This is a podcast I recorded for Talis’ Nodalities series of talks. Because Facebook has recently made announcements about moving in a Semantic Web direction, I spoke with their Senior Open Programs Manager, David Recordon, about Facebook’s perspectives on many of the technologies they’re beginning to use. We ended up discussing Social Networking as a graph—that is: a network of related things. We also spoke about the Open Graph Protocol they’ve worked on and touched on privacy and walled gardens.

As you listen to the podcast, you can have a look at the source code for my site. (Just don’t run any validators on it and complain about what a poor developer I am: I already know ). In the head, you’ll notice a few lines of metadata that are discussed in the podcast:

For more information, you can also read the Nodalities Magazine article I wrote about Facebook’s announcements.

The Open Graph Protocol page has information about the protocol itself. Facebook’s f8 developers’ conference site also has links with more information for developers.

Many thanks to David Recordon for having this conversation with me for Nodalities, and to my employer Talis, who has made this podcast available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3 license.

[podcast]http://talis-podcasts.s3.amazonaws.com/twt20100705-david_recordon.mp3[/podcast]

This post was originally published on Nodalities Blog. The Talis offices, for the past few weeks, have been awash with geeky excitement—that kind of near giddy excitement that comes with eager expectation. We’ve all been waiting for something important.

For some, this was no doubt augmented with the announcement of Steve’s new iPad; but that’s not what’s gotten us all worked up.

For months, we’ve been looking forward to the launch of data.gov.uk; and last week, the wraps finally came off. The official press release put it:

A major new website has been launched to the public which gives anyone who wants to use it unprecedented and free access to government data in one place.

Making public data available for re-use is about increasing accountability and transparency and letting people create new, innovative ways of using it. Government data should be a public resource. By releasing it, we can unlock new ideas for delivering public services, help communities and society work better, and let talented entrepreneurs and engineers create new businesses and services.

The exceptional team behind data.gov.uk have striven to adhere to web standards in its production: including Linked Data as a priority, as Professor Nigel Shadbolt explained:

We are also going to increase the use of ‘Linked Data’ standards, which allows people to provide data in a way that is as flexible and easy-to-use as possible.

I can confidently say that we’re very proud of data.gov.uk, the team behind it, and our involvement with it. We’re excited by the prospect of this data being used as raw material for clever people to make interesting, useful, even world-changing things with it. We’ve seen the beginnings and proof-of-concept projects already.

Now comes the really exciting stuff. What are you going to build?

Image: “Yay for happy days!” by le vent le cri via flickr (CC: By)

|This article first appeared in Nodalities Magazine, CC By + SA

For anyone following the Nodalities blog, you may have read some of my recent posts discussing the trends boiling up around Web 3.0 (other buzzwords are available). The Mobile Web and upgraded connectivity in general; the rise of ubiquitous computing from chips in every product imaginable; Linked Data and the “Semantic Web” as an organising platform for this rising tide of data—these are three very broad trends seeing a lot of media attention presently. From where I’m standing, I tend to see the next great turning point of the Web as a convergence of some of these trends, and see it as a rise in the importance of and reliance upon data itself and data tools generally.

The mobile web is bringing new sorts of information to people, and they can make use of this info wherever they happen to be because of advances in devices ad connectivity. As phones and web-enabled devices get better, so to do the chips we seem to have embedded all over the place, and we can now begin to have a more clear picture of what we do through the information we gather from our heaters, cars, and pedometers. Also, as more objects become connected, the grunt-work of number-crunching and storage is becoming commoditised into big, efficient, utility-like cloud services, which host and work with our collected information much more effectively than the gadget in your hand could ever hope to do. Others, like us here at Talis, talk about the Semantic Web, which allows for an evolution from a bunch of connected documents to the explicit connections between bits of information.

Also fermenting in this mix is a strengthening trend of political transparency and a public, shared ownership of social data. Barack Obama’s new administration has clearly made this a priority with the launch and work around data.gov; and in the UK, Sir Tim Berners-Lee himself has been appointed to an Parliamentary advisory role. There is growing pressure to be able to have access to public data, and to see it as belonging to the nation’s people rather than allowed to be legitimately filed away in the great, locked bureau of the capitols.

