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By Javier Carbonell, March 26, 2010 6:02 pm

Undoubtely the global economic crisis is turning the approach of public authorites to economics. There is a general consensus that new technologies and productivity should be a “must” to get a sustainable standard of life, and we can’t continue basing our development in other less value added activities. This has been clearly understood by British Government which is trying to enhance technology and mainly Information Technology. Some months ago British Government was pioneer making public data available for companies and citizens in a plausible effort to promote the initiative “Linked Data”.

Now, British Prime Minister has gone further and in the presentation “Building British Digital Future”, has bet again on Information Technologies. He has tackled this issue from different perspectives (infrastructures, services…), but it is notorious the role given to “Semantic Web”. In fact, the £30 million foundation that will be allocated to create an Institute of Web Science, headed by internet inventor Sir Tim Berners Lee and leading scientist Professor Nigel Shadbolt, was one of the main points on his speech.  He dedicated effort to describe semantic web and their implication for companies, citizens and economy. For instance he said:

“This will help place the UK at the cutting edge of research on the semantic web and other emerging web and internet technologies, and ensure that government is taking the right funding decisions to position the UK as a world leader. And we will invite universities and private sector web developers and companies to join this collaborative project”

Of course it is not common this kind of arguments in politicians but we are very pleased about that, and we hope other politicians/countries to follow this path.

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By Sergio Garcia, March 3, 2010 11:03 am

Author: Sergio García.   Telefónica I+D

For decades, the World Wide Web has evolved as a network of documents connected through hypertext links.  These documents have usually been conceived to be read by humans and during the last decade, the semantic web initiative emerged to develop a set of languages and tools for computers to understand the web content. Based on the Semantic  Web standards, the Linked Data initiative consists in a set of best practices to publish structured data on the Web, establishing a Web of Data.

Standards and Principles
Continue reading 'Linked data and Semantics'»

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By Javier Carbonell, August 28, 2009 1:20 pm

During the last years, Semantic Technologies have occupied an important place in most of the predictions done by main consultant companies when forecasting the future. We could say that “Semantic Technologies are the technologies of the future and always they will be”.

After several years explaining the concept and the great number of advantages of these technologies but with no commercial applications, the commercial implementations have arrived. It could be thought that this should have  supposed an important boost in the number of news related to Semantic Technologies, but this is not happening and the number of references to Semantic Technologies is not increasing and even is decreasing (except in concrete moments as the celebration of important events as Sem Tech in San Francisco). So, what can we deduce?, Are these technologies losing the moment?, Is now and old fashion concept?  Something was wrong?

From my point of view “NO”.

On the one hand, the “name” of semantic technologies has never be a  clear one.  Perhaps for the scientific community it was clear the exact meaning of the concept (and I’m not completely sure of that), but for the market is an ambiguous concept that sometimes has created too high expectations in IT companies.

On the other hand, when these technologies have matured they have been adopted by the IT systems in a smooth way and with different names : “knowledge systems”, “contextualization tools”…, but at the end they are semantic technologies (we can define semantic technologies in a quick way as those technologies oriented to use “concepts” instead of plain text). Beside this, other concepts very close to “semantic technologies” and that can be considered included among them are getting more famous. For instance, as it can be seen in the next graph, the number of times that the term “semantic web”  appears in the web is decreasing but on the contrary, “linked data” is gaining positions, and even it could surpass it in some time (some companies use now to promote theis products) .

 For this reason I think that Semantic Technologies are not declining but they are evolving and adopting a commercial form. In the future we will hear about “Virtual assistants”, “Contextualized interfaces”… and other kind of concepts that in the shadow are based on the present effort to standarize, promote and invest in Semantic Technologies.