This is Part 2 of a post on Australia and semantic apps. In Part 1, which you can find here, we were introduced to David Petar Novakovic, his work and semantic apps.

In Part 2 we look a little more closely at semantic apps and Australia’s role in the future of the semantic web

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Computation Linguistics, Semantics and Natural Language Processing (topics we covered in Part 1) are all thought to be part of what will eventually be Web 3.0 – where do you think we’re at in terms of the development of practical apps that use the theory that’s currently out there?

The Smart Web is fast approaching, these technologies are already being used in real apps. Our own platform is being used to help power some technologies being used by some rather large publishers. This will be a slower adoption by companies to stay ahead of the curve, unlike the huge boom caused by Web 2.0.

There are companies popping up that are doing search, or basically competing with Google. I don’t believe search as it exists now will create big waves in the future. Instead smaller apps that provide specific functionality built on semantic technologies will pop up. These small apps will make recommendations and suggestions and learn about us. Because browsing exposure will be made of up sequences, or mashups of these smaller technologies, we will become less dependent on search.

Examples of early versions of this behaviour have been around for a while. Widgets like Minekey that display related content in other websites, recommended friends in Facebook or even “related blog posts” at the end of a post are machines making suggestions.  Using these means there are less situations that arise where we need to search for something. Add to this the effect of collective intelligence, or “lazy web” like twitter and friendfeed, we really are needing search less and less. I don’t think Google will ever go out of business, but Peter Norvig from Google has said he thinks “semantic stuff” is not really the future. In reality they use a lot of statistical approaches in their own search technology, and the boundaries between “semantic stuff” and their own technologies are becoming less well defined, he probably wouldn’t reiterate that comment now.

There are great opportunities out there for companies to provide apps built on these technologies. Hence why I started working on a platform to provide this kind of functionality. In fact i wanted to develop the small apps, but I needed the platform in the back end to provide the smarts first.

Where do you think we’ll be in the next couple of years

The boundaries between what is recommended by humans (tagging) and what is recommended by machines will blur and eventually won’t matter any more. Ontologies and the Semantic Web will be married with smart semiotic engines, bringing the technology closer to the real information. Combined with semantic and microformat aware browsers and devices, more and more possibilities for engaging interaction will occur.  Information both online and offline will always be personally relevant, no matter where you are and what you are doing, whether it is on the web or not. Data Portability is one of the key enablers of this new wave of relevance, control and engagement.

Is Australia well-placed to be at the forefront of that world, or do we have a lot of catching up to do?

From a technology and IP point of view, Australia is up there with the rest of the world. The problem with Australia is that most of the investors don’t understand these technologies and shy away from the young entrepreneurs. On top of this, investors over here need the harder sell, something that rarely comes naturally to young technologists. I know this is a gross generalisation, but it is not far from the truth.  Think about Powerset, it would have been a lot harder for them to get funded over here, let alone make an impression in the US, but because of where they are, and the people willing to make a commitment to their vision, they sold to Microsoft for something around $100mil after getting a series A round of $12mil. Anyway, that is a topic for another post.

A lot of this stuff is still very much driven by research, Queensland University of Technology has a very strong IR/COLING cluster that is involved on the international stage. There are also strong groups at other universities around Australia.

I’d like to see the universities introducing these concepts at least as a single subject earlier in the degree, give people a taste of what is going to be driving the next generation of the web. We need more things like Silicon Beach.

Who (besides you, of course ) should we be keeping an eye on in the space, in Australia?

Faraday Media, they have the vision, technologies, prowess, momentum and support to deliver a whole family of next-gen technologies that will change the way we use the web. Keep an eye on them.

Any last comments?

Anyone interested in having a look at some technologies useful for these kinds of calculations should check out Toby Segaran’s “Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications”. A very cool introductory book.

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So there it is. A big thanks to David for taking the time to to give his thoughts. Rumour has it there will be some big announcements from Comvine in the coming weeks so keep and eye out at TechNation Australia for more news as it arises.