So, picking up two fairly obvious trends here: Social, Public Data and Linked Data; it would seem to follow that people would begin to have access to previously unavailable information in usable, linked forms. And it’s certainly beginning, as articles elsewhere in this magazine have illustrated. But, what about other chunks of public data? What about when data comes from universities, institutions, scientific foundations and NGO’s? What about charities monitoring crime, CO2 emissions and family histories? Wouldn’t these make a useful piece in the web of social data? What resources have the governments themselves got, if they want to make their public-owned data available in a useful format?

These questions form a major part of the thinking behind Talis’ Connected Commons initiative (talis.com/cc). Basically, Talis has made its Semantic Web platform (including data hosting and access tools) available free of charge for any datasets made available to the public. In doing so, we’re hoping to remove the barrier of cost entirely to publishing interesting data in a Linked Data way. One major reason for this is to promote reuse and mashups of this interesting data, and for people to be able to “follow their noses” to the data that completes their projects. But, from a publishers’ perspective, this is important, because it’s removing a major reason not to bother with making data useful, if not only public. So, with this, data can be made public and useable and the developers and users get the benefit of public SPARQL endpoints and API access to interesting data.

To keep the data open and public, datasets need to make use of either the Public Domain Dedication and License (PDDL) or Creative Commons’ CC0 license. Ian Davis, in his article in this magazine, explains more about waivers and the Connected Commons, and there is a lot more about this particular initiative over on the Talis site (talis.com/platform/cc/faqs/).

In a recent interview with the BBC, Sir Tim said: “This is our data. This is our taxpayers’ money which has created this data, so I would like to be able to see it, please.” I wonder if initiatives such as Connected Commons will begin to remove excuses, hindrances, and obstacles? As public awareness of the importance of access gets hotter, this might become a political issue, as well as a pragmatic one. I hope that in the rush to publish data, and in the ensuing discussion and debate that follows, that the users, hackers and developers don’t get sidelined. I think the world is ready for its data back.

Talis, my employer, has been a big promoter of Linked Data and open-access to information, because we see that new ideas often arise when existing ideas come together. Innovation, if you like, occurs at the join between ideas when they connect. I see this as fundamental to the way ideas and their applications (technology) advance. I tend to believe that anything “novel” is actually affected when other ideas are connected together.

In the technological world, this seems like a strong analogy for Linked Data: information which can be connected by a web-like network of links. These Linked Data have become the foundation for what has come to be known as the “Semantic Web”, a web of connected information which breaks out of information silos and enables the discovery of new ideas from old, and innovation from existing information. We use the phrase “serendipitous reuse” for the idea that once an idea (or a piece of data) is published, it can be used and reused in novel ways and in context of other data to produce unexpected, and unforeseeable possibilities. These ideas (data, again) become increasingly useful when published in a format which allows them to be linked freely to ANY other piece of information. We’ve had the distribution method for this network for years (the good, ol WWW itself) and it’s been about a year since RDF was launched by the WWW Consortium to handle the data itself. The idea is basically to give every bit of data an address (a universal address, not one subjective to a database like a cell reference), and to predicate that bit of information very much like language does. If you think of it like a language, RDF lets bits of data (nouns) to be acted upon or act upon (verbs) others (other nouns). This triple-format enables a near infinite recombination (theoretically) of any data, anywhere with an address.

So, what’s the problem? Well, most of the world’s data are locked away in silos (prisoners of the cells their databases confine them to). Many organisations may wish to make use of their data in a semantic environment, and many might even embrace the Open-source nature of their data, and make it freely available to the world to recombine and use: there are always more innovations outside an organisation than within! In order to lower barriers to enter this linked data world, Talis has built a Platform with resources to host and utilise these connections, making use of semantic web standards (RDF and SPARQL, the query language of the semantic web) and a developer-friendly environment (a RESTFul API, for example).

However, this innovation is only possible when data are accessible. In order to further lower the barriers, Talis is now offering free access to the Platform to host public domain data. We are calling this initiative the Talis Connected Commons, and the offer is not limited to free hosting: the data access services, including access to a public SPARQL endpoint, are also freely available. To keep this data open, you will need to use either the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and License or the recently launched Creative Commons CC0 license to publish data. Anyone will then be able to freely access the stored data using the Platform services, without API keys and without usage limits.

