From semantic web to charged news
Jinfo Blog

6th December 2009

By Tim Buckley Owen

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To judge from conference presentations at Online Information 2009, next year may be the one when the semantic web comes of age. But will the improved information experience that it promises persuade people to pay for quality? Up to now it hadn’t been able to live up to the hype, said Ian Davis of Talis – but, with Linked Data emerging as the dominant design, that was changing. Uniform resource identifiers (URIs) identified things and the Resource Description Framework (RDF) described them; data from sites that employed these technologies could be collected and used in real time. Elsewhere, Tom Scott of the BBC explained how Linked Data, allowing loosely coupled, distributed items to work together, had become the cheapest, surest way of building a web site. Where every programme had its own automatically updated page, with around 10,000 updates in total per day, the BBC was using sources such as the MusicBrainz open content database and Wikipedia to provide supporting information, with a controlled vocabulary from DBpedia handling disambiguation. When it came to government data – the basis of so much commercial information – the mandating of Linked Data standards could represent the tipping point, said Nigel Shadbolt of Southampton University. But there were still administrative and cultural barriers to overcome; currently, government departments had no duty to keep records of the non-personal data they held – and officials were sometimes reluctant to make valuable data generally available on the grounds that it wasn’t ‘perfect’ yet. Raffaele Turiel and Andreas Gianotti explained how the Italian business newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore used semantic technology to create automatic metadata for its information, monetising content by enhancing its relevance and improving its search engine optimisation. With increasing user loyalty resulting from the improved quality of retrieval achieved by the Cogito search engine, readers were viewing more pages and bumping up advertising revenue as a result. That presupposes that advertising has any future as a payment model for news. As the BBC’s Newsnight programme reported from the Online show on December 2 (http://digbig.com/5basmx), the stand-off between News Corporation and Google continued to split the industry, with Laura Vosper of LexisNexis accepting a need to fund the infrastructure that goes behind creating quality journalism, while Karen Blakeman of RBA Information Services suggested that Google had ‘caved in’ by agreeing to limit free searches. Defending his near fully charged service in one of the (free) seminars, however, the Financial Times’s Caspar de Bono appealed to the discernment of information professionals in choosing valuable ‘expensive’ information over information that wanted to be free. The word ‘professional’ was there for a good reason, he said. PowerPoint presentations from the free seminars will be available in due course at http://digbig.com/5basmw

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