Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2009
Written by Richard MacManus / December 2, 2009 10:30 AM / 48 Comments
2009 has seen a lot of Semantic Web and structured data activity. Much of it has been driven by Linked Data, a W3C project which gained momentum this year. According to Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, Linked Data is a sea change akin to the invention of the WWW itself. We've gone from a Web of documents to a Web of data.The 10 products we've picked out for this end-of-year review are ones that have done interesting things with data. Connecting to other data, building new applications with data, sharing data, and more. These 10 products may not be the type of Semantic Web apps that the W3C envisaged in the 90s, but that no longer seems to matter. What's important is that the Web is becoming more meaningful - more semantic.See also our 2008 list.
Google Search Options and Rich Snippets
ReadWriteWeb's Best Products of 2009:
In May, Google announced two significant additions to its search product: Search Options and Rich Snippets. The two features notably extended Google's core search product and the 'rich snippets' part in particular was based around structured content.
Rich snippets extract and show useful information from web pages. Google is using structured data open standards such as microformats and RDFa to power the rich snippets feature. It is inviting publishers to mark up their HTML (webmasters can find more details here).
Feedly
Feedly describes itself as "magazine-like startpage." When it launched in August 2008, we labeled it just "an alternative interface for Google Reader." However with the launch of Feedly Mini, a mini bar that hovers at the bottom of the screen as you surf through blogs on the web, the service has become a much more inclusive blog reading companion.Feedly Mini integrates Twitter, FriendFeed, Google Search, Mozilla's Ubiquity, and more. A number of our writers love this tool - Sarah Perez went so far as to call it "a must-have tool" for anyone who uses services like Twitter and FriendFeed.
Apture
Apture is a Javascript plug-in for publishers that adds contextual information to links, via pop-ups which display when users hover over or click on them.In our February review, we came away impressed by Apture due to the amount of multimedia that can be packed into such a little pop-up. Also the end-user experience is sophisticated - readers on washingtonpost.com and other sites that use Apture can see rich, relevant, contextual content from the likes of Wikipedia, YouTube and Flickr without leaving the host site.
Zemanta
Zemanta is a real-time semantic analysis tool that plugs into your blogging software. As we explained in April, Zemanta offers bloggers relevant links, photos and other assets to include in their blog posts. Zemanta's API is also being used by startups. Over 2009, the company has continued to iterate and impress. For example in October Zemanta released a new engine and API.Zemanta is open source and standards-based. It works well with the rest of the tech community and has some interesting tools for supporting non-profit organizations.
Note: We compared Zemanta to Apture in an August analysis post.
Open Calais 4.0
In January Thomson Reuters released their most significant update yetto the Calais web service and open API: Calais 4.0. Calais is a toolkit of products that enables publishers to incorporate semantic functionality within their properties - enabling them to categorize content as people, places, companies, facts, events, and more.Calais 4.0 went beyond metatagging and enabled publishers to integrate their content with Linked Data assets from Wikipedia, GeoNames, the Internet Movie Database (IMDB), Shopping.com and others. Calais 4.0 also let publishers share semantic metadata about their content with "content consumers" such as search engines, news aggregators, related stories recommendation services and more
Next page: Semantic Web apps 6-10
1 comment:
Nice Blog !!!
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