There is more information available at www.talis.com/cc, where you can find detailed technical information, FAQ’s and other resources.

Image: “Eggistentialism 1.5 or Three of a Perfect Pair” by bitzcelt (via flickr), CC Licensed

This post featured originally in Nodalities Magazine.

I’m sure I’m introducing old friends; but Twitter is a “microbloggiing” platform, to give it its proper description. it gives users 140 characters to publish status updates, comments, gripes, complaints, praises, news and whatever comes to mind. It’s burst out of its original answer to the simple question: “What are you doing?” and users often tweet just about everything.

One interesting innovation is the integration of the hashtag. Simply a hash symbol (#) and a tag descriptor for the comment. This gives people the ability to follow particular threads of updates or participate in conversations around an interest. They’re often used, for example, to update the goings on from conferences (#FOWA for example). People give their own content this little bit of information, and a search engine can find them. People can add additional information and follow conventions which allow for distributed trends that anyone can follow and interact with.

The recent snowfall in Britain gave rise to a flurry of tweets about road closures, amounts of snow falling, schools closing down and all the other chaos unleashed. When users followed a simple convention, however, this information got organised. People quickly adopted the #uksnow hashtag to track the topic; and eventually someone worked out a way to capture all the info needed to follow these geographically. By tweeting the first half of a UK post code plus a rating out of ten snowfall, anyone following the thread knows exactly where it’s snowing. It’s like an instant weather polling station, distributed across the country. It can go a step further, however, when services can actually mashup these tweets when users turn their simple status updates into a mini line of code.

This little bit of information allows for people to write software to track and automate the twitter information. This interactive map from benmarsh.co.uk, for example, actually plots a visual graph of snowfall across Britain. Bigger snowflakes indicate larger numbers out of ten in the poll. It’s simple, really. Ingenious, possibly. But the fundamental distinction between this tracking ability and the noise of thousands of Twits shouting about the snow is that little bit of metadata.

So, is this use of twitter a metaphor for the Semantic Web? It’s certainly a picture of automating information flow using metadata via software. Sounds Semanticcy to me.

"Confetti" by mr_gonzales

I have talked a lot about metaphor, both here and, perhaps sadly, to my friends and family. Metaphor and the abstract are true passions of mine, and I can’t help but see them everywhere. I suppose, it’s the nature of metaphor to be everywhere, really.

However, there is a whole plethora of meaning in this statement, if you pull yourself back from it a bit. What’s rubbish? Rubbish is stuff we throw away; it can smell bad; it’s collected from our houses and fills holes in the ground; we don’t want rubbish; we don’t like rubbish; it’s a generic term for things we don’t like or are unhappy with. With this simple statement, I’m ever-so-casually bashing together large quantities of information and notion, and letting the meanings fall where they will. Inside this somewhere is the idea of “propositionality”, meaning that I’m letting the hearer of this statement draw their own conclusions to what I’m saying (he’s not happy with his computer, his computer may not be very good, he wouldn’t recommend it, he’s having a bad day…) some of which is intended, some of it not (at, least, not consciously). There are also cultural considerations in that there is a sort of social consensus that this metaphor “works” and that we must not literally interpret this statement as an intention to physically dispose of an object (which is good when you consider any time you’ve ever heard a person “understood or experienced in terms of” rubbish This leads me to think that there are also elements of disassociation between the two concepts, so that some of the meaning is actually in the difference between “rubbish” and “this computer”. I’m probably not going to throw it away (at least, not immediately); It’s probably something I’ve bought and have no intention of burying in the ground; I expect to be happy or satisfied with it (whereas, you wouldn’t about a used tea-bag). So, the two concepts modify each other, they’re like points in a perspective, making it possible to glean added meaning from the situation which is greater than just the two ideas themselves.

(if you’re still reading by here, email me, and we’ll have a pint!)

