Document-centric XML is simply a deep challenge that will take more time (and probably more of a commercial incentive) to tackle. For the time being, structured authoring managed the XML way is still implemented mainly by very large organizations: such an approach has “trickled down” from organizations the size of IBM to organizations the size of Adobe (which does, in fact, use DITA now), but there are not tool chains yet available that will bring it down much further. The failure of the W3C XML Schema Working Group to provide a functional specification supporting document-centric XML can hardly be underestimated.

As long as content is not easily authored in a semantically rich, structured fashion, the vision of the semantic web will remain an illusion. When and if document-centric XML gets more attention from standards bodies and software vendors, human communications will become far more efficient and effective.

via http://tinyurl.com/yjyvrqj

Cathy Marshall is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research, Silicon Valley; she has been at Microsoft for the last nine years. Cathy has long worked in the disciplinary interstices of computer science, information science, and the humanities, with occasional collaborations in the arts and the sciences. Her interests include digital archiving and long-term retrieval; how people use and share encountered information; how people read, annotate, navigate through, and interact with eBooks and other electronic publications; and spatial hypertext. She holds provocative views on topics like the Semantic Web and social tagging. Before coming to Microsoft, she was a long-time member of the research staff at Xerox PARC. She has delivered keynotes at WWW, Hypertext, Usenix FAST, CNI, VALA, ACH-ALLC, and a variety of other CS and LIS venues.

• http://iat.ubalt.edu/moulthrop/chrono.html

"At its heart is a formal Mathematica representation. Its inference engine is basically a large number of individually hand-engineered scripts for tapping into data which he and his team have spent the last several years gathering and "curating". For example, he has assembled tables of historical financial information about countries' GDP's and about companies' stock prices. In a small number of cases, he also connects via API to third party information, but mostly for realtime data such as a current stock price or current temperature. Rather than connecting to and relying on the current or future Semantic Web, Alpha computes its answers primarily from his own curated data to the extent possible; he sees Alpha as the home for almost all the information it needs, and will use to answer users' queries. "

via http://www.faviki.com/ "use of Wikipedia's articles and associated pages as a topic ontology for this purpose. The benefits of the approach are that the ontology terms are developed through a social process, maintained and kept current by the Wikipedia community, represent a consensus view, and have meaning that can be understood by reading the associated pages. We have demonstrated the use of Wikitology to improve the performance of an information retrieval system and as a source of evidence in a intra-document entity co-reference task.

"I’ve migrated entirely from Del.icio.us, personal wikis and similar online services and over to Twine. There are several reasons for this, some of which I’ll detail here — and end by hinting at why it’s immediately relevant despite Twine being in an invitation-only beta. For the sake of easy digest, we’ll begin with Twine’s features presented in bullets: 1. Social bookmarking service 2. Central storage for documents, images, videos and other data (from your machine or from the web) 3. Media viewable inside Twine, bookmarked or uploaded. (videos, images, etc.) 4. Collaborative platform with wiki-like editing/built in text editor 5. User-created groups with discussion boards 6. Intelligent analysis of added content (more on this below) 7. A recommendation engine to help discover informati"

"Update operations are performed on a collection of graphs in a Graph Store. Operations are provided to change existing RDF graphs as well as create and remove graphs with the Graph Store."

open source NEPOMUK (Networked Environment for Personalized, Ontology-based Management of Unified Knowledge) effort, the Semantic Desktop isn't a dream; it's an emerging reality and will be here with the upcoming release of KDE 4 for the Lin

'The goal of Linked Data is to enable people to share structured data on the Web as easily as they can share documents today. The term Linked Data was coined by Tim Berners-Lee in his Linked Data Web architecture note. The term refers to a set of best pra

"we have a decentralized, fairly democratic means of uniquely identifying stuff. Anyone with some web space can create a URI to represent something (our RDF resource—see above) in a way that can be understood right across the web. There doesn’t need to be a web page at your URI, but it’s good practice to have a human- and/or machine-readable description of what the URI represents at the other end. It is the nature of the web that anyone can say anything about anything, so you can’t control what other people say about your URI, but by publishing a description at your URI, you can at least have the final word on what you intended it to mean. By making all data the same shape, and making the things the data describes uniquely identifiable across the web, RDF makes your code and your data more portable, more interoperable, and more useful. How to use it Publishing data in your HTML with eRDF I said before that RDF can be written in lots of different ways; one of those ways is eRDF. It’s a simple way of embedding RDF statements into HTML by using attributes such as id, class, rel, and href in a spec"

" * Business 2.0 Article About Radar Networks: Weaving the (Semantic) Web * BusinessWeek Article About Radar Networks: A Web That Thinks Like You * Nova Spivack Podcast Interview for Supernova Conference with Kevin Werbach * Rivals try to save the operating system * Scoble Finally Gets The Semantic Web * Radar Networks in PC World * Nova Spivack in Entrepreneur * Podcast with Nova Spivack about future of the Semantic Web and collective intelligence * Radar Featured in the Chronicle * MIT Technology Review: A Smarter Web * We’re hiring! "