Nova Spivack – Minding the Planet

KurzweilAI.net has published an article I wrote redefining the meaning of Web 3.0. Basically, I am proposing that Web 3.0 include a set of emerging technologies that are all reaching new levels of maturity at the same time.

I just found out from Pete, that the Venice Project is making really heavy use of RDF. Very interesting. Another major proof point. It’s looking like 2007 is going to be the year of mainstream RDF applications. It sounds like there are some similarities between what the Venice Project is making, on a platform level, [...]

I’ve been reading some of the further posts on various blogs in reaction to the Markoff article in the New York Times last Sunday. There is a tremendous amount of misconception about the Semantic Web– as evidenced for example by Ross Mayfield’s post recently. Ross implied that the Semantic Web is about automating the Web, [...]

Wow — there has been quite a firestorm over the term Web 3.0 on the blogosphere today and yesterday. While I am remaining neutral, I also have an open mind regarding what it could be defined to represent. Here are some random thoughts towards defining term:

ZDnet’s Dan Farber, just blogged about the Semantic Web meme — Dan says: Back to Web 3.0. There will be one, and it has been associated at this point with concepts of the semantic Web, derived from the primordial soup of Web technologies. It’s been a focus of attention for Tim Berners-Lee, who cooked up [...]

I’ve read several blog posts reacting to John Markoff’s article today. There seem to be some misconceptions in those posts about what the Semantic Web is and is not. Here I will try to  succinctly correct a few of the larger misconceptions I’ve run into: The Semantic Web is not just a single Web. There [...]

A New York Times article came out today about the Semantic Web — in which I was quoted, speaking about my company Radar Networks. Here’s an excerpt: Referred to as Web 3.0, the effort is in its infancy, and the very idea has given rise to skeptics who have called it an unobtainable vision. But [...]

The CEO of MySQL, Marten Mickos, gave a talk this morning at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco on his vision for a "great database in the sky" in which all data would be open and accessible on the Web (running on MySQL servers of course!). In his talk, without mentioning the Semantic Web, [...]

Danny Ayers and Henry Story both posted thoughtful replies to my Meaning and Future of the Semantic Web essay. A few comments to their points below…

NOTES Master Copy can be found at this URL or http://tinyurl.com/yynb93 Last Update: Tuesday, November 7, 2006, 10:17AM PST License — This article is distributed under the Creative Commons Deed. If you would like to distribute a version of thisarticle, please link back to http://www.mindingtheplanet.net from yourversion, thanks. Printable version — Click here to download [...]

Today A-List blogger and emerging "media 2.0" mogul, Om Malik, dropped by our offices to get a confidential demo of what we are building. We’ve asked Om to keep a tight lid on what we showed him, but he may be releasing at least a few hints in the near future. Om was there in [...]

The OWL language, and tools such as Protege and TopBraid Composer make it easy to design ontologies. But what about the problem of integrating disparate ontologies? I haven’t really found a good solution for this yet. In my own experience designing a number of OWL ontologies (500 classes – 3000 classes on average) it has [...]

Sorry I didn’t post much today. I pulled an all-nighter last night working on Web-mining algorithms and today we had back to back meetings all day. I just came back from a really good product team meeting facilitaed by Chris Jones on our product messaging. It’s really getting simple, direct, clear and tangible. Very positive. [...]

Today our product team met with Shel Isreal to show him the alpha version of what we are building here at Radar Networks and get his feedback. Shel had a lot of good insights. We showed him our full product and explained the vision, and gave him a tour of the new dimension of the [...]

My company, Radar Networks, is building a very large dataset by crawling and mining the Web. We then apply a range of new algorithms to the data (part of our secret sauce) to generate some very interesting and useful new information about the Web. We are looking for a few experienced search engineers to join [...]

NEWS RELEASE Radar Networks appoints Lew Tucker Ph.D. as Vice-President and Chief Technology Officer. SAN FRANCISCO, CA. — Aug. 28, 2006 — Radar Networks (http://www.radarnetworks.com) today announced the appointment of Lew Tucker, Ph.D. as its Vice-President and Chief Technology Officer. Radar Networks is building technology for enriching content that will catalyze the evolution of a [...]

I’m very pleased to announce that two distinguished Silicon Valley veterans, Lew Tucker Ph.D. and Mike Clary, have joined Radar Networks (http://www.radarnetworks.com). In addition, we have just launched a new version of the Radar Networks corporate website with these details and more. It’s been a great few weeks at Radar: As well as Lew and [...]

I haven’t blogged very much about my stealth startup, Radar Networks, yet. At the most, I’ve made a few cryptic posts and announcements in the past, but we’ve been keeping things pretty quiet. That’s been a conscious  decision because we have been working intensively on R&D  and we just weren’t ready to say much yet. [...]

Shel Israel and I just finished up working together for 10 days. I needed Shel’s perspective on what we are working on at Radar Networks. Shel lived up to his reviews as a brilliant thinker on strategic messaging, branding and positioning. So what are the 15 people at Radar Networks working on? It’s still a [...]

Yesterday, the first public open-source release of Open IRIS was annnounced. IRIS is a Java-based desktop semantic personal information manager developed by SRI (with help from my own company, Radar Networks — we provided a some of our early semantic object libraries and a native triplestore, and some work on UI; note that our own [...]

Following in the footsteps of Douglas Engelbart’s pioneering work, SRI has announced the upcoming open-source (LGPL) release of Open IRIS — an experimental Semantic Web personal information manager that runs on the desktop. IRIS was developed for the DARPA CALO project and makes use of code libraries and ontology components developed at SRI, and my [...]

My congratulations to Paul Ford, who was just profiled in a New York Times article. Paul is a friend and one-time advisor to Radar Networks, and is fast becoming a Big Writer. Paul wrote a widely-read article on the Semantic Web once.

I believe the next big leap for the Web is what I am calling "The World Wide Database." The World Wide Database is a globally distributed network of data records that reside on millions of nodes around the network which collectively behaves as a giant virtual, decentralized database system. Google Base is an attempt to [...]

There is a hidden problem with open databases such as Google Base and Ning — as presently designed — a problem that I have not seen any discussion of yet. Briefly stated: As the number of unique data schemas created in such systems grows, the probability of applications that use those schemas breaking also grows [...]

I am playing around with the barely functional live beta of Google Base that just launched. There’s not much there, but what I do see is interesting. At the very least this is going to be serious competition for Ning. Beyond that it may compete with Craigslist and other classifieds and events listing services. It’s [...]

Here is a good article from IBM that provides decent, not-overly-technical, overview of the technologies that make up the Semantic Web, and the value they offer.

Great news! Radar Networks, the venture I’ve been building, has received its first round of outside funding from Vulcan Capital. We are heavily in stealth mode.

I’ve been thinking about different types of communities recently. Two forms of community that are often discussed are "communities of interest" where the members share a common set of interests (e.g. a community of people interested in Japanese culture), and "communities of practice" where the members share a common set of skills (e.g. a community [...]

First of all I know Clay Shirky, and he’s a good fellow. But he’s simply wrong about his claim that "tagging" (of the flavor that is appearing on del.icio.us — what I call "social tagging") is inherently better than the use of formal ontologies. Clay favors the tagging approach because it is bottom-up and emergent [...]

This interesting new brain study reveals processing differences between Semantic Memory and Episodic Memory in human brains. Nature performs these functions differently, and there is probably a good reason why that is so. On the Web we don’t really have an equivalent of Episodic Memory or Semantic Memory yet… but we’re working on it!