I mentioned in my previous post that data are used in abstraction. What I mean by this, is that a bit of data is “used” in a process when it’s a point of reference for something. This number + that number = another number, the two numbers are reference points for the sum. When I say: “I’m busy on the 2nd” it means that I’ve referred to a bit of data (a number on a calendar application, an email, or whatever) that I’ve used as a point of comparison. I’ve essentially understood the projected state of my schedule in terms of what i’ve already planned to occur. And, these bits of data are more and more powerful when the perspective you gain from them is more accurate.

When we get more reference points, and more interactions, our perspective becomes more flexible. We can abstract ourselves right out, and look at a very broad picture. Google’s Pagerank does this by mining clickstream information from a very, very large dataset using very simple reference points: the number of links to an item increases its position in the rank. Conversely, we can focus right in on a single notion or dataset using as many different references as possible to understand a limited set of transactions. Amazon’s book results page is full of this kind of perspective with user-ratings, purchase histories, browsing behaviour, and mathematical algorithms to give a very full picture (and options to accomplish a task) of a single notion.

So, I think that data are very similar to metaphor in that they are used to understand one thing (or set of things) in terms of another (or others).

The upshot of this is that we can refer to this abstract concept of “data” in terms that help us to understand both their significance and their utility to us. When I say: “I want my data to do this”, it’s not that helpful unless you understand that I’m trying to get all my reference points to produce a perspective to help me accomplish something. Which leads me to my main point: the whole point of metaphor is to help—or possibly enable—our understanding. Data should do the same. Collecting all the bits and pieces of information you incur by being a person and doing things should bring you some form of understanding leading to a benefit.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Semantic Metaphors

'my mac is cool "kkkkk"' by yaraaa

I’ve been blogging a bit over on Nodalities about “stuff being connected”. The idea being basically: everyone is constantly creating data—all the bits of information that can be used in abstract.  These tiny bits of information are constantly being generated by every process we undertake, from the obvious like online banking to the more obscure like driving to work (your odometer tells you how many miles you’ve gone, your on-board computer may store info about your car’s status, your satnav knows where you’re going and been, your mobile phone may know this too, the garage knows when your last service was… this list can go on and on). These data are more powerful when automated by software, and they become exponentially more useful when they are connected with other data. For example, the knowledge that £50 pounds left your account isn’t particularly helpful without a connection to that little bit of data which tells you the date of the transaction.

But why are some data more obscure—why don’t we even think about using some of them?

It may be simply because they’re not immediately useful to us, yet. We can, right now, log in to our banks and have a look at our accounts. We can shuffle and access and compare and analyse because this information is being presented to us in an easily-managed and understandable way. We have access to the raw data, and most of us have some basic understanding of why these data are important. I wouldn’t be surprised if readers of this blog have a spreadsheet or two with financial calculations on it, or use quicken with their balance info. We all know how important calendar events, emails, address book contacts, and bank balances are, and we have various systems to deal with them.

But, what do we DO with all the data we don’t currently access routinely? Well, this is where those connections come in. We can connect data together using some sort of framework, or abstract construct like a database. However, this database will need to be connected to another database (or exported to an existing one) in order for these new bits and pieces to be considered in terms of others.

More simply, the tools and formats we use all the time (spreadsheets, calendars, notepads, computers, odometers etc…) already exist but they don’t currently take into account the further levels of data we create. We don’t have a tool to see our car’s mileage at a certain date, so we’d need to walk out to the car, look at the odometer, and guess. The bit that’s missing is the connection—the link between information we have and a tool or another bit of data. In the previous example, we need a database to collect mileage, a connection between that and date data, and a calendar to view it—tools and data.

There are two sides to these software tools, though. There’s the side presented to the user, and the side that is accessed by processors and memory and software. I’ll blog more on the human-side later, but the “stuff” happens at the edge of these two coming together.

The “Semantic Web” works on a framework which enables any data to be easily connected to other data. Instead of sitting in a traditional relational database, which makes its connections based on a set of specific instructions (schemas), all the data are encoded with a bit of information identifying them to the web. In essence, each piece of data has an address, and can be pointed to much like a web site points to another. This works at various levels of granularity, so individual records can be linked very easily, allowing for applications to be written on top of these linked data. These applications can then let us analyse, manipulate, swap, and USE anything, literally, that we can link.

