extension

Operator is a Firefox extension that adds a toolbar allowing you to explore the microfomats and semantic data embedded in any web page as you surf.

Surfing with Operator is really eye opening as it brings attention to just how much semantic data is already out there on the web, Technorati tags, blog author names, friend lists, feed subscriptions are common and often marked up with the right tags.

Freebase Semantic Database

Freebase provides a database of over 4 million topics, all semantically labelled and accessible through a comprehesive API. The API is REST-based and uses MQL to structure query requests.

One of the greatest features of Freebase is that users can add their own ontologies (or topics), so if you have a load of data that you want to share and make discoverable, you can do so via a bulk upload. Then combining your data with that already present in Freebase is straight-forward.

Semantic Hacker

Semantic Hacker caused controversy when they announced a competition to find the best use of their API with a prize of a measly million dollars!

Leaving the competition aside, their API will take unstructured text (or web pages) and attempt to classify them by placing them into categories that roughly match up to the DMoz directory categories. Their Bayesian algorithm is pretty well-trained and gives good results even when fed web pages that contain irrelevant information like adverts, menus and copyright notices.

Semantic Search Engines

There are a number of search engines providing search facilities for semantic data. SWSE searches RDF data on the web and has a SPARQL search API.

Yahoo also have plans to provide search for the semantic web and have a research project already available online. When this matures and gets customised using their new BOSS technology, it should be a rich platform for developers.

Intellidimension also offer a semantic web search engine with a SPARQL interface.

In fact, there are lots of companies jumping into this area. There is no clear winner yet but SPARQL seems to be the technology of choice. Everybody is eying Google warily, if they make an announcement about their interest in this field, all these companies will see some very tough competition.

Open Calais

This absolute jewell of a service can create semantically structured documents from unstructured text. Owned by Reuters, Open Calais is heavily slanted towards business and news gathering but the results are still very impressive.

When you feed in a chunk of text, it will identify places, dates, people, companies and so forth and even relations or events involving those entities.

It also offers a tagging plug-in for Wordpress blogs. If you have any experience with Tagaroo, I’d love to hear about it so please leave a comment.

Twine

Twine is a CMS with a semantic focus and could well become the Wordpress of the next generation web. Currently still in beta so I haven’t been able to try it out.

Mash It All Up With Pipes

DERI offer an RDF equivalent to Yahoo Pipes, called simply Pipes. Their offering is not as full-featured as Yahoo’s but you can get the source and extend it, and even host it on your own server.

Given the wealth of amazing data provided by all the other services, no doubt you have some great ideas for mash-ups and new services, so Pipes can be a quick way of prototyping.

The future of the web is not so far away and we all need to learn about these technologies so we can be part of it.

Creative Common licensed photo by jm3.