Fresh + Newer talks about the semantic web and museum data interoperability:

At Museums on the Web 2008 there was the beginnings of a push amongst the technically oriented for the development of APIs for museum data, especially collections. Driven in part by discussions and early demonstrations of semantic web applications in museums, the conceptual work of Ross Parry, and the presence of Eric Miller and Brian Sletten of Zepheria; Aaron Straup Cope and George Oates of Flickr, MW08 might well be a historic turning point for the sector in terms of data interoperability and experimentation.

One — not very compelling in my opinion — example provided is:

Now back to that semantic query, wouldn’t it be useful if we could do this - “Play me all the music videos of singles that appear on albums whose record cover art was influenced by Jackson Pollock?”. This could, of course be done by combining the datasets of, say the Tate, Last.FM, Amazon and YouTube - the missing link being the Tate.

I think better examples and real prototypes will help push this sort of data aggregation in useful, educational and entertaining directions. It could be cool.

I learned today that toasters are also audio and video accessories.

Thanks Amazon! Who would have guessed?

Interesting, I also learned (on the same page) that the Panisonic Microwave oven is a toaster and that 2 stars is higher than 3.5 stars which is higher than 3 which is higher than 5.

(note that I am sorting by review score here…).

What’s up with that?!

Jim Hendler may be saddled with the unfortunate title of tetherless World Senior Constellation Professor but he has nice (though breezy) overview of how the web is getting its semantics.

It’s an exciting time for those of us who have been evangelists, early adopters, and language designers for Semantic Web technology. What we see in Web 3.0 is the Semantic Web community moving from arguing over chickens and eggs to creating its first real chicken farms. The technology might not yet be mature, but we’ve come a long way, and the progress promises to continue for a long time to come.

The web3.0 will radically change the rules. As all content will be geotagged, content will have to be classified using a new metric: the GeoRank. GeoRank will not be an absolute value. It will always be related to the observer.

This sounds reasonable but ignores (I think) the computational issues. There are already better metrics than Pagerank for many things (I’ve always been a huge fan of Kleinberg’s Hubs and Authorities (PDF)) but they are a bear to compute.

It’s fun looking for information about the semantic web. Turtle and N3 both formats for RDF. I was looking for information about the details of the syntax; here’s what I found:

Mexico Turtles Totugas n3

You gotta love the web.

David Huynh has put together a beautiful web interface to the Freebase dataset. Very nicely done.

(check out the Wikipedia if my title was confusing)