Andraz: thanks so much for your insight and the DBs you mentioned. I suppose we already see some examples of ‘computers acting like personal assistants’ in tools like personalized recommendations in Amazon and Netflix (though I use them very little). I think it’s very valuable to take that sort of thing to the general web. I can’t remember who said that there’s never too much information just not good enough filters. So thanks for taking on the challenge to help us sort this endless amounts of bytes.

I’m trying out both your Zemanta toolbar and the WP plugin. We’ll see how it goes.

I think lately there was too much emphasis on the Semantic web technology and vision instead of clear execution. Semantic web is a technology and a paradigm whose only purpose should be to deliver better services to end users and companies.

This means that computers need to be able to take a step in the direction of understanding the data. Processing existing content is an important thing. On the other hand large organized databases are being created from Web 2.0 resources - dbPedia, Freebase, MusicBrainz. A project called Linking Open Data (LOD) is trying to unite and federate these databases which are becoming vocabularies for software to communicate and process information between different systems.

Thus by joining completely statistical systems and systems that (to at least certain degree) tackle meanings, we will be able to create new services and (more importantly) improve old ones.

My belief is that a lot of Web 3.0 offerings are going to be “ambiental”, just popping up when there is something to help with and staying hidden most of the time. Computer becoming more of a personal assistant and less of a tool. I’d imagine telling computer to do some complex task, then being presented with results which I just check and correct - like you would deal with personal assistant.

Glue, Zemanta and a few others are following this new ambiental assistant path. I hope we’re doing a good job. We’re definitely carving for feedback.

Andraz Tori, CTO at Zemanta