Cyc is one of the most notorious projects in artificial intelligence. Now spanning for over 20 years it has yet to deliver on initial promise of human-reasoning capabilities. While initial goals were too ambitious, we should still be quite happy with the achievements. Especially now when it seems Cycorp (owner of Cyc) is seeing the potential in opening up its knowledge base to third party developers. Yesterday OpenCyc was released under CreativeCommons 3!

OpenCyc is probably currently bast available and open ontology of the world. This means it is a large database of concepts that we humans use when we think about the world. This includes things such as  “game” and “Valentine’s day“, but also relationships between things such as “biological grandmother” or “created by“. While all this is easy for humans, it is hard for computers. Now OpenCyc is building a common vocabulary so computers will be able to understand the information and not just pass it around.

Still large gap exists between plain text and information that computers would understand and be able to reason about. Zemanta’s API can be seen as providing part of the solution (text in, structured information out), but we currently don’t yet directly support OpenCyc concepts (however Freebase is available). We hope we’ll be able to find a way to connect to OpenCyc in the future and we are always glad to hear what our API users would like to see! So please let us know! Would this be interesting to you?

As for end users not caring about the APIs, ontologies and similar, what’s the point? Well it’s simple: you’ll get better suggestions.

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Nodalities is one of the bright stars of semantic web reporting. It’s a magazine more concerned with business than academic aspects of semantic web. In last issue I had a pleasure to write an article about my view of how semantic data is changing the web game. I am republishing it here, but don’t forget to read the rest of Nodalities!

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Everyone is getting on the semantic web bandwagon, creating, curating and publishing both linked web data and annotated-web data. Nearly every day Mash-ups using semantic web and web services from big platform providers are born. By opening up the data the new platform has been quietly established.

Definitions of semantic web are as elusive as definitions of Web 2.0, it means different things to different people. However to me it seems that the most obvious and direct consequence has been mostly neglected in shadow of bigger visions. Semantic web turns services that were previously prohibitively expansive to create into cheap and possible. Be it big service or small one.

Data acquisition that services can build upon is being made cheaper and cheaper because data is now (getting) well organized, exchangeable, accessible and in some cases even free. When looking at things on the web scale there are two big data sources that are now at the disposal of every developer, entrepreneur, artist and investor.

First one is Wikipedia and its semantic derivates such as dbpedia and Freebase. Second one is social network data opening up gradually, but surely. One describes topics of the world and our lives at large, the second one manages to describe our lives at micro level. The third benefit is that the rest of the data sources will map their information to one of those two. Zigtag and Faviki are first examples of services trying to map Wikipedia view of the world to the web content at large (and I strongly suggest trying them out).

Is this True Semantic Web?

For the true crusaders of Semantic web this is “little semantics gets you a long way” approach. But it can also be seen as bottom up approach which will end up using more detailed ontologies for specific purposes while still being connected to the web at large and leveraging its potential. Lately even Cyc maps some of its knowledge to Wikipedia.

Not all of semantic web data will be free, but it seems that easy exchange, augmenting and repurposing of data will lower the barrier for competition and thus drive prices into the ground. As creating and maintaining complex datasets becomes easier and almost implicit, more people and companies will be doing it. Beside encyclopedia market there is another interesting case. Microstock photo providers managed to undercut prices of large photo providers with the help of both web architecture and its social fabric which made it cheap to aggregate supply from cheap sources.

One thing that I hope is yet to happen is social networks competing themselves into opening the data for repurposing to third party applications (with appropriate mechanisms for privacy protection in place).

While still being closed garden Facebook is a very interesting case. You might not have noticed it, but Facebook’s platform is just one step away from being a vision of automated agents come true. The data is in there, development platform is standardized, developers with millions of ideas are there. The question is just how far Facebook will let applications act on their own.

Beyond Web 2.0

The second web Cambrian explosion (Web 2.0) came into existence largely because of the abundance of cheap infrastructure of both hardware and software. Suddenly startups didn’t need to buy large servers up-front, they could rent them and scale when needed. And as importantly software infrastructure became cheap to get and build upon. Open source has created huge, diverse and extremely cheap software stack that many startups are leveraging. Not only that, it is standardized enough that developers don’t need long lead-in times to start crunching useful services out. The trend is going even more in the direction of “infrastructure as service”, we are seeing companies like Amazon and Google not only offering their CPU cycles and storage, but whole database engines, queuing services and similar.

