This second robot-related story is right out of Star Trek and seems way too fictional to be true, but there are folks working on how to make an android that would look, talk, and respond like the character Dick from the 1982 novel, “We Can Build You.”
This interesting use, or not, of semantic technology caught my attention. Sometimes the accuracy of semantic analysis is in question and the topic in this specific situation could create even more suspicion. The students and professors at Humboldt State University avoided that by reading each of the 150,000 geo-coded tweets to produce a map revealing geographic differences in hate speech regarding, homophobia, racism, and specially-challenged topics.
Andrew Lacy, one of the co-founders of the mobile game Tapulous, has moved into a new market with ZapTravel, a semantic travel search engine. The premise is to take away the data entry approach and use a more texting approach, i.e., “I want to go to Paris.”
Once again my search for the odd and illusive taxonomies have resulted in a treasure. "Taxonomy of trash" was brought to us by Philly.com and it didn't fail to entertain and intrigue me.
Ontology Systems is a finalist in the Big Data and Analytics category for the Pipeline COMENT Innovation Awards 2013.
The Disaster 2.0 team recently hosted the second Masterclass at the Federation of Enterprises in Belgium to discuss the role of social media and web technologies in providing information during disasters. Disaster 2.0 is a two-year project exploring how EU governments currently and can potentially use web 2.0 applications and semantic technologies in disaster response.
As the semantic web continues to develop and grow, it increases the potential to test and challenge the technical and human resources currently supporting it. So the idea of a conference focused specifically on crowdsourcing the semantic web, seems appropriate.