Alongside this linked data infrastructure (call it the Semantic Web, or Data Web or just the Web) is the proliferation of computing hardware. Processors and memory are being manufactured into just about anything we can buy. Thiese are all working  to take the stuff we do and “translate” it into data. Phones, cars, fridges, credit cards, clocks, scales, watches… we’re surrounded by little processors or bits of memory recording and crunching what we do. What makes this situation currently frustrating/exciting is that they currently don’t share their information, and aren’t “aware” of the potential of other computing.

So, what am I getting at? Well, like we’re saying over on Nodalities, hook it up! We’re getting data, that’s happening. We have the framework(s) and the distributed network (the Web), and we have decades of experience automating data-comparisons (which is all Software ever does, if you boil it down).

The next step is to connect it.

I’m planning to attend this year’s Future of Web Apps conference in London. Their list of speakers sounds fantastic, and I’m really looking forward to meeting some folks in real life.

I’m particularly interested in this conference for its stated focus on the web community. Just have a look at the Agenda:

• How to grow and nurture your community
• Work/life balance or Blood, sweat and tears: Which is the startup way?
• Colliding Worlds: Using Jabber to make awesome web sites
• Startups live – An interview with three new European startups
• How to survive outside of Silicon Valley

The BBC reported a few days ago that:

Web users are getting more ruthless and selfish when they go online, reveals research.

The idea is that people are using the web to get things done, and don’t seem to notice that service providers want them to stick around. They even get tetchy with intrusions or ‘widgets’.

I agree, to a certain extent, with this statement—that people are impatient with adverts on sites. However, I’m not sure if I feel this article is that well informed. Yes, it is backed by Jakob Nielsen (so-called “Usability Guru”); which means it’s founded on stable research etc…

But, what’s a widget if not a short-cut to a result? An Amazon widget on a site is basically a way to buy a product without the need even to visit Amazon.co.uk. I don’t think it’s helpful to lump all widgets together on this one. Most widgets are functional—In fact, I’d go so far as to say that a non-functional widget is just a banner-ad.

It IS annoying when your browsing is interrupted with a flash game or advert placing itself over your text or form. It doesn’t help me make a decision, and actually puts me off that particular site. The Times Online had a long-running Land Rover ad which drove over the page, stopping me from reading. Since when is a Land Rover Discovery 3 an impulse buy?

What this article fails to notice is that users are doing exactly what they’re supposed to do: use. The internet is usable now. People can think to themselves: “I’d quite like to buy an iPod, right now.” Within a minute, they can have a confirmation email and estimated delivery date in their inbox. This is using the web, and I think it’s not so much a ‘ruthless’ thing or a ‘selfish’ thing. You expect to buy what you’d like in a supermarket, and no one would call you ruthless for not setting up camp there for the afternoon. I know I like to spend as little time in Tesco as possible, and I don’t think anyone who considers me selfish or ruthless does so on account of that.

This is actually an issue of usability and confidence. People are more confident in their ability to purchase, find information, and network online. The majority of my book, electronic, and increasingly household purchases are done on amazon.co.uk. I check my calendar on Google before confirming appointments, and I even check people’s statuses on Facebook to see how they are. This is confident, comfortable use. I don’t need to spend an hour on a site when I can get the info I need in my RSS reader (Vienna, it’s brilliant!), but I still want the content.

I’m also still open to relevant advertising… If I’m after an iPod, I don’t mind being shown iPod accessories, especially discounted ones. I don’t mind being recommended a new book by a previously-read author. But, I do mind being shouted at by banner-ads and I tend to ignore them.

Having worked in online marketing, I couldn’t imagine a less-useful tactic than plastering your content with splashy ads and irrelevant content. It’s not helpful or usable, and goes against the grain of how the web works. It’s an open garden, and it’s rude to litter. This does not mean we’re ruthless, we’re just getting better at keeping our spaces clear and useful.

There’s the bin, put your Flash-ads in on your way out of our park, mate.

Image: “Rubbish!” by dogbomb from flickr

I just watched this talk by Richard Baraniuk (link if embed doesn’t work), about opening up access to educational text and information. One of the most amazing ideas from his talk and the project they’re working on (Connections) is open-sourced text books.

