In March, Radar Networks launched Twine, an application that organizes information and connects people, places, companies, products, Web pages, videos, and photos. Along with Metaweb's Freebase, Powerset (sold to Microsoft), Hakia, Reuters' Calias, AdaptiveBlue and a few other start-ups, Radar Networks is trying to crack the code on building a piece of the semantic Web.
In a Times Online article, Web creator Tim Berners-Lee gave an example of how the semantic Web would work:
"Imagine if two completely separate things--your bank statements and your calendar--spoke the same language and could share information with one another. You could drag one on top of the other and a whole bunch of dots would appear showing you when you spent your money."
Twine won't provide that futuristic capability but it attempts to build a "semantic graph" of relationships between content, tags, people and Twines (the collection of items of an individual or group on the service). Each piece of content is a "semantic object," Radar Networks CEO Nova Spivack said, using Twine's underlying ontology and database, which applies semantic technologies such as RDF for storing data.
Spivack told me that public Twines are now visible to visitors to the site and to search engines. So far in the beta phase nearly 15,000 Twines have been created and 354,000 pieces of user-contributed content have been added into the system. More than 50,000 users signed up (34,000 are active) for the service, spending 13 to 15 minutes per session on the site, he said.
A major new release of the Twine platform is slated for release in the fall to address shortcomings and introduce new features. "We have worked on a lot of simplification, reducing the clutter, and we still need to reduce more. Twine has a lot of powerful features nobody uses, so we are moving some of the advanced features out of the way," Spivack said. "The fall release will bring more intelligence and semantics to the surface. For example, we will let anyone define a new type of thing, such as a recipe or baseball team form, to author. It's more like what Freebase does, and we will also likely integrate with Freebase over time."
In addition, performance improvements and algorithms to improve search as well as mining and crawling content are in the works. "A major focus of our work is on personalization and recommendations," Spivack said. "Ultimately, Twine is about 'interest networking' and is a content distribution network. People declare their interests, add content, join Twines and connect with people. As users work with the system it learns about their interests, using artificial intelligence and semantic Web technologies to provide more relevance. We are not attempting to index the whole Web, just the best stuff of interest to users. Ninety-nine percent of what's on the Web is not interesting to a user, so it's more about high signal to noise."
On the business front, Spivack believes that Twine can be an intermediary for users, delivering more targeted marketing messages in addition to content. It's similar to the way Facebook is creating a new kind of environment for advertising based on knowing member interests and their social or semantic graph. "The goal for Twine is to be the place on the Web that best understands your interests and represents them to others. The key is to give users control and privacy," Spivack said.
Twine is a work in progress. It's ambitious and has the potential to demonstrate how a more semantic Web could benefit users. The biggest challenge will be scaling the back-end infrastructure and attracting users, which means Twine will have to become far more easy to configure and use. We'll see in the coming months whether the forthcoming changes to Twine help open the floodgates.
Updated numbers on users and usage, 6:30 AM PST, August 1
The Semantic Web has been just around the corner for a few years. It turns out that bringing a semantic layer of metadata to the Internet is like climbing a mountain in flip-flops.
Tuesday night, Semantic Web mountain climbers Powerset, Radar Networks, and Metaweb participated in a salon at Powerset's San Francisco office, where I talked with them about their product plans.
Powerset gives wings to Wikipedia
I got a preview of Powerset's search engine, which is due to go into beta in the coming weeks, according to co-founder and CTO Barney Pell and as reported by TechCrunch.
Powerset differs from Google and other mainstream search engines in that it linguistically parses sentences, finding subjects, verbs, objects, synonyms, and other elements using a highly sophisticated, language-independent parser licensed from Xerox PARC).
Powerset then extracts and indexes concepts, relationships, and meanings, rather than keywords. (I wrote about Powerset when it first came out of stealth mode, in June 2007.)
Rather than trying to boil the search ocean, compete with Google, and deal with spam and 20 billion documents, Powerset has focused its initial efforts on giving wings to the 3 million pages of Wikipedia.
Hakia's semantic search engine also indexes Wikipedia and other sources. However, Powerset returns a more comprehensive dossier of results for queries, based on deep analysis of Wikipedia pages and other content, and also provides new ways to navigate and discover facts on the individual Wikipedia pages. More details to come when Powerset officially launches its public beta version.
Powerset plans to index the Web at some point (at a significant cost, in terms of servers and bandwidth). For now--or more precisely, when the company allows the public access to its technology--Wikipedia users will be the beneficiaries of a powerful semantic index and user experience.
True KnowledgeI also got a look at True Knowledge's search engine. Company CEO William Tunstall-Pedoe said the search engine is in private beta for now, with about 7,000 users.
Unlike Powerset and other search engines, Cambridge, England-based True Knowledge is building its own knowledge base. Users input facts, as in Wikipedia, but in a more structured manner. In addition, True Knowledge imports data from sources, including Wikipedia, in the form of discrete facts, such "Sacramento is the capital of California."
Queries, including those in natural language, are parsed for machine reading, and they access the repository of facts accumulated. True Knowledge can make inferences, such as in the following example.
(Credit:
True Knowledge)
The capability to infer truths based on the data repository would be a welcome feature for Wikipedia, which doesn't have an automated method for dealing with contradictions.
Barney Pell (Powerset), William Tunstall-Pedoe (True Knowledge), Nova Spivack (Radar Networks), Paul Davison (Metaweb)
(Credit: Dan Farber/CNET News)
Metaweb
Another San Francisco Semantic Web start-up, Metaweb, was also a participant in the salon. The company's Freebase is more similar to True Knowledge than Powerset.
Freebase is an community-built database with a large corpus of open data sets, including Wikipedia and MusicBrainz. Powerset includes some Freebase-structured content in its index, and True Knowledge could add Freebase data to its knowledge repository.
Radar Networks' Twine
I also chatted with Nova Spivack, co-founder and CEO of Radar Networks. His company created Twine, an application combining bookmarking, blogging, and RSS reading, with an underlying semantic engine to tie the pieces of data together.
Spivack said Twine has about 7,000 users in private beta, as well as 40,000 standing in line for access. Half of the users have created private Twines, with corporations and closed communities of interest using the service for collaboration.
Major enhancements are planned for the summer and fall, including allowing for complete customization of the user interface. "We have only surfaced a bit of the platform so far. Twine as a platform will integrate with other applications, such as blogs, catalogs, social communities, and corporate sites," he told me.
"It's an enormous multiyear project," Spivack said. It's not like a Google beta or a 1.0 version masquerading as a beta." The same could be said of the other Semantic Web services in the room. It's going to be a very long beta cycle.
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