Semantic Web Getting Real

BlueSalamander writes "Tim O'Reilly just did an interview with Devin Wenig, the CEO-designate of Reuters. With no great enthusiasm I started to read yet another interview on how the semantic web was going to make everything great for everybody. Wenig made some good points about the end of the latency wars in news and the beginning of the battle for automatically detecting linkages and connections in the news. Smart news, not just fast news. Great stuff — but just more words? Nope — a little searching revealed that Reuters just opened access to their corporate semantic technology crown jewels. For free. For anyone. Their Calais API lets you turn unstructured text into a formal RDF graph in about one second. I ran about 5,000 documents through it and played with a subset of them in RDF-Gravity. The results were impressive overall. Is this the start of the semantic web getting real? When big names and big money start to act, not just talk, it may be time to pay attention. Semantic applications anyone? The foundation appears to be here."

Comments

What?

[TubeSteak]

Is the semantic web supposed to be one of those Web 3.0 things?

Advertising.....

[IHC Navistar]

If online news outlets cut out the advertising promos that precede every video news clip, it would be a million times more popular that it already is.

I mean, nobody wants to see an advertisement tht is twice as long as the video clip itself. People will especially be turned off when they realize they took the time two view a 30 second mattress or advertisement just to view a 45sec-1min news clip about a story that is either boring, uninformitive as print, or just plain crappy.

Advertising is the Black Plague of all media. It's consumer repellent ability can't be denied, and the number of good ideas that have been ruined by ads is unimaginable.