Geospatial Semantic Web Blog

Today Nintendo Wii released a new Wii Channel called the News Channel. Similar to the Weather Channel, the News Channel is an information portal, which periodically downloads news feeds from the Associated Press.

A key feature of this News Channel is the viewing of news in a Google-Earth-like globe. In this view, news articles are rendered as stacks of newspapers. News that are reported from different geographical locations are geospatially placed on the global — e.g., news that are reported from the Washington D.C. region are stacked together and placed at the capital of the United States.

Other interesting features include the ability to play a news feed as a sequence of slide show and the ability to adjust the screen font size for a better viewing in front of a TV. See my YouTube video.
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Entrepreneurs are constantly in the look out for Semantic Web applications that will create business value. Pellet, an OWL-DL reasoner in Java, is a very successful Semantic Web application. Clark & Parsia is now in process to offer commercial support for Pellet. Also, the company is considering to create Semantic Web applications for public policy reasoning and managment.
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GPS is one of the hottest technology in the 2007 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES). Recent news are full with exciting GPS product and service reviews. If 2006 was the year of Wi-Fi, then 2007 will be the year of GPS.

Here are few CES stories in the development.
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Recently I learned about Centiare from Gregory Kohs, a co-developer of the application. Centiare is a new Wiki application that builds on the Semantic MediaWiki features.

Centiare is a unique online reference directory that anyone can use. You can set up your very own Directory page about yourself or your business, and no other users can edit it. That’s how the Directory pages work — if you create it, you own it.

[Y]ou’re encouraged to express advocate points-of-view (APOV); include links to your products, artwork, blogs, or books you’ve written; and create wiki-links to any other pages in Centiare that you find interesting.

Centiare differs from other community-based Wiki sites in several ways.
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Mozilla Firefox 3 may support Microformats, RWW reports. This news was spreading because Mozilla designer Alex Faaborg wrote an interesting blog on why browsers should support semantic markups. In his blog, Alex writes,

Much in the same way that operating systems currently associate particular file types with specific applications, future Web browsers are likely going to associate semantically marked up data you encounter on the Web with specific applications, either on your system or online.

Alex envisions the future Firefox browser as an information broker (or an aggregator) for the Web. It will automatically detect, extract and collect different semantic information on the Web and populates users’ favorite applications with this information. RWW has a nice diagram that illustrates Firefox as an information broker.
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