The idea is that collaborative text-books, published on-demand could answer more questions and provide a better, more tailored resource to students and teachers. If educational resources are produced with granularity (i.e. like ‘Lego’ blocks which can be reused at a small level) they can be used and reused in a variety of novel and unpredicted ways.
Have a look and let me know what you think!

I tend to live in a world of metaphor. It’s not my fault, according to Lakoff and Johnson. We all use metaphor all the time: to construct our thoughts and work out abstract concepts.

I’ve been exploring this a bit in the context of the Semantic Web over on Nodalities. Please feel free to have a look and send me some feedback on what you think about this set of ideas.

I’ve been doing quite a bit of reading on the Semantic Web lately, and its primary feature from the perspective of  a writer is a difficulty of easy definition. It avoids simple sobriquet and isn’t explained without analogy and lengthy description.

The best way I have come to think of the whole system is as a set of perspectives, a way of looking at information in a network. Sir Tim Berners Lee described it using the Social Graph as an analogy, but Nova Spivack, from Radar Technologies,  has a brilliant talk about the Graph which explains the concepts and history behind the Semantic Web:

The folks at Read/Write Web have published an article I wrote  for them about UK-based innovations company Talis.

Feel free to have a look over at the post, and feel free to leave comments either on Read/Write Web, or here on zachbeauvais.com.

After my trial implementation of  AdaptiveBlue’s Smartlink technology on this very site, I was contacted by Director of Business Development, Fraser Kelton, who agreed to a Questions and Answers session about Adaptive Blue’s new technology. For a quick introduction, I have been trying out AdaptiveBlue’s Blue Organiser for a few weeks and found their semantic features helpful and intuitive for finding and retreiving changing information, and decided to try out the Smartlink code to offer this to readers of my blog:

• What makes a link Smart?
  
  Traditional links are not smart, they’re simple pointers to pages. When we write about a book and link to the book’s page on Amazon we mean to link to the thing but the link points to the page.
  
  A link is smart when it’s capable of automatically identifying and understanding what the thing is on the page. Once the link is identified to mean a thing a lot of valuable information can be automatically presented to the user that’s contextually correct for the thing.
  
  What I mean by this is that once a link is semantically understood to be about a specific book the user can be presented with options around that particular book – read the New York Times Book Review for the book, find similar books, save the book to social networks, etc. When the link is identified to be about a music album the actions and information presented are different and contextually correct.
• How about the ‘link’ in Smartlinks… where does it link to?
  
  With SmartLinks the user links like they normally would to a page on one of a dozen of sites – a book on Amazon, an artist on Last.fm, a stock on Google Finance, and a SmartLink is automatically inserted. The SmartLink is automatically inserted and when the icon is clicked a SmartLink pane launches that includes relevant content from across the web that’s populated using semantic understanding of the original link.
• How is this information kept up-to-date?
  
  Everything is automated so the information is always up-to-date. For example, when a user links to a stock page on Google Finance the SmartLink understands that the link is about a stock and will instantly pull up-to-date information about the specific stock into the SmartLink pane when it’s launched. When users link to new releases on Amazon, or one of our other supported sites, a SmartLink is automatically created for the book with relevant and correct information.
• Can I use Smartlinks on my own site or blog, and what would be the benefit from a content host’s perspective?
  
  Yes, SmartLinks install with 1-click for Blogger and Typepad, there’s a WordPress plug-in and a single line of java script for all other blog platforms and sites. SmartLinks will then instantly appear on all links to supported sites – both for new posts and all archived posts.
  
  There are a lot of benefits for enabling SmartLinks on your site. They automatically enable you to provide a tonne of additional and contextually correct information in your posts. Your readers will have the instant ability to discover and explore what you’ve blogged about without leaving your site and without having to search or filter for more information – SmartLinks do all of this automatically and present a nice package of pure results. Additionally, a blogger can connect their Amazon Affiliate ID to SmartLinks so that all Amazon links within the SmartLink are monetized – this occurs for new posts as well as all old posts, enabling bloggers to monetize their archives.
• Can smartlinks be used alongside RSS or in conjunction with subscription technology? (e.g. for keeping up to date with past current Smartlink, like following a stock or tracking the popularity of a favourite song)
  Right now SmartLinks do not work with RSS.
• Where would I find Smartlinks at the moment? (i.e. Who is using this technology?)
  