If Web 2.0 was enabled by cheap hardware and software infrastructure, this time web will be enabled by cheap data. Cheap not only in sense of not having to pay for it, but cheap when acquiring, using, storing and reasoning about it.

Killer app

While it seems that universal access to data makes many things possible and cheap, it also makes it harder as far as business models are concerned, especially with the “free” mentality of web lately. But I will not go into discussion of the business models of web startups, since so much is being written about that already.

Except artists everyone else is asking the though question what is going to be the “killer app” for semantic web?

Unsurprisingly answering “Semantic web is the killer app” does not satisfy developers and entrepreneurs let alone investors. It might satisfy visionaries, but visions rarely put bread on the table.

For investors it is sometimes hard to accept the fact that killer application is the distributed platform itself and that there seems to be no gatekeeper emerging that would cash-in on the “semantic web” as a whole. Bets are placed all over the space, from search engines that ‘understand’ your questions, to social networks using semantics, but the most of success currently seems to be in vertical search engines.

However there is a problem a lot of these companies have stumbled into. Semantic web is sold on the promise of computer understanding human world and affairs on one level or another. And when you tell that to common users, it is unbelievably easy to completely disappoint them. Just look at the media coverage of some recently launched startups in that field.

Dreaming of apps

So are there any applications that might come into existence anyway and not disappoint? What if we manage to establish semantic web technologies as ambiental web fabric, which works best when you don’t have to pay much attention, but really helps in many, but not necessarily in all cases?

Well, I can think of some and I am sure you can too, my question is why we are not seeing more work in that area?

Lets start with social networking, social network such as Linkedin knows where I am, who I work for, whom I worked for. It knows my whole schooling, my career up until present. Adding a bit more information it could easily know hobbies, which conferences I go to, my connections by type. This could be pulled from other networks such as Facebook. Why doesn’t Linkedin let me state the direction I want for my career?

And then use that information to automatically discover who I should get to know to achieve short and long term career goals? And while we are at it why wouldn’t it look at my and his/her calendar and schedule time and place of a meeting. Oh, and since I am meeting someone I don’t know it can offer a list of topics to break the ice with - matching hobbies, friends and maybe interesting facts about where we both worked, but did not know about each other. I’d just love to answer a simple yes/no questionnaire every week and select between few persons and have a meeting setup automagically. Long term benefits of this far outweight some mismatches that would happen. And not just meeting the people already in position to help, but also people that are expected to go into those positions in the future. Is anyone doing research on predicting career moves based on social network dynamics?

The general idea here is that social networks have semantic data that can be leveraged by machine learners to do great recommendations of how to develop one’s career and life. You can call it “automatic career steering” or “managed real-life social networking”.

If you want to get a bit wilder, think about your mobile phone. It is following you around, knowing where you are who you communicate with (discovery of proximity via Bluetooth), it could even record all the audio on the phone and off the phone. Indexing of the audio is hard, but if you have good context – both geographical, social network context and cultural knowledge the tasks becomes a tiny bit more tractable. Maybe it could work in some specific situations, maybe it could listen to your phone conversation and put the meeting you just verbally scheduled into your calendar, maybe it could provide an instant recall for the book you know somebody mentioned a week ago or maybe it could even create automatic meeting minutes for you. But all this are hard things to get right every time for the computer. That’s why every morning computer would ask you a few questions about conclusions that came out from processing all your yesterday-data while you slept.

Getting real (with Zemanta)

Previous paragraph is quite a stretch of imagination, but some things are already doable today.

Imagine you are an author writing an article, bog post or a report. Right now your computer is a tool to let you input the text and put a bit of design in it. But why couldn’t computer at least try to figure out what you are talking about? And just give you some addition material on the side, unobtrusively, but possibly useful. It can make mistakes, but it has to bring real benefit enough many times to be seen as useful. What could a computer suggest?

Well, it could establish relations between your writing and other semantic sources. We already mentioned two – Wikipedia as world at large and your social network as your microworld. There is high possibility that parts of your writing are going to map to those two sources. Maybe you want to know something more about the term you just mentioned or maybe you want to offer your readers a chance to read about it themselves and place a link there (if you are authoring web content). Natural language processing is capable of doing those things today.

