Earlier this month I had the great pleasure to spend time talking with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web and now Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in Cambridge, MA.

Our wide-ranging dig into the past, present and future of the Semantic Web was recorded for one of the regular Talking with Talis podcasts, and now appears here as the first of a new podcast series for ZDNet; Talking Semantics.

In this post, I’d like to draw out some aspects of the conversation that I found most interesting. Have a listen for yourself, draw your own conclusions, and please do share them in TalkBack. Read the rest of this entry »

A rumoured additional investment in San Francisco-based Semantic Web startup, Radar Networks, has become clearer over the weekend.

Late last week, Dan Primack broke the story on PE Hub, reporting on a lunch he’d had with Ross Levinsohn and Roland Van der Meer of Velocity. VentureBeat’s Chris Morrison added flesh to bones, reporting his own sources as suggesting a $15-20 million investment, and I in turn reported that here.

A conversation with Radar Networks’ CEO, Nova Spivack, backed up by Radar’s formal press release overnight, sheds further light on both the investment and its purpose. Read the rest of this entry »

Chris Morrison reports on VentureBeat that Semantic Web company Radar Networks has received a fresh round of investment, probably in the order of $15-20 Million. This is less than the $42.5 Million to Metaweb that I mentioned in my last post, but the detail of how much control each company has had to surrender to their respective investors remain unclear.

Radar Networks is best known for their Twine application, which launched at O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Summit last November. Twine remains in closed beta at the time of writing.

Disclosure: Radar Networks CEO, Nova Spivack, is a member of my employers’ Platform Advisory Group.

Hello, and welcome to this latest offering from the ZDNet blogging stable.

My name is Paul Miller, and I’m delighted that ZDNet have invited me to start a blog with them that can concentrate on bringing you insight and analysis on the Semantic Web. I’m grateful to David Grober and his colleagues at ZDNet for the opportunity, and look forward to fulfilling the potential that we all saw in setting out on this particular journey.

From its early gestation as a glimmer in the eye of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, through a decade or more of cutting edge research in universities and the R&D arms of big corporations, the Semantic Web has really begun to reach enterprise readiness just recently. Publication of the SPARQL specifications last month, for example, sees the completion of the core standards toolkit upon which application developers will depend. As far back as April last year, Reuters demonstrated their faith in semantic technology with their acquisition of Clearforest, and some of the reasoning behind that move became clearer in a conversation between Reuters’ Devin Wenig and Tim O’Reilly earlier this month. Last month, too, we saw Metaweb raise $42.5 Million in a Series B investment round.

My colleague, Danny Ayers, does a great job of tracking the minutiae of the Semantic Web community with his regular This Week’s Semantic Web blog posts, and I certainly have no intention of duplicating those efforts here. Instead, I intend to interpret the news, analyse the news, and draw out the big trends hidden within the news. Why does the Semantic Web matter, and what should you be doing about it?

We’re heading into conference season, and I’ll be on the ground at events such as the World Wide Web conference in Beijing, Semantic Technology in San Jose, and Linked Data Planet in New York, trying to get at the trends underlying the presentations and the corridor chatter. I’m also lining up interviews with some of those most closely involved in developing and deploying semantic technologies for the mainstream, and there will be more on the first of those in a couple of days.

As well as my own posts, I’ll be looking to line up a series of guest bloggers with interesting perspectives of their own to add, so subscribe to the feed and join us on an enterprise-friendly journey through the opportunities offered by the emerging Semantic Web.