  SmartLinks are enabled on a large number of blogs. You can see some great examples at:
  • http://madstocks.blogspot.com/ – wonderful stock blog that makes great use of SmartLinks for stocks
  • http://steffanantonas.com/ – a great blog that has SmartLinks enabled as well as a number of SmartLink Widgets
  • http://gothamgal.blogs.com/ – has a nice mix of book and music SmartLinks (check out the Typepad list in the right-hand sidebar – SmartLinks were automatically added providing additional benefit to something that previously existed)
• What are ‘Semantics’ on the web, and how do smartlinks feature in the ‘semantic web’?
  
  Semantics is defined as "the meaning, or an interpretation of the meaning, of a word, sign, sentence, etc." To understand the meaning of a word is to semantically understand it. Semantic Web is an academic term about using standardized data formats and a language for recording the relationship between data so that computers can analyze and understand meaning and context of all data on the web.
  
  At AdaptiveBlue we’re taking a top-down approach to semantic understanding. Our products are focused on bringing additional value to consumers in just a few basic verticals – books, music, stocks, etc. It’s a noun-verb equation. We leverage vertical semantic knowledge and existing information on the web to recognize nouns and then apply appropriate verbs.
  
  Let’s say a user quickly blogs about a great meal they had at a restaurant and includes a link to the restaurant’s page on CitySearch with no additional information. Our technology is able to identify the link as a noun and understand that it’s about a specific restaurant. A SmartLink is then automatically inserted that includes relevant verbs: read reviews, make a reservation, find it on a map, find nearby bars to grab a drink at afterwards, etc. All of these are for the specific restaurant and all of this is completed automatically and instantly.
• Does this have anything to do with the much-vaunted ‘Web 3.0′?
  
  I don’t think anyone knows what’s next for the web. Regardless we don’t want to be known for a label or a buzz word. We want to be known for the value and utility that we bring to individuals. We’re leveraging our technology to enable users to browse smarter and think that the benefits today are already strong and they’re only going to strengthen in the future. You can attach yourself to any number of labels, but at the end of the day it all comes down to people and that’s our focus.
• Do you see Smartlink technology changing the way we use the web? How/not?
  
  Yes. Currently we provide the smarts to understand that a page on Amazon is about a thing and can provide instant information that’s contextually correct for that thing. That’s valuable and different from how we currently use the web today, it provides a more efficient method to discover and learn more about the object.
  
  Understanding that a page on Amazon is a particular thing, and that it’s the same thing that’s on a page on Barnes and Noble or in a particular blog post is very valuable. This starts to shift away from a web of pages towards an emerging web of things and individuals will find a lot of value in a web of things.

After my trial implementation of AdaptiveBlue’s Smartlink technology on this very site, I was contacted by Director of Business Development, Fraser Kelton, who agreed to a Questions and Answers session about Adaptive Blue’s new technology. For a quick introduction, I have been trying out AdaptiveBlue’s Blue Organiser for a few weeks and found their semantic features helpful and intuitive for finding and retreiving changing information, and decided to try out the Smartlink code to offer this to readers of my blog:

• What makes a link Smart?
  
  Traditional links are not smart, they’re simple pointers to pages. When we write about a book and link to the book’s page on Amazon we mean to link to the thing but the link points to the page.
  
  A link is smart when it’s capable of automatically identifying and understanding what the thing is on the page. Once the link is identified to mean a thing a lot of valuable information can be automatically presented to the user that’s contextually correct for the thing.
  
  What I mean by this is that once a link is semantically understood to be about a specific book the user can be presented with options around that particular book – read the New York Times Book Review for the book, find similar books, save the book to social networks, etc. When the link is identified to be about a music album the actions and information presented are different and contextually correct.
• How about the ‘link’ in Smartlinks… where does it link to?
  
  With SmartLinks the user links like they normally would to a page on one of a dozen of sites – a book on Amazon, an artist on Last.fm, a stock on Google Finance, and a SmartLink is automatically inserted. The SmartLink is automatically inserted and when the icon is clicked a SmartLink pane launches that includes relevant content from across the web that’s populated using semantic understanding of the original link.
• How is this information kept up-to-date?
  