Maybe you would like to be pointed out who else wrote what on that topic? Someday I’d like for a computer to warn me that what I have just written actually agrees with John C. Dvorak for once.

Computer can automatically discover (free or commercial) images that would illustrate what you are saying in your text. And you can pick and include them with one click.

And in case of web published tags can be automatically suggested to make discovery of their content easier. Gradually even more types of suggestions can be implemented as the “understanding” of text gets better.

These all are the things that we do at Zemanta. We are trying to hide all the complexities of the process of “understanding” the text and matching it with the semantical sources. The user never has to know, (s)he just wants suggestions that make writing process more efficient and end product better. And when user selects specific suggestions maybe we can even sneak in (with his permission) semantic annotation that comes handy later on when semantically-capable search crawler such as SearchMonkey comes along.

Currently this technology makes most sense for bloggers, since they can use all those type of suggestions to make their blogging easier and in some cases more profitable. However maybe other people want to do different stuff with it, that’s why API was born, it is currently in testing and open to anyone who sends a mail. Maybe others have better ideas than us. Why wouldn’t this technology come handy in any CMS and in any application where you have to author text? Or in your online word processor, or maybe in an email program? When I type “Hy mum, I am on holidays on Tenerife” in an email I want the computer to suggest me a photo of Tenerife where I am at. Mum would love it!

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Now the funny part, I was undersigned as “Andraz Tori is the CTO and Co-Founder of Zemanta, an applied-semantics startup aimed at blogging“. Anyone knows of any non-applied semantics startups? Maybe Nodalities still needs to be careful about academic roots of semantic web.

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Live Writer support

But that’s not the only thing we did, we’re happy to announce Microsoft LiveWriter support! For now as early technological preview, but it should be enough to give you a test of where we’re going and to tell us what we missed. Download it from Zemanta LiveWriter download page.

Zemanta Live Writer plugin

CrunchBase integration

Furthermore, we also started to integrate new databases. This month we’re adding CrunchBase, a free directory of technology companies, people, and investors. So when you’ll be writing about some new startup that got you excited, we’ll now have a link to CrunchBase for more in-depth information. Respective logo’s of companies and images of people will also show up in the Gallery.

Zemanta now also knows Crunchbase links and company and founders images

Amazon Enhancements

We’re making two important changes in our Amazon integration. Firstly we’ll start suggesting book covers of books that we also find hyperlinks in the text. The book covers images will have your Amazon affiliate id inside.

Secondly, we’re changing default behaviour of affiliate ID. We’ll insert Zemanta affiliate id if you don’t have one set. If you don’t like this you can set your own (we won’t touch existing set id’s) or opt-out in preferences (and set it to no affiliate id).

Amazon book cover suggestion

We’ll be issuing update through the usual update channel for your platform.

• UX Week, 12-15 August, San Francisco
• Wordcamp, 16 August, San Francisco
• Drupalcon, 27-30 August, Szeged, Hungary

We’re also finalizing our presence at a few events in beginning of September:

• Ars Electronica Festival, 4-9 September, Linz, Austria
• dConstruct, 3-4 September, Brighton, UK
• i-Semantics, 3-5 September, Graz, Austria

We won’t be missing either at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York, Blog World Expo and a number of other events in second half of September, but that’s a topic for a later blog post.

We decided to also try our technology at calculating what’s most popular at the moment in a tool called Zemanta Popular. It’s an hourly list of the most recommended stories in our network. The theory is that we should show emerging stories almost as they are breaking.

There’s also an extra twist in it. Each story has a Reblog button next to it, so it’s easy for you to take a quote from that story and build your own perspective around it easily.

Zemanta Popular

You can follow the stories directly on the page, or subscribe do the Feed. You could also add it to your Netvibes or iGoogle account to always show you the latest stories directly from your dashboard.

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Reblog is one such byproducts. The core idea is that giving a correct and fair attribution to other blogs, while quoting a bit from them, is hard. It requires copying piece of text, styling it differently, giving a nice back-link with possibly name of author and blog, additionally expanding it with published date.

