“GoodRelations is a language that can be used to describe very precisely whatyour business is offering. Some people call GoodRelations a ‘data dictionary’, others prefer ’schema’ or ‘ontology’. But the name of the thing is not important. Important is that you can use GoodRelations to create a small data package that describes your productsand their features and prices, yourstores and opening hours, payment options and the like.

You simply paste this data package into your Web page using W3C’s RDFa format.”

Martin and Jamie talk about the vocabulary itself, before moving on to the some of the ways in which it transforms commerce on the Web for early adopters such as Best Buy and O’Reilly.

The conversation – and its implications – are also covered in this post on ZDNet today. Links to some of the sites and resources mentioned during our chat are included here, after the fold.

• Best Buy
• Bing
• DBpedia
• DERI
• Drupal Ubercart
• GoodRelations
• GoodRelations Cookbook
• GoodRelations Developer Wiki
• Google
• Google Product Feed Converter
• HTML 5
• Freebase
• Linked Data
• Magento
• Metaweb
• O’Reilly Media
• osCommerce
• Ping The Semantic Web
• RDF
• RDFa
• RDFS
• Sindice
• SPARQL
• STI
• UPC Code
• Universität der Bundeswehr München
• VirtueMart
• Yahoo!
• Yahoo! BOSS

Related articles by Zemanta

• Example Best Buy Product RDFa Markup Released (beta) (jay.beweep.com)
• Best Buy jump starts data web marketing (chiefmartec.com)
• Talking with Martin Hepp about solving the paradox of choice (jonudell.net)
• Thoughts on RDFa (jay.beweep.com)

Backed by Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital, Seattle-based Evri is using semantic technologies to

“change the way consumers discover and engage with content on the Web.”

Via the site at evri.com, users are able to explore news-like topics of interest. Through partnerships with The Washington Post, Hearst and others, Evri is also able to reach established audiences on those sites. An API enables developers to leverage Evri in their own applications, and the forthcoming version 2 of Evri promises further capabilities.

As well as discussing Evri itself, we explore some of Will’s views on the changing role of semantic search, and the potential for this fledgling market to reach wider consumer awareness and adoption. Have a listen, and see what you think.

Links to some of the resources mentioned during our conversation follow, after the cut…

• Bing
• Business.com
• DARPA
• Evri
• Evri’s iPhone application
• Farecast
• Gap
• Google
• Hearst Corporation
• Go2.com
• Insightful Corporation, now part of TIBCO
• Overture, now part of Yahoo!
• Powerset, now part of Microsoft
• Rich Snippets
• SearchMonkey
• Siri
• Vulcan Capital
• The Washington Post
• Yahoo!

Related articles by Zemanta

• Evri Gets New CEO, Will Hunsinger (xconomy.com)
• Evri Drives New Hearst Website, Wants to Make News Aggregators Smarter (xconomy.com)

Earlier this week Flip and I got together on Skype to reprise some of the conversation as a podcast, which is now available.

Production of this podcast was supported by Talis.

My arrangement with Talis concludes with the release of this podcast, so if you want to keep listening to my content you will need to subscribe directly to my feed, either on this site or in iTunes. Talis podcasts continue without me, and you can find their various channels aggregated here.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Is Infochimps’ Aggregated Data a Boon to Researchers or a Privacy Nightmare? (gigaom.com)
• Dear Twitter: Really? Seriously? [Infochimps] (siliconangle.net)
• Infochimps: Share and Sell Your Raw Data (readwriteweb.com)
• DEMO: Infochimps lets users share and sell data (venturebeat.com)
• Infochimps Wants Folks to Monkey Around With Its Data (gigaom.com)
• Twitter Data Dump: InfoChimp Puts 1B Connections Up For Sale (readwriteweb.com)

I spoke with Felix recently to record a podcast exploring the issues that Collibra sets out to address for their growing band of large enterprise customers.

Production of this podcast was supported by Talis.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Defrag Nov 11/12 (jeffnolan.com)
• Defrag 2009: A Retrospective (thenextweb.com)

Lew Moorman is President of Rackspace’s Cloud Division, and I recently spoke with him to hear more about the company’s plans, and their understanding of the way in which the Cloud is increasingly being adopted by mainstream businesses. The resulting conversation has just been released as a podcast.

We also explored the changing nature of the Cloud Computing industry itself, discussing the likelihood that the number of providers will shrink, and addressing calls for market leaders such as Rackspace and Amazon to enable greater interoperability between their data centres.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Defining Cloud Computing for Business Users (socialmediatoday.com)
• Rackspace on Its Cloud Strategy (datacenterknowledge.com)
• Rackspace Launches NoMoreServers.com To Tout Computing-As-A-Service (techcrunch.com)
• Rackspace Announces Expansion – Chicago Datacenter Coming Soon (centernetworks.com)
• Rackspace: Shared Hosting on Borrowed Time (datacenterknowledge.com)

Have a listen to hear about some of mySociety’s projects, and to learn Tom’s views on the current rush toward greater access to data.

As usual, links to the resources we discuss are available in show notes on the Talis site.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Parliamentary website TheyWorkForYou launches redesign (onlinejournalismblog.com)
• Mapumental: visualise any neighbourhood in the UK by transit times, house prices and “scenicness” (boingboing.net)

As a rule, they tend to either offer a pretty interface that facilitates end-user exploration of a constrained set of data, or they proudly offer a massive list of files for download, or they publish an API and encourage you to interact via that. Each of these modes of access has a place, but none is going to be appropriate for most uses of most data, most of the time.

As such, it was refreshing to talk last night with Kevin Merritt. Kevin is CEO of a Seattle-based startup called Socrata, and he is convinced of the need to support multiple modes of access and interaction.

Socrata has utility in a number of markets, but the focus of our conversation was in the context of Government data. Have a listen, to see what Kevin thinks can be done to make initiatives such as the US Government’s data.gov site more useful.

Production of this podcast was supported by Talis, and links to items discussed are included in show notes available on the company’s Nodalities blog.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Linked Government Data (w3.org)

Every time a new search engine pops up, bloggers, journalists and analysts get all worked up about its potential (or otherwise) to be a ‘Google Killer.’ I’ve written about this before, and really can’t understand the apparent obsession with ‘killing’ a company that’s continuing to do remarkably well at meeting the needs of millions. It’s not perfect, of course, and there’s always room for more innovation/competition, but does Google need to die in the process?

It was therefore something of a relief to talk with William Tunstall-Pedoe, and to hear his talk of ‘complementing’ the Google search experience. William is CEO of Cambridge-based True Knowledge, a company that markets its technology as an ‘Answer Engine.’

The True Knowledge web site has been around for a while, largely serving as technology show case and source of new knowledge for the voracious machine rather than as a serious destination site in its own right. Far more interesting is the way that the underlying technology enriches your everyday search experience via browser plugins, and augments third party sites and services (like hotly anticipated virtual personal assistant, Siri) by means of an API.

Have a listen to hear William’s views on what the company can do, and the ways in which it can enrich existing user behaviours.

Production of this podcast was supported by Talis, and show notes are available on their Nodalities blog.

Related articles by Zemanta

• SemTech 2009: Semantic Search (expertsystem.net)
• True Knowledge (expertsystem.net)
• Report: Wolfram Alpha to offer API for data feeds (news.cnet.com)

Today I published a podcast with Thanassis Tiropanis, project manager for the recently finished SemTech report and co-organiser of a workshop on Semantic Web applications for learning and teaching which takes place in Nice on 30 September.

Production of this podcast was supported by Talis, and show notes are available on their Education blog.