"QROBO WILL REPLACE OTHERS. The brand-new QROBO is the real semantic web search engine."

Check this citation yourself at semantics.co.kr to verify this statement. SWESE, Swoogle, look out... :-)

I met people from the company at CeBit.

Update (9.3.2008): They also patented PERSONAL INFORMATION MANAGEMENT METHOD USING INTERNET in 2007, which shows how completly fucked up the patenting system is when you can patent something like this (which we incidentially publshed as papers 5 years ago and you can download as software since the web exists...)

Tomorrow, at the 8th March 2008 I am presenting some slides about Semantic Desktop tomorrow at the SFI Studecki Festiwal Informatyczny.

Drop in at 15:45 in beautiful Krakow University.



At the moment Chad Fowler is giving a talk on Ruby, and its great fun to listen and learn.

See a short report on NEPOMUK in 3SAT TV this sunday, later on the web.



Yve Fehring, Gabi Glasstädter and a team from 3SAT were here a minute ago (actually they are still here, filming the next DFKI prototype, Babbletunes). They took some pictures of NEPOMUK and interviewed Andreas Dengel. The report is on air in "neues" this Sunday, 16:30.



At one point, they put the "sniffing dog of news" on our prototype, cute!

We are proud to say: NEPOMUK is the only Semantic Web product on the CeBit fair, the biggest computer fair in the world. Why?

Wanting to search for other people working in the topics of web 3.0 and semantic web, I searched the official CeBit 2008 search engine for products and exhibitors for Semantic Web technologies. The product NEPOMUK came as single result. The only exhibitor mentioning semantic web is groupMe.

First!



You can see NEPOMUK in Hall9, booth B37, and GroupMe (presented by my good friends from L3S) in the same Hall 9 at booth B22.

There is a question related to the semantic web, and this question is - will it be a centralized, dictated system or open? Is there "one weird standard to rule us all?"

Update: Roy Fielding, who motivated to write me this post yesterday, answered in a comment and I reconsidered my post, rewriting it (29.2.2008). Updates are Italic, deleted text striked.

The fundamental question as such - is the semantic web a controllable system or a distributed (more chaotic) structure - shows up in different manifestations. I interpret the question of unambigous URIs - one URI for one concept, not multiple - as subtopic of this.

As you could guess already, the answer is no. The Semantic Web is as free, open, uncontrolled, unreliable as the web today, but with more features.

Roy Fielding said (actually cited) that one the Semantic Web's goal is to unambigously identify resources. He also cited another quote by Tim Berners Lee:
I don’t want the Web to constrain what people do: the Web
is not there to constrain society. It’s there to model society
in its completeness, in its entirety. [Tim Berners-Lee, 1994]

What does this mean? Unambigous means when you talk about the Tesla Car, you must always use the same identifier (in our case, a URI) to refer to it. As could be expected, this idea is not a requirement of the semantic web and not practically required nor used much. Some people state it as a nice scientific goal, but deployers don't have to care about it as the W3C recommendation has something else to say.

Instead, people continue to say things about the world in blogposts and wikipedia and elsewhere as always, minting new URIs for things as they want. In the Semantic Web, the standard tags "rdfs:seeAlso" and "owl:sameAs" are then used to link the different views about the same thing, or the Tesla. If you want to neen non-ambiguity, perhaps use sindice (or any other semantic web search engine). Horray, freedom of expression and scalability prevails.

And yes, the Semantic Web is already there, for example on openlinkeddata, or on GoPubMed. So maybe Roy's statement "the semantic web will never happen" indicates Roy is living in the past? We will see in the future...

Sorry Mr Fielding, this sarcasm now rebounds to myself, I was wrong, you are right in citing both positions.