With the arrvial of Yuki Matsuoka from Japan, there are now people with as many nationalities working in DERI as the European Union has member states, namely 27! The strongest foreign community in DERI is not coming as a surprise the Polish. However, this place is shared with the Germans, who also comprise of 11 members. The full statistics can be seen in the pie chart below:

" In the UK's Guardian newspaper site today, writer Jemina Kiss suggested that Web 3.0 will be about recommendation. "If web 2.0 could be summarized as interaction, web 3.0 must be about recommendation and personalization," she wrote. Using Last.fm and Facebook's Beacon as an example, Kiss painted a picture of a web where personalized recommendation services can feed us information on new music, new products, and where to eat. It's a marketers dream and it's really not far off from the definitions we've come up with in the past here on ReadWriteWeb."

From Read/Write Web

An Introduction to the Social Graph API

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Via John Breslin

" I was very interested to hear about the launch of Google’s social graph API at the weekend. The social graph API “returns web addresses of public pages and publicly-declared connections between them”, where the connections are currently being obtained from crawled XFN and FOAF links. Dan Brickley, the co-creator of FOAF said:

The Google API looks like a step in a very interesting direction. Of course it will be possible to think of many things it doesn’t yet do, but I encourage everyone here to have a think about simple, practical and useful incremental improvements to it. We can do a lot more eg. with full SPARQL access, but proving full SPARQL to the aggregation of the planet’s public FOAF/XFN data isn’t going to happen anytime soon. Interesting times

In answer to Niall Larkin’s question about how this relates to SIOC, such services help us because by providing an easy method to find one’s social graph (both “me” and “knows” connections), it also makes it easier to find your social objects which can be described using SIOC (see my previous illustration, and see also Kingsley Idehen’s demonstration of how this can work).

In short, you can use FOAF to create the social graph, and use SIOC to represent social objects."

“Google's general mission has been to organize the world's information. With that they bring in the flotsam and the jetsam, the good with the bad because they're casting their net far and wide,” Microsoft's Cliff Guren said.

Its initiative in mass digitization stems from a vision of Internet search as a tool to hunt not only the words we type in, but also the things we might have meant to type in, said Colin Gillis, an Internet analyst at brokerage Canaccord Adams.

Like many concepts in the Internet industry, this idea can go with an arcane title: the Semantic Web. It's a concept already partly realized on some websites, for instance when search engines recognize a common typing error.

To achieve this needs data.

“The important component of the Semantic Web is mass digitization,” Gillis said. “You have to have all the little bits of data, all the little pieces. From comprehensive data sets come deeper insights. "

Microsoft vs Google

Search is still the Master

" The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has kicked off 2008 with publishing two significant Semantic Web specifications in the month of January. The first is the query language specification, SPARQL (pronounced, "sparkle") and the Ontology Language for Web (OWL) 1.1. One could argue the computer science industry is in the midst of the biggest shift in software development in the past fifty years.

To understand the depth of Semantic Web is to first understand Semantic Web is not limited to the "Web" and it includes all aspects of the computer software industry to include the corporate enterprise. Semantic Web is something an organization does, not buy or out sources."

Will your company Sparkle in 2008