Every year ReadWriteWeb selects the top 10 products or developments across a range of categories. We kick off the 2010 ‘Best Of’ series with our selection of the top 10 Semantic Web products and implementations of the year.
This year we’ve chosen 5 products by semantically charged startups and 5 implementations by large organizations. The startups represent the cutting edge of Semantic Web. Each has made an impact on the Internet this year, with user growth and innovation. The organizations we’ve selected – which include Facebook, Google and the BBC – offered the best examples of large scale deployment of semantic technology.
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A note on terminology: we are using ‘Semantic Web’ and ‘Semantic technology’ somewhat interchangeably, although many people believe that the term Semantic Web (upper case) should only be applied to W3C-approved technologies such as RDF and SPARQL. The fact is that a good portion of our top 10 use technologies that are either not approved by the W3C (the Web’s governing body, led by Sir Tim Berners-Lee), or they’ve been tweaked in some way – for example, Facebook’s use of RDFa. So we’ve chosen to use the term ‘Semantic Web’ in its broader, more inclusive, sense. In a nutshell, these are products that add meaning and context to data.
Here then is our list of the top 10 Semantic Web products or implementations of 2010 (in no particular order).
Freebase
In July Google acquired one of the leading Semantic Web companies, Metaweb. Metaweb runs Freebase, an open, semantically marked up database of information. It looks similar to Wikipedia, but Freebase is all about structured data and what you can do with it.
Google already had a relationship with Freebase, pulling in its information to provide intelligent search results within Google News. With the acquisition of Metaweb, Google can now leverage the company’s tools and data even further, especially within basic Web search results.
Freebase was one of our top 10 Semantic Web products last year and being acquired by Google validates its potential.
GetGlue
This year was a turning point for GetGlue, the service where users "check in" to watching TV shows, reading books, listening to music and more. Last November, GetGlue changed its branding and launched a new website. It changed almost overnight from a geeky browser add-on called Blue Organizer to a destination website called GetGlue. Mobile applications followed soon after, enabling its users to interact with GetGlue while watching TV or at an entertainment venue.
The changes have been good for GetGlue. It’s experienced strong growth this year, reaching over 600,000 users by the end of September.
The launch of the iPad in 2010 triggered a new round of innovation in the startup community. Few startups utilized the touchscreen UI to create a unique user experience more than Flipboard, a magazine reading application built specifically for the iPad.
It turns out that Flipboard isn’t just a pretty face, it’s also using Semantic technologies.
In July, Flipboard acquired semantic technology startup Ellerdale, whose intelligent data-parsing algorithms had previously been used to create a real-time search engine and trends tracker. Ellerdale’s technology was used by Flipboard to design a more personalized real-time experience – determining what social updates are important to you and presenting them in its now familiar magazine-like format.
Hunch
Hunch started out as a Q&A service, but in August it re-positioned as a personalization service. It’s a recommendation engine that shows you movies you want to see, books you want to read, vacation destinations you want to go to, and much more. The company is on a mission to "map every person on the Internet to every object on the Internet, be that a product, a service, or a person.”
Co-founder Caterina Fake told us in October that Hunch uses a decision tree model, as an alternative to search, to provide more personalized information to users.
Apture
Apture is a semantic contextual search service which continues to iterate strongly (it made our top 10 list last year, too). In August, Apture launched Apture Highlights, a plug-in that allows you to dive deep into any topic you discover on almost any page around the web.
When we first noticed Apture several years ago, it was a service that required publishers to load up linked pop-up widgets with multimedia of their own choosing. The company removed that barrier to entry with its August release. Everything is now automated and it’s available almost everywhere. Indeed we liked it so much, we started using Apture on ReadWriteWeb (there is no commercial relationship, we just think the product adds to our site’s user experience).
Next Page: Top 5 big organization implementations of Semantic Web technology. Featuring Facebook’s Open Graph, Google’s semantic search, and more…
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