As reported on the Yahoo blog here and Techcrunch here, Yahoo has declared it's commitment to open semantic web standards, such as RDF and microformats.
Although this announcement may be related to Yahoo's chess game with Microsoft, such as Yahoo's announcement to join OpenSocial (see here), Yahoo has been quite willing to accept open standards over past few years, and has an interesting set of open API's for developers to use.
This new announcement may kick off a race to create new and interesting search applications enabled by semantic technologies. Yahoo may become an indispensable resource of semantic information, essentially a utility, in the same way Amazon's S3 is attempting to be a storage utility.
For the uninitiated, semantic technologies cover a wide range of software and data standards, all designed to provide structure and meaning to data.
The vast majority of data is unstructured, such as the text in this blog entry.
Search technologies are often limited to skimming the surface of unstructured data to find key words.
The semantic web or data web, as it is sometimes called, is the application of semantic technologies on the current internet.
Using metadata in the form of Ontologies, Taxonomies, Microformats, or others, developers and end users can incorporate semantic structure into applications and data.
This provides a much deeper, richer informational environment and thereby promotes ease of search, social networking, data access and many other applications.
The semantic formats supported by Yahoo’s planned semantic platform opens up opportunities for a number of semantic software companies and developers to create applications that leverage this new resource of semantic data.
Alitora's ASAPI service is a perfect compliment to semantic resources such as Yahoo's planned semantic APIs. With ASAPI, applications can be composed that merge semantic information from multiple sources. We call these applications "Semantic Mashups".
At Alitora, we look forward to connecting ASAPI to Yahoo's APIs, enabling rich semantic application development.
The semantic web ecosystem will have many resources and many species. Sources of data, such as that supplied by Yahoo's planned APIs, will be the raw resource material to be incorporated into the many species of applications now evolving.
An early release of ASAPI will be shortly available to interested developers. Please check back here for an announcement and download information, or send us an e-mail at: info@alitora.com
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