  Everything is automated so the information is always up-to-date. For example, when a user links to a stock page on Google Finance the SmartLink understands that the link is about a stock and will instantly pull up-to-date information about the specific stock into the SmartLink pane when it’s launched. When users link to new releases on Amazon, or one of our other supported sites, a SmartLink is automatically created for the book with relevant and correct information.
• Can I use Smartlinks on my own site or blog, and what would be the benefit from a content host’s perspective?
  
  Yes, SmartLinks install with 1-click for Blogger and Typepad, there’s a WordPress plug-in and a single line of java script for all other blog platforms and sites. SmartLinks will then instantly appear on all links to supported sites – both for new posts and all archived posts.
  
  There are a lot of benefits for enabling SmartLinks on your site. They automatically enable you to provide a tonne of additional and contextually correct information in your posts. Your readers will have the instant ability to discover and explore what you’ve blogged about without leaving your site and without having to search or filter for more information – SmartLinks do all of this automatically and present a nice package of pure results. Additionally, a blogger can connect their Amazon Affiliate ID to SmartLinks so that all Amazon links within the SmartLink are monetized – this occurs for new posts as well as all old posts, enabling bloggers to monetize their archives.
• Can smartlinks be used alongside RSS or in conjunction with subscription technology? (e.g. for keeping up to date with past current Smartlink, like following a stock or tracking the popularity of a favourite song)
  Right now SmartLinks do not work with RSS.
• Where would I find Smartlinks at the moment? (i.e. Who is using this technology?)
  
  SmartLinks are enabled on a large number of blogs. You can see some great examples at:
  • http://madstocks.blogspot.com/ – wonderful stock blog that makes great use of SmartLinks for stocks
  • http://steffanantonas.com/ – a great blog that has SmartLinks enabled as well as a number of SmartLink Widgets
  • http://gothamgal.blogs.com/ – has a nice mix of book and music SmartLinks (check out the Typepad list in the right-hand sidebar – SmartLinks were automatically added providing additional benefit to something that previously existed)
• What are ‘Semantics’ on the web, and how do smartlinks feature in the ‘semantic web’?
  
  Semantics is defined as "the meaning, or an interpretation of the meaning, of a word, sign, sentence, etc." To understand the meaning of a word is to semantically understand it. Semantic Web is an academic term about using standardized data formats and a language for recording the relationship between data so that computers can analyze and understand meaning and context of all data on the web.
  
  At AdaptiveBlue we’re taking a top-down approach to semantic understanding. Our products are focused on bringing additional value to consumers in just a few basic verticals – books, music, stocks, etc. It’s a noun-verb equation. We leverage vertical semantic knowledge and existing information on the web to recognize nouns and then apply appropriate verbs.
  
  Let’s say a user quickly blogs about a great meal they had at a restaurant and includes a link to the restaurant’s page on CitySearch with no additional information. Our technology is able to identify the link as a noun and understand that it’s about a specific restaurant. A SmartLink is then automatically inserted that includes relevant verbs: read reviews, make a reservation, find it on a map, find nearby bars to grab a drink at afterwards, etc. All of these are for the specific restaurant and all of this is completed automatically and instantly.
• Does this have anything to do with the much-vaunted ‘Web 3.0′?
  
  I don’t think anyone knows what’s next for the web. Regardless we don’t want to be known for a label or a buzz word. We want to be known for the value and utility that we bring to individuals. We’re leveraging our technology to enable users to browse smarter and think that the benefits today are already strong and they’re only going to strengthen in the future. You can attach yourself to any number of labels, but at the end of the day it all comes down to people and that’s our focus.
• Do you see Smartlink technology changing the way we use the web? How/not?
  
  Yes. Currently we provide the smarts to understand that a page on Amazon is about a thing and can provide instant information that’s contextually correct for that thing. That’s valuable and different from how we currently use the web today, it provides a more efficient method to discover and learn more about the object.
  
  Understanding that a page on Amazon is a particular thing, and that it’s the same thing that’s on a page on Barnes and Noble or in a particular blog post is very valuable. This starts to shift away from a web of pages towards an emerging web of things and individuals will find a lot of value in a web of things.