Google Base provides users the ability of bulk uploads. To enable this Google has defined some extensions to syndication feeds.

To facilitate the addition of more detailed information we extended RSS 1.0 by creating a module defined in a Google Base namespace. The namespace defines a list of attributes that can be used to increase the amount of information provided for an item in a bulk upload.

Information about all attributes is available here. Some interesting observations from their RSS 1.0 extension —

• Google has defined a new namespace (http://base.google.com/ns/1.0) to support these attributes. Are we seeing the first formal adoption of Semantic Web concepts (by Google) here?
• Google Base let’s users create new schemas (attributes). For instance, an example from Google Base shows how “language_skills” attribute can be added to a job opening description. I wonder how these new namespaces are ingested by Google Base?

[EDIT] More discussion on Google Base and Semantic Web by Danny, Shelly and many others(here and here)

A while back I wrote a blog that reports my user experience with SemanticWorks 2006. In my blog, I claimed that the software doesn’t seem to support the use of owl:imports when editing an OWL ontology.

Today an anonymous person is kindly enough to inform me that I was wrong — see my blog’s comment section. I took this person’s advise and try the software again. This time I’m able to use owl:imports when editing an ontology.

The following shows I successfully defined an ontology that imports SOUPA Document ontology, and which in turn imports SOUPA Person and SOUPA Time ontologies:

Screenshot-1

The following shows the class view of all classes that are imported from different ontology documents:

Screenshot-2

The following shows the property view of all properties that are imported from different ontology documents:

Screenshot-3

Should you have other comments, drop me message.

The much awaited service from google Google Base is now launched! Go check it out… its quite cool. My first reaction was that it is yet another tagging tool - but it seems way cooler than that. It looks like it provides a simple way for you to create different item types and give attributes to each. It would be interesting to see if they are going to provide APIs so that we can make use of all the information available and import/export RDF metadata.

Shanghai might be China’s business hub, but getting to a meeting on time has always been a problem because of the high demand for taxis. Starting this week, Shanghai residents can now hail a taxi using their mobile phones and a new wireless short message service (SMS).

The Shanghai Taxi Control Center has launched a “Booking Taxi Via Short Message” service to ease citizens’ transportation needs.

After citizens input their name, location, destination and starting time, and indicate the traffic details nearby, they only need to send the message to 96965. The control center will relay them with a message to confirm the booking and then send a taxi to the required place within 10 minutes.

Source: ChinaTechNews.com

The Financial Times has a good article on the way mobile communications is changing modern life. The long articlew covers wifi, mobile phones and a lot more and looks at their impact around the world.

Mobility Special: Plugged into it all
By Richard Waters, Financial Times, 11 Nov2005
…
Tools such as e-mail and instant messaging may have been around since the dawn of the internet era, but it has taken a wireless communications revolution to turn them into a constant and inescapable fact of life for a growing part of the population. WiFi networks - a low-cost technology that can beam large chunks of data over short distances using part of the radio spectrum that was previously the preserve of gadgets such as garage door openers and baby monitors - assure the digitally addicted of a permanent and ubiquitous connection to the wider world. At the same time, more versatile mobile phones have turned text messages into the communications tool of choice for teenagers in Asia and Europe, if not yet the US, while also bringing e-mail to many handsets. For those in the grip of these new networks, life has changed. There’s no such thing as solitude any more, no fragment of time that cannot be filled with digital chatter
….

A common observation is that the things people seem to enjoy most (e.g., food, drink, sex) are not envisioned as part of Heaven. I guess we shouldn’t expect wifi or good mobile phone coverage there either.

Paul Resnick has an interesting post from last year (spotted on populicious) summarizing and commenting on a paper describing a class of situations in which reputation systems are unambiguously bad:

Ely, Jeffrey C., Fudenberg , Drew and Levine, David K., “When is Reputation Bad?” (May 2004). Harvard Institute of Economic Research Discussion Paper No. 2035. http://ssrn.com/abstract=566822

Danny has initiated an excellent wiki page on microformats and faqs-for-rdf fans. A useful resource scoping microformats with RDF - a must read for Semantic Web fans.

To add some justification to my previous post, here’s a good summary of IBM’s adoption of Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web — from the “The Future of Social Networks” event at IBM, Cambridge. Summary of the panel talk and discussion on IBM’s adoption of emerging technologies for the intranet make a useful read.

(via David Weinberger)

“Semantic Web for Industry”, the keynote talk by Tim Berners-Lee during Industry Day at ISWC 2005 seems to have generated some interest. Slides make a fairly convincing argument for Semantic Web adoption by industry. The concept of RDF Bus and its positioning for the enterprise is very well depicted.
(Via captsolo)

A revised version of the UMBC Semantic Web Reference Card has been released. This is is a handy “cheat sheet” for Semantic Web developers that can be printed double sided on one sheet of paper and tri-folded. The card includes the following:

• RDF/RDFS/OWL vocabulary
• RDF/XML reserved terms (outside RDF vocabulary)
• a simple RDF example in different formats
• SPARQL semantic web query language reference
• many handy facts for developers

Please send any comments or suggestions to feedback@ebiquity.umbc.edu.

Open Source software has increasingly grown in popularity and dominance, challenging the likes of Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM. Both Industry and Academia have adopted Open Source Software like Linux, OpenBSD, Apache, MySQL and OpenOffice to replace or supplant commercial versions of Windows XP, Websphere, Oracle, DB2, and MS Office. This dominance will be seen to continue to grow in the coming years.

Giants like Google, Amazon, eTrade, and eBay use Open Source Software to run their web businesses/services. The tradeoff to paying royalties or license fees, is the availability of source code, which is closely scrutinized or safety tested, by these companies and then deployed. Thus, these companies no longer depend on licensed proprietary solutions.

Google Ads and the roaring profits made by Google in its last quarter have led to Google stocks jumping by around 50 dollars in less than a month. Online targeted advertising has been seen to be more effective and more companies are now investing in online advertising like Google Ads.

Open source software projects and their “profitability” have often been questioned and even dismissed as a fools errand. However now bighshots like Microsoft, IBM and Oracle amongst others seem to have formulated strategies to cope with Open Source. Venture captitalists have been pouring money into Open Source Projects — a sign that this is seen as next big thing. Companies dismissing Open Source or failing to adapt to it, risk losing their user base and affecting their longterm survivability.

Microsoft: Shared Source, Windows Live, Office Live

IBM: Open Source Acquisitions, Adoption of Open Source (support model)

Oracle: Free version of the Oracle database

Everyone wants a piece of the online-advertising pie. With the increasing growth of high-speed internet, people are growing to expect free services on the Internet. The success of XBox-live is a sign of things to come.

The availalbility of cheap/free software replacements for most of the popular commercial products will see further decline in the revenue for commercial products.

Software Companies seem to be realizing that in the coming decade, online software services will be a major source of revenue — search, ads, trading, gaming, and so on. The “free” Internet Browsers will be the gateways to the online world, while the stored PC programs will see a declining role.