When you use Zemanta, we add a little button at the bottom of the posts, saying Reblog, this allows anyone to click on it to get a nice citing interface:

Reblog button

Initial Reblog quote selection

Preview and publish to your blog

In the last step you can then preview the final post and publish it to your blog. If you don’t feel like this is the end or would rather just copy and paste the text, we also give your raw HTML version of the blog post.

To enable others to easily quote you with proper attribution, just Get Zemanta, and that’s it.

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Exactly a year ago, Andraz and I were sitting in a cafe by the river, pondering whether we dare to test the limits of our imagination and apply for this unknown but strangely familiar beauty contest we found online. They were looking for the next Google they said, but didn’t mind if it had very rough edges. Perhaps most importantly, they were offering a lot of help and asked only the most important questions.

So we took it. Spent the next two weeks polishing the application and couldn’t sleep the night before first selection. We had no idea what was waiting for us out there, but it felt right. At that particular moment, all we had was our imagination, a prototype and courage, to close our eyes and make the first step. It turned out to be a firm one, and on the next one we were not alone anymore.

Seedcamp has helped us to focus, to steer, to experience this new world and most important, it validated our ideas. This year, we are proud to be part of Seedcamp week again, this time on the other side, encouraging new generation of killer startups in London.

So as a message to all entrepreneurs who are considering boosting their business efforts, YES, you should apply and give your best effort to stand for your ideas. Everything else will be easier.

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Image via Wikipedia

First tip in presentation how to get your content in front of audience is about Zemanta. It’s has really impressive title - Super Dope Ill Ninja Secret Trick. The gist of idea is that besides general Zemanta suggestions, we also help in creating relevant trackbacks. When you include links to suggested articles those blogs are pinged. Then depending on the configuration of blog on the other side, reverse link might show up in their trackbacks, and in turn generating traffic and exposure for your blog.

In the audio recoding, the audience asked a few questions, which I’d like to answer.

1. How far back do Zemanta suggestions go?
   -> We started aggregating first blog posts in September 2007, so this makes about 11 months in the past.
2. Does Zemanta crawl the web? How does it find blogs?
   -> Right now we aggregate, as opposed to crawl. This means that we don’t search whole internet as traditional search engines, but follow a collection of blogs. These blogs are mostly handpicked from the best sources on the Internet, and blogs of our users.
3. How does Zemanta make recommendations?
   -> In short: we look at the body of the text, extract main concepts and then find relevant suggestions for them.

Take a look at full blog post at BlogString, and don’t forget to listen to embedded podcast at the end as it has lots of answers to the questions from the audience.

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We are glad we will be able to participate this year’s Defrag conference in Denver, Colorado in November with the subtitle “The implicit web and more”. I’ll be talking about “Finding Serendipitous Information Through Context”. Hoping to bring some insights about how computers are figuring out what’s on our personal and collective minds and how they might provide us with stuff we don’t quite expect, but still helps or entertains us.

We also got discount code/coupon for all our friends that would like to get 100$ off for early bird registration. Use discount code “at1″ at DefragCon registration site (actually just click on the link, promotional voucher code is already included).

We heard many good things about Defrag 2007 conference, so we don’t have any doubts Defrag 2008 is going to be even better. See you there!

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Zemanta extensions and plugins have stoped working two hours ago. We apologize to all our users and ask for patience. Since we believe in transparency, here’s the explanation:

Amazon is a company best known for their online bookstore, but in the world of web their most prominent offering is “infrastructure as a service”. It consists of Simple Storage Solution (S3) for serving static files, Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) for running programs and some other interesting services.

Amazon’s web services are very economic offering for startups like ours. Unfortunately that also means that when their service has problems, several other services are affected. Today there have been serious problems with S3 which among other things caused Zemanta plugins to stop working.

Zemanta uses S3 for two main purposes: distributing javascript code which renders interface for our graphical user interface and serving small icons at the bottom of each zemified post. Since S3 stopped working our graphical interface cannot be loaded when you write your blog. Our backend service works without flaws so our partners using web API are not affected.

Since roll-out infrastructure itself is affected we cannot independently provide a fix. We would like to apologize to our users and will try to prevent such points of failure in the future. Please bear with us until Amazon fixes their service which should be very soon since there are many services affected.

UPDATE (0:30 GMT): According to Amazon Web services status page some users should already have Zemanta back and working again. Others will have to wait a bit more.

UPDATE: Service now works again.

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