Battle for the Future of the Net

Battle for the Future of the Net: "European engineers, working with researchers from the U.S. and elsewhere, already have played a big role in the development of basic Web 3.0 standards. Now, governments are raising the stakes to keep Europe at the forefront. 'They want to create the defining technologies for the Semantic Web and give European companies an advantage in the market,' says Mark Greaves, a scientist with the asset management firm Vulcan."

SAP unveils Co-Innovation Lab and envisions Web 3.0

SAP unveils Co-Innovation Lab and envisions Web 3.0

"During his remarks, Kagermann discussed his notion of Web 3.0. "Web 2.0 is coming up in value. We want to take Web 2.0 to 3.0." It’s a version of the semantic Web theme, but focused on business software. "If you look to the services that we are defining with our enterprise SOA and things a bit beyond, we know that these type of enterprise services over time, in collaboration with many customers, associations and partners, a kind of standard can bring the Internet of business services," Kagermann said. "We don’t have the semantics today that go beyond Web 2.0 and will allow software to to speak to each other."

Semantic Web Technology Gains Steam

Semantic Web Technology Gains Steam

"For those companies looking for commercial Semantic Web products, the market is finally beginning to gain steam as more vendors from the traditional web and web service development, search, data analysis and management fields are releasing products dedicated to creating and managing applications and data for the Semantic Web.

eWEEK Labs took a look at three products designed to help businesses build and manage Semantic Web solutions; Altova's SemanticWorks 2007, Intellidimension's RDF Gateway 2.3.4 and TopQuadrant's TopBraid Composer 2.0. All three of these programs are available in free evaluation versions and are worth checking out for any business interested in building Semantic Web solutions."

Mind the Gap: Another Look at the Problem of the Semantic Gap in Image Retrieval

ECS EPrints Service - Mind the Gap: Another look at the problem of the semantic gap in image retrieval: "This paper attempts to review and characterise the problem of the semantic gap in image retrieval and the attempts being made to bridge it. In particular, we draw from our own experience in user queries, automatic annotation and ontological techniques. The first section of the paper describes a characterisation of the semantic gap as a hierarchy between the raw media and full semantic understanding of the media's content. The second section discusses real users' queries with respect to the semantic gap. The final sections of the paper describe our own experience in attempting to bridge the semantic gap. In particular we discuss our work on auto-annotation and semantic-space models of image retrieval in order to bridge the gap from the bottom up, and the use of ontologies, which capture more semantics than keyword object labels alone, as a technique for bridging the gap from the top down."

SiberLogic, XML, RDF, and OWL

SiberLogic, XML, RDF, and OWL: SiberLogic, based in Toronto, has some very interesting products that seem to be putting it all together. "SiberLogic today offers a complete and cost-effective environment for teams producing technical documents. A flexible family of products provides not only fundamentals such as version and workflow control, conditional and multi-channel publishing, and staging & deployment options, but also leading-edge functionality that includes semantic enablement via emerging standards such as OWL and RDF, full DITA and S1000D support, real-time fragment reuse analysis, and dynamic generation of a cross-platform knowledge base."

Rescentris Releases Version 2.5 of its Semantic Notebook, CERF - The ELN for Biology

Rescentris Releases Version 2.5 of its Semantic Notebook, CERF - The ELN for Biology: "Rescentris, Ltd., a leading provider of electronic laboratory notebook (ELN) software for biology and multi-disciplinary life sciences, today announced the immediate availability of CERF 2.5 and the CERF Development Kit (CERF-DK) to help life sciences organizations better manage their research information. CERF (Collaborative Electronic Research Framework(TM)) is the industry's only ELN built on semantic web technologies. The semantic engine in CERF enables it to capture the meaning and relationships in R&D information as well as the experimental context in which data are collected - all transparently, while the scientists do their work."