Excellent article on semantic tech and its future

excerpt and url below:-

What is the Semantic Wave?

The semantic wave is a tidal wave of four stages of internet growth. The first stage, Web 1.0, was about connecting information and getting on the net. Web 2.0 is about connecting people — putting the “I” in user interface, and the “we” into Webs of social participation. The next stage, Web 3.0, is starting now. It is about representing meanings, connecting knowledge, and putting these to work in ways that make our experience of internet more relevant, useful, and enjoyable. Web 4.0 will come later. It is about connecting intelligences in a ubiquitous Web where both people and things reason and communicate together.

Over the next decade, the semantic wave will spawn multi-billion dollar technology markets that will drive trillion dollar global economic expansions to transform
industries as well as our experience of the internet. The Semantic Wave 2008 report examines drivers and market forces for adoption of semantic technologies in Web 3.0 and maps opportunities for investors, technology developers, and public and private enterprises.

What are Semantic Technologies?

Semantic technologies are digital tools that represent meanings and knowledge (e.g., knowledge of something, knowledge about something, and knowledge how to do something, etc.) separately from content or behavior artifacts such as documents, data files, and program code. This knowledge is encoded in a digital form that both people and machines can access and interpret. The basic shift in information and communications technology (ICT) that is occurring now is from informationcentric to knowledge-centric patterns of computing. This is made possible by the application of semantic technologies and open standards that enable people and machines to connect, evolve, share, and use knowledge on an unprecedented scale and in new ways that make our experience of the internet better. Not restricted just to current Semantic Web standards, the next stage of internet evolution will encompass a broad range of knowledge representation and reasoning capabilities including microformats, semantic html, pattern detection, deep linguistics, ontology and model based inferencing, analogy
and reasoning with uncertainties, conflicts, causality, and values.

http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reportinfo.asp?report_id=682287&t=d&cat_id=

Our main algo has become stable  and we now started working on rolling out the next iteration (MGFA) which is more intuitive and intelligent.

Based on the feedback from our partners and user requests, we have incorporated modules and