原文较长，在http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/18306/page1/ 内容有点像Lassila和Hendler的《Embracing Web 3.0》，但似更谨慎。下面转贴其中讲目前SW应用的部分。其中提到了：
曾任W3C Semantic Web Initiative leader的Eric Miller的咨询公司Zepheira；
Tom Gruber等人的RealTravel
U.K.-based Garlik公司
神秘的Radar Networks公司（公司主页上写着：目前正出于秘密开发状态，07年内会推出产品）
Skype创办人建立的P2P TV服务公司 Joost
从中可见，对于SW的应用前景，似有两种看法：
1. 只限于RDF和简单本体，且它们有不少用处（以RDF Database的形式，结合其它技术，在实现不同来源的数据集成方面）。如 Hendler的"It's really a realization that a little bit of Semantic Web stuff with what's called Web 2.0 is a tremendously powerful technology." 以及Joost的CTO Dirk-Willem van Gulik 的："RDF [and the other rudimentary semantic technologies] solve meaningful problems, and it costs less than any other approach would," he says. "The entire remainder"--the more ambitious work with ontologies and artificial intelligence--"is completely academic."
2. 不仅RDF，而且基于推理等复杂的AI技术也会有实用价值。如：神秘的Radar Networks公司的创办人Nova Spivack 说的"First comes what I call the World Wide Database, making data accessible through queries, with no AI involved," Spivack says. "Step two is the intelligent Web, enabling software to process information more intelligently. That's what we're working on."
无论哪一种，上面几家都获得了风险投资。 论坛上的兄弟们加油了！愿早日找到亮点，争取由我们中的某些人在国内首先创办一家这样的web 3.0公司！
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《A Smarter Web》节选
Into the Real World
If Miller's sunset epiphany showed him the path forward, the community he represented was following similar routes. All around him, ideas that germinated for years in labs and research papers are beginning to take root in the marketplace.
But they're also being savagely pruned. Businesses, even Miller's Zepheira, are adopting the simplest Semantic Web tools while putting aside the more ambitious ones. Entrepreneurs are blending Web 2.0 features with Semantic Web data-­handling techniques. Indeed, if there is to be a Web 3.0, it is likely to include only a portion of the Semantic Web community's work, along with a healthy smattering of other technologies. "The thing being called Web 3.0 is an important subset of the Semantic Web vision," says Jim Hendler, professor of computer science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, who was one of the initiative's pioneer theorists. "It's really a realization that a little bit of Semantic Web stuff with what's called Web 2.0 is a tremendously powerful technology."
Much of that technology is still invisible to consumers, as big companies internally apply the Semantic Web's efficient ways of organizing data. Miller's Zepheira, at least today, is focused on helping them with that job. Zepheira's pitch to companies is fairly simple, perhaps looking once again to Dewey's disorganized libraries. Businesses are awash in inaccessible data on intranets, in unconnected databases, even on employees' hard drives. For each of its clients, Zepheira aims to bring all that data into the light, code it using Semantic Web techniques, and connect it so that it becomes useful across the organization. In one case, that might mean linking Excel documents to payroll or customer databases, in another, connecting customer accounts to personalized information feeds. These disparate data sources would be tied together with RDF and other Semantic Web mechanisms that help computerized search tools find and filter information more efficiently.
One of the company's early clients is Citigroup. The banking giant's global head of capital markets and banking technology, Chris Augustin, is heading an initiative to use semantic technologies to organize and correlate information from diverse financial-data feeds. The goal is to help identify capital-market investment opportunities. "We are interested in providing our customers and traders with the latest information in the most relevant and timely manner to help them make the best decisions quickly," says Rachel Yager, the program director overseeing the effort.
Others are beginning to apply semantic techniques to consumer-focused businesses, varying widely in how deeply they draw from the Semantic Web's well.
The Los Altos, CA-based website RealTravel, created by chief executive Ken Leeder, AdForce founder Michael Tanne, and Semantic Web researcher Tom Gruber, offers an early example of what it will look like to mix Web 2.0 features like tagging and blogging with a semantic data-organization system. The U.K.-based Garlik, headed by former top executives of the British online bank Egg, uses an RDF-based database as part of a privacy service that keeps customers apprised of how much of their personal information is appearing online. "We think Garlik's technology gives them a really interesting technology advantage, but this is at a very early stage," says 3i's ­Waterhouse, whose venture firm helped fund Garlik. "Semantic technology is going to be a slow burn."
San Francisco-based Radar Networks, created by ­EarthWeb cofounder Nova Spivack and funded in part by Allen's Vulcan Capital, plans eventually to release a full development platform for commercial Semantic Web applications, and will begin to release collaboration and information­-sharing tools based on the techniques this year. Spivack himself has been part of the Semantic Web community for years, most recently working with DARPA and SRI International on a long-term project called CALO (Cognitive Agent that Learns and Organizes), which aims to help military analysts filter and analyze new data.
Radar Networks' tools will be based on familiar ideas such as sharing bookmarks, notes, and documents, but Spivack says that ordering and linking this data within the basic Semantic Web framework will help teams analyze their work more efficiently. He predicts that the mainstream Web will spend years assimilating these basic organization processes, using RDF and related tools, while the Semantic Web's more ambitious artificial-intelligence applications wait in the wings.
"First comes what I call the World Wide Database, making data accessible through queries, with no AI involved," Spivack says. "Step two is the intelligent Web, enabling software to process information more intelligently. That's what we're working on."
One of the highest-profile deployments of Semantic Web technology is courtesy of Joost, the closely watched Internet television startup formed by the creators of Skype and Kazaa. The company has moved extraordinarily quickly from last year's original conception, through software development and Byzantine negotiations with video content owners, into beta-testing of its customizable peer-to-peer TV software.
That would have been impossible if not for the Semantic Web's RDF techniques, which Joost chief technology officer Dirk-Willem van Gulik calls "XML on steroids." RDF allowed developers to write software without worrying about widely varying content-use restrictions or national regulations, all of which could be accommodated afterwards using RDF's Semantic Web linkages.
Joost's RDF infrastructure also means that users will have wide-ranging control over the service, van Gulik adds. People will be able to program their own virtual TV networks--if an advertiser wants its own "channel," say, or an environmental group wants to bring topical content to its members--by using the powerful search and filtering ­capacity inherent in the semantic ordering of data.
But van Gulik's admiration goes only so far. While he believes that the simpler elements of the Semantic Web will be essential to a huge range of online businesses, the rest he can do without. "RDF [and the other rudimentary semantic technologies] solve meaningful problems, and it costs less than any other approach would," he says. "The entire remainder"--the more ambitious work with ontologies and artificial intelligence--"is completely academic."
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W3CHINA.ORG讨论区 - Web新技术讨论 → 『 Semantic Web(语义Web)/描述逻辑/本体 』 → 利好报道 - MIT Technology Review: A Smarter Web
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2007/5/16 21:52:00
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利好报道 - MIT Technology Review: A Smarter Web
