Semantic Web News & Articles

The Interactive Knowledge Stack, or IKS, has reached its second year. In that time they've made promising headway, but like the rest of the semantic web, they're really just getting started.

In the never-ending argument over which country is Number 1, the UK has just surpassed the US in one particular area: that of open data.

When Dries Buytaert founded Drupal (news, site), he intended it in part to be a platform where he could test out and play with new technologies. Drupal, for example, was an early adopter of RSS. With the pending release of Drupal 7, this goal isn't changing, and the Drupal 7 team is asking for feedback from the "pedantic web community" on how its implemented some new features.

Here we are on the brink of the night before Christmas, if that's your kind of thing. And this time we're indulging ourselves by shuttering the shop from now until the first Monday of 2010.

For us it's reflection season. In that spirit we've cooked up a concise retrospective of 2009, including items our readers took particular interest in, and some things we found generally interesting.

Without further ado we leave you to some holiday reading. May the end of 2009 treat you and yours well.

Enterprise CMS Highlights

It was largely business as usual in the ECM sector this year, with a few notable exceptions.

• SDL's acquisition of XyEnterprise made sense.
• But it was Autonomy's acquisition of Interwoven that was the most talked about.
• That is until Open Text's acquired Vignette -- although many suspected Vignette was on the market.
• In November Forrester fingered EMC, IBM, Microsoft, Open Text and Oracle as the leaders in their Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Content Management while Autonomy, Day Software, Alfresco and SpringCM were placed in the visionaries box.
• In early Q4 at Open World Oracle announced plans to integrate their enterprise Applications with their ECM document services. Details were slim, so we'll have to look for more facts there in 2010.

Beyond acquisition activity, open source players stepped up their game and look to be positioned well for some 2010 combat.

• Alfresco got more attention from analysts and chalked-up an important DoD certification. Adobe and Alfresco continued to work together on Adobe's LiveCycle Enterprise Suite. The company also made strides with their cloud offering via a partnership with RightScale.
• Paris-based Nuxeo launched US operations in the ever popular Boston area, added Digital Asset Management (DAM) to their offering and hired Cheryl McKinnon -- previously of Open Text -- to run global marketing programs.
• The DoD was on our radar again as it voiced support for open source software in the procurement process, in the form of a DoD memo.

SharePoint in the Limelight (still)

• SharePoint remained so dominant that vendors big and small rushed to build integrations and connectors. All year long people found the topic of Web Content Management with SharePoint intriguing. However, we heard more about frustrations than successes.
• The anticipation and early previews of SharePoint 2010 dominated the annual (and sold out) SharePoint Conference 2009. The event brought tidbits for technical administrators, covered the 2010 upgrade plans, and spurred partners to announce support for the product.
• For project managers, Dux Raymond Sy wrote up a brief on project management with SharePoint 2010. He followed up this article with a two-part treatise on why SharePoint ignorance is not bliss.
• The SharePoint 2010 beta was released this past November. And Microsoft -- ever keen on inspiring upgrades and enabling the partner channel -- followed up this month with the launch of an official SharePoint 2010 upgrade service offering.
• Yet despite progress in the field, many organizations still struggle to go beyond using SharePoint as a file sharing service. Still, dear Steve Ballmer's confidence is higher than ever. He even described how SharePoint is like the PC.

Web CMS a Super Dynamic Space

Perhaps it's been web content management that has seen the most change this year:

• Vignette and Interwoven acquisitions were mentioned above, but we'll shed a tear and pay them homage one more time here. Confusion was voiced fairly broadly around the Open Text grab of Vignette, notably around their 2010 platforms roadmap. There were also some whispers and chirps about Open Text layoffs. More on that in 2010.
• Yes, we like strong opinions as much as the next fella. Catering to such appetites analyst firm Forrester Research announced that Web CMS 1.0 was officially dead. Weee!
• We all learned that the second most used Web CMS, Drupal, will -- with the brains and funding of Acquia -- go from not so user friendly framework to easy as pie SaaS with the release of Drupal Gardens (now in early alpha). This something to watch in 2010.
• At the J Boye conference in Aarhus, Denmark key practitioners voiced some inconvenient truths and focused on web content management industry challenges. Our recent article Emerging Trends in Web Content Management touched on this again. Certain voices from the field are calling for the death of the WCM acronym, but suitable replacements have yet to be put forward, with a straight face. Stay tuned to the vocabulary space. We're either going to move forward, move backwards, or stay put. I think that about covers the options.
• Mass market WCM options shifted around a bit in terms of brand strength and popularity. Yet  the most popular open source Web CMS products remained Drupal, Joomla and WordPress. You can get the skinny on the top 20 open source CMS brands in the 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share report.

Standards Abound, Gain Ground

The subject of standards was never far from anyone's mind:

• Enterprise CMS and document management vendors realized part of the key to their success is the ability to interoperate via CMIS. The greatest common factor interoperability specification made good progress over the course of 2009 and version 1.0 is now out for public review.
• HTML 5 continued to gain traction even if it's more years away than we like to admit.
• CSS3 brought support for mobile and multi-column layouts
• Increased use of the mobile web brought the need for standards.
• Even Microsoft expressed support for open standards and interoperability
• At J Boye Aarhus in November, Day Software's David Nüscheler, covered 8 Key Trends in Web Content Management. They fit well with Day's plans and offerings, but nevertheless were good food for thought and quite standards oriented.
• Discussions at the Gilbane San Francisco event also shone light on standards. Irina Guseva's article Content Integration Standards -- CMIS, JSR-170, JSR-283 is a worthwhile read.
• For a great overview of hot content management standards, read Jon Mark's article WCM Field Notes: The Skinny on JCR, CMIS and OSGi.

