How to Keep Up with the Semantic Space

Fact: Reshma Sohoni, chief executive of Seedcamp (the VC accelerator focusing on European tech startups) said in an interview this week that “In the past few months, we’ve seen a lot more developments around the semantic web,” and talked about the coming value of semantic web services.  

Analysis:  There’s never-ending buzz about the semantic space. Just this week John Conroy writing at the Content Matters blog had a long and interesting piece examining “three ingredients needed to enable and popularize the semantic Web,” with the aim of answering “if we really are on the cusp of a content revolution.”

Also, I admit it, I can’t stop playing with the semantic-space startups, whether it’s Sensebot or the newly launched Evri, or Powerset (just acquired by Microsoft, as I wrote about previously).

If you’re thinking of the future of digital information use, you can’t get enough of the semantic stuff.  I’ve been blogging on the topic in small ways (search above for “semantic”) – but likely will be doing much more throughout the year.

it’s increasingly difficult to keep up with the flood of semantic developments, but Henry Story over at Sun’s “BabelFish Blog” often covers semantic topics, and yesterday he had one big blog entry, “My Semantic Web Blogroll.”  It’s just an excellent list of other blogs and research sites chronicling advances in the space, some of which I had never heard of.  It’s too much reading to serve as a dedicated blogroll over on the margin, really – who has the time?  As Henry puts it, “The following are the semantic web blogs I follow closely. I am sure I must be missing many others that are interesting. Though I already am way past the point of information overload.”

I have several different semantic blogs and research sites I follow on my own blogroll (right margin), and I also read the technical blogs published by startups themselves, for example Radar Networks, Powerset, and Hakia (see here for their blogs).  

But until someone (Microsoft?) builds the definitive semantically enabled web-research site, you’ll have to track these topics somewhat manually.  I definitely recommend Henry’s longer and specialized list of sites.  Here’s just a selected chunk of his recommended pages, with his thumbnail description of each:

Planet RDF – RSS It’s triples all the way down

Planete Web Semantique – RSS French Semantic Web planet

Raw – RSS Danny’s linkiness

Rinke Hoekstra – RSS “Time is nature’s way to keep everything from happening at once.” – John Wheeler

S is for Semantics – RSS Dean Allemang’s Blog – Check out our new book on the Semantic Web!

Semantic Focus – RSS On the Semantic Web, Semantic Web technology and computational semantics

Semantic Wave – RSS News feeds and commentary maintained by semantic web developer Jamie Pitts.

Semantic Web Interest Group Scratchpad – RSS Semantic Web Interest Group IRC scratchpad where items mentioned and commented on in IRC get collected.

Semantic Web Wire – RSS Comprehensive News Feed for Semantic Web.

semantic weltbild 2.0 (Building the Semantic Web is easier together) – RSS Building the Semantic Web is easier together

SemanticMetadata.net – RSS

Speaking my mind – RSS The whole is more than the sum

TagCommons – RSS toward a basis for sharing tag data 

Happy semantic reading!

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