" Six years ago in this magazine, Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila unveiled a nascent vision of the Semantic Web: a highly interconnected network of data that could be easily accessed and understood by any desktop or handheld machine. They painted a future of intelligent software agents that would head out on the World Wide Web and automatically book flights and hotels for our trips, update our medical records and give us a single, customized answer to a particular question without our having to search for information or pore through results.

They also presented the young technologies that would make this vision come true: a common language for representing data that could be understood by all kinds of software agents; ontologies—sets of statements—that translate information from disparate databases into common terms; and rules that allow software agents to reason about the information described in those terms. The data format, ontologies and reasoning software would operate like one big application on the World Wide Web, analyzing all the raw data stored in online databases as well as all the data about the text, images, video and communications the Web contained. Like the Web itself, the Semantic Web would grow in a grassroots fashion, only this time aided by working groups within the World Wide Web Consortium, which helps to advance the global medium. "

The Semantic Web in action

The Pew Internet and American Life project has released a new report: Digital Footprints: Online identity management and search in the age of transparency. This report examines our relationship with our online information, stuff like our Google results and the information we've presented online.

Via Fred from Unit Structures.

"Each day about 1,700 juniors at an East Coast college log on to Facebook.com to accumulate “friends,” compare movie preferences, share videos and exchange cybercocktails and kisses. Unwittingly, these students have become the subjects of academic research.

To study how personal tastes, habits and values affect the formation of social relationships (and how social relationships affect tastes, habits and values), a team of researchers from Harvard and the University of California, Los Angeles, are monitoring the Facebook profiles of an entire class of students at one college, which they declined to name because it could compromise the integrity of their research. "

On Facebook, Scholars link up with data.

The December issue of the Semantic Report is now out.

"OpenID Authentication 2.0 and OpenID Attribute Exchange 1.0 are now final specifications (”OpenID 2.0″). This morning was the closing day of the Internet Identity Workshop and David Recordon, Dick Hardt, and Josh Hoyt (three of the authors and editors) made the announcement during the first session. Both specifications have evolved through extensive community participation and feedback and each have been stable for a number of months. There are already a variety of open source libraries shipping these specifications with product support including Google’s Blogger (via Sxip’s library) and Drupal who did their own implementation of the specifications. Multiple OpenID Providers including MyOpenID, Sxipper, and VeriSign’s PIP already have support for both of these specifications"

"The Orderly Semantic Web (roughly analogous to what Spivack calls The Intelligent Web) is never going to happen. Universally agreed upon upper ontologies? Not likely. …. The totality of human intelligence expressed using nothing more than syllogisms and first order logic? Set your mind at ease, Clay Shirky, this won’t be necessary."

Jim Hendler on Shirkyng his responsibility.

World Wide Web proposal:

Proposal for a HyperText Project.

just another proposal.

The 6th international Semantic Web conference is currently being held in Busan in South Korea.John Breslin recounts his tale of getting to his destination...

and includes some pictures

Project10X’s landmark industry study charts the evolution of
semantic technologies and the growth of multi-billion dollar markets for web 3.0 products and services.

This month Project10X is publishing a study on semantic technologies and their market impacts that is must reading for investors and ICT companies as well as public. It's called “Semantic Wave 2008: Industry Roadmap to Web 3.0” (SW2008). You can click this link to download the executive summary and prospectus.

Anthony Lilley of the Guardian questions the whole notion of a Web 3.0 and a Semantic Web-is it all hype and marketing or is there some real substance behind it?

In his article he compares Web 3.0 or a Semantic Web  to a brand relaunch of the Web akin to Kylie Minogues new look.Is the Web constantly reinventing itself or still the same old Web?

On thing is constant with regard to the Web, though, despite the criticism, is its evolution.Paul Miller has an interesting piece on his blog over on Nodalities which looks at both sides of the debate.