Zach Beauvais

Well, since blogging about Talis several times, I’ve taken the plunge and accepted their gracious offer to become a researcher for their Semantic Web Platform. That means I’ll be blogging a lot about the Semantic Web and it’s cool features etc. over on one of Talis’ blogs, especially ‘Nodalities’ where you can see my first post: Hello World–really original title, that.

Hopefully all my blogging here will put me in good stead to encourage discussion and facilitate dialogue (fancy words!) over there, and I hope everyone likes what I write… we’ll see.

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 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:

Nova Spivack - Semantic Web Talk from Nicolas Cynober on Vimeo.

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.

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.

In a bid to test a bit of the Semantic Web, I have inserted a little line of Java script into my blog which should automatically turn many of my links Smart. Not 8 hours after I had inserted the script, I was contacted by Fraser at AdaptiveBlue, the creaters of the Smartlink technology, who asked how I was finding the new links. After offering me some advice about ‘Turning on Smartlinks in my Blog’, Fraser also agreed to a Question and Answer post about AdaptiveBlue (watch this space…)

Because I have been trialling BlueOrganiser for a few weeks, I am somewhat familiar with the technology, and do find it useful. I have not, however, noticed any of my links becoming ‘Smart’ of their own accord. I did manage to manually make a couple of links smart by adding a bit of HTML to the blog article (<smartlink="yes") which enabled AdaptiveBlue’s flashy menu with information on Apple and the iPhone. However, the automatic tech doesn’t seem to have worked with my Drupal website (after inserting the code in the page.tpl.php file–just like Google Analytics’ Urchin code). Fraser suggested I create the following link, to test out the smartness of my placement.

Is it Smart?

It does indeed appear to be Smart but is displaying the following error message:

"Rats! The Smart isn’t connecting to this Link…"

Oh well, it’s a step in the right direction for the Semantic Web. More on this later!