Archive for April, 2010

Recently, Facebook announced Open Graph – which is another step in the direction of linked open data. Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg said: “Yelp is mapping out the part of the graph that relates to small businesses. Pandora is mapping out the part of the graph that relates to music. If we can take these separate maps of the graph and pull them all together, then we can create a Web that’s smarter, more social, more personalized, and more semantically aware.”
After UK’s Prime Gordon Brown has announced the huge investment in semantic technology this is only another indicator that the uptake of the technology has long started. We are closely monitoring these developments and play with ideas of how to make use of this data and technology in our products.

Working with information, data, knowledge and the like since years and every day, we have become very familiar with the challenges and opportunities arising with new information technology (and a never-seen-before information overflow). Still, it is hard to capture and present this knowledge quickly and impressively.
“Information Revolution” by Michael Wesch is a great video that gets the message across: the way we find, create, share, deal with, use, comment, … information has dramatically changed and will continue to change. Check it out at

In a speech about UK’s plan to secure recover, growth and jobs in the global market place on 22 March, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced a groundshaking set of changes, essential to place Britain as a world leader inthe new age of digital economies in the very close future. The cornerstone of these measures was the  announcement of the creation of an Instituteof Internet Science headed by the British inventor of the Web TimBerners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt. The focus of this institute,which will receive £30m of government funding, will be on the application of the next generation of the web – semantic web technology– to improve government’s IT way that technology is used in government.
Here you can watch the whole video:  

The semantic technology relevant part is announced in the interval 4:07– 7:00.