If there was any doubt that libraries belong in semantic web development, check out these two examples of the semantic web applications that are emerging. The majority of applications available right now (or in preview/beta) focus on information management and search. Sounds like our business to me. With 2008 predicted by some as the year of the semantic web, the time for libraries to take a closer look is now.
Freebase
Pulls in data from datasets such as Wikipedia and creates relationships and meaning between different data points. Their example of usage:
For example, if you ask Freebase for Jennifer Connelly films with actors who have appeared in a Steven Spielberg movie, you”ll get a tidy list of eight movies.
Also includes an API to add Freebase results to your own web projects. Possibly useful at the refdesk.
If you’re a statistics person, this concept will be very familiar to you. Essentially, it’s a giant database of cross-tabulated data. But unlike the kinds of data that you might be used to cross-tabulating, such as government statistics or census data (as I used to do) there is a big difference with Freebase inherent in the datasets they have chosen to populate their database -
Because Freebase lets anyone edit the data, there’s always a chance that somebody has, intentionally or unintentionally, introduced a mistake.
Hakia
Aims to retrieve more relevant, reliable search results. As librarians used to teaching all kinds of complicated methods to retrieve better results not only from search engines but scholarly databases we might wonder whether such a goal is possible! This and other semantic search projects will be interesting to watch over the next year.
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