The DiSo project is a promising attempt to create a distributed social network which is not following the “silo” approach as other social networks do. The blog of the project offers a short (4 min) introductionary video in which Chris Messina explains the vision and ideas behind this solution. The project will make use of open standards like OpenID, XMPP and different microformats. Code is available as open source. Really looking forward to see this stuff in action soon.

It looks like the predictions come true and semantic web takes off in 2008. After Google another big player (one you wouldn’t expect in the game at the first first glance), Reuters, made a nifty tool for semantic processing called Calais available.

The Calais web service automatically attaches rich semantic metadata to the content you submit - in well under a second. Using natural language processing, machine learning and other methods, Calais categorizes and links your document with entities (people, places, organizations, etc.), facts (person ‘x’ works for company ‘y’), and events (person ‘z’ was appointed chairman of company ‘y’ on date ‘x’). The metadata results are stored centrally and returned to you as industry-standard RDF constructs accompanied by a Globally Unique Identifier (GUID).

It seems to have quite some power under the hood.

The Google Code Blog introduced today the Social Graph API which is meant to make the information of a social graph to be reused easily. It’s based on the open standards XFN and FOAF data that is embedded into websites. You can find some simple toys to get the idea at the project page. It is real fun to play around with this! Tim O’Reilly asks for mechanism that enforce privacy about selected connections what I also really would like to see. I am not sure but I think it (actually not the Social API itself but XFN/FOAF/etc. in general) also offers new ways of spamming: An advertisement site could like to random profiles pages as friends and if the linked person checks their graphs (asking for people who linked to them) they see the link. Not sure if I got that wrong. Anyhow, this stuff looks really interesting and promising!

Wikia search, the search engine of Jimmy Wales‘ company Wikia, is now online as an alpha version. Everything is very basic so far - no much functionality, content or eye-candy. It relies on user contributions and is supposed to be open and transparent.

Life scientists have a (new) tool to search for literature: GoPubMed. Many others have already reported about and I just found it via this posting (sometime I am quite resistant :)). The press release tells us:

This, the first semantic search engine, reduces search time by up to 90%. By sorting search results it enables scientists to answer biomedical questions in completely new way.

I played around a little bit and think it is really functional and fancy. Funnily “shot gun sequencing” in one of my papers leads to the key word “Firearms”. Recently Folksonomy 4 Science was included which “allows users to identify experts in the biomedical field and gain important information on recent research topics by viewing their networks.”

I guess you didn’t miss the big hype about Googles OpenSocial (link doesn’t work so far), which is a set of open API standards for social networks. I like Google for using open standards and working with and not against the community. But regarding this opening of social networks (same for FOAF/XFN) I have strong concerns as we lose too much control about the data and our privacy. Ralf Bendrath and others precisely describe the problems.

The Internet is challenging our current understanding of privacy/identity/society. Maybe we just have to accept this change and must adept our attitudes. For me personally it is not a problem that a potential employer can find out that I have fun in my spare time (as long as the information is correct … which I cannot control) for other it might be different. But the potential abuse of this easy-to-harvest data by governmental agencies makes me refuse to stop questioning the legitimation of these technologies.

The W3C has created a set of logos to promote semantic web technologies. Nice!

(What this means for microformats can be found here. :))

The W3C published a recommendation for the Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages (GRDDL). The motivation is to make the extraction of semantic data from XML especially from XTHML easier and stimulate by this the usage of embedded sementic data. It describes for example how to extract RDF data from XHTML files that contain data wrapped in a microformat. If you are interested the primer is a good starting point.