Enterprise 2.0

The adoption of social computing in the enterprise was big news this year.

• Google took the beta tag off its apps to show it was enterprise ready
• Then they released Google Wave, supposedly the next generation collaboration platform.
• We learned four reasons you should adopt social media in the enterprise
• That Twitter and Facebook are the most persuasive technology of all time. And now the real-time fire hoses are open (watch what you say!).
• But despite all the hootin and hollering, not everyone thought this Enterprise 2.0 thing was necessary.

Industry Themes: Search, Speed, Analytics, Semantics, Real-time, Open Source and more...

You can't go through a year without major industry shifts, 2009 had its share:

• Microsoft challenged Google in the search arena with Bing. Have the Search Wars begun in earnest this time?
• Google brought new meaning to less is more with the Chrome browser.
• Just about everyone was talking about the real-time web. Google unveiled real-time search, Twitter opened the real-time fire hose for all developers, as did Facebook.
• The analytics space was taken for a roller coaster ride when IBM acquired SPSS for US$ 1.2 bil and Adobe acquired Omniture for US$ 1.8 bil.
• The semantic web pushed forward with an HTML+RDFa Draft, RDFa metadata moving it the Drupal core and some interesting research on applying semantic web metadata to large data sets. Tim Berners-Lee continued work on linked data and semantic web technologies, with an official mandate in the UK.
• Open Source went to the White House in the form of the Drupal Web CMS. And the U.S. Department of Defense said open source software was a-OK for them.
• Looking forward, CMS Watch recently made their 2010 predictions.
• And looking backwards (to October 2008), Gartner predicted the Top 10 Strategic Technologies of 2009 ...were they right?

That's it for the holiday brain food fun. Thanks for supporting us in 2009 -- we'll see you right back here in January.

Researchers with the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) have thrown themselves head over heels into the semantic web. At this year's 8th International Semantic Web Conference, they presented a paper (download the PDF) focused on the problem of automatically generating the metadata that many semantic web functionalities rely on. 

Talking about RDF closures can cause eyelids to flutter, but the RPI folks aren't living in some theoretical world. They've been digging hard into large, public data sets and have learned some important lessons about making data more useful. Come join us for a closer look.

HTML 5 (news, site) is the fifth major revision of the web's core language and it has been designed to support the rapidly changing Web 2.0 world we live in today. Let's take a little tour of what this latest version means for web development.

Without complex decision trees helping computers determine what pieces of text relate to what, it's nearly impossible to make use of the wealth of data available on the web.

In the case where you're only interested in people reading your pages, that's fine. But what if you want other sites to access and use the data you're offering with a full understanding of the context? We're one step closer to a standard that defines exactly how to make this clear.

For months now we've been talking about RDFa and how this proposed standard leads toward the semantic web. Recently, this vision took a step further toward reality.

ocPortal (news, site) has been incubating version 4.2 of its Web CMS for some nine months now. Finally out, what delights does it offer?

Orchestr8, developers of semantic tagging and text mining software, announced a new technology to complement their content analysis service, AlchemyAPI.

Dubbed Visual Constraints, the company claims the tool enables the extraction of structured data (such as product info, pricing, descriptions, etc.) from any web page.

On September 4th, the President took another important step toward a more open and transparent government by announcing a new policy to voluntarily disclose White House visitor access records.

Aside from a small group of appointments that cannot be disclosed because of their necessarily confidential nature, the record of every visitor who comes to the White House for an appointment, a tour or to conduct business will be released. As historic as the President’s announcement is, it is also a good illustration of what is missing from the administration’s technology infrastructure plan -- a coordinated approach to providing data standards.

Last week the World Wide Web Consortium (news, site) announced a new standard that connects simple knowledge organization systems (SKOS) like classifications, taxonomies, folksonomies, etc. with the linked data community.

The bridge allows SKOS to assist in managing large collections of data in the form of books, historical artifacts, news reports, blog entries, etc.

As many a blog entry will reiterate, as of late, there’s been a good amount of buzz around the launch of Microsoft’s new Bing search engine.

Moreover, there’s been a decent amount of speculation on what the growing popularity of Bing -- along with their recent agreement with Yahoo -- will mean in regards to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) practices.  As with any buzz in the online world, many marketing blogs, including Forrester, began to postulate what effect Bing will have on SEO, even before it officially launched.

These days the UK government seems unusually savvy when it comes to technology, open source and open standards. Now they've embraced another open movement, that of open data. And they've appointed Sir Tim Berners-Lee, father of the World Wide Web, to help.

If you regularly run into words like "ontology" and acronyms like OWL, then you'll be pleased to hear that Protege 4.0 (news, site) has been released.

Those who aren't deeply involved in the semantic web may not quite run to learn more, but semantic web technologies are coming faster than you think. It's a good idea to pay at least some attention.

Over the years, the Drupal (news, site) web content management system has had the same problem as any other growing software project: deciding which features are important enough to belong in the core of the software.

One such candidate feature -- which the Drupal team has discussed since 2004 -- is that of enabling CMS administrators to define custom content types, or fields for the system.

The Content Construction Kit (CCK), an add-on module for Drupal, has handily taken care of this need for years. In Drupal 7, it will no longer be needed. But even more, we'll be getting some tasty semantic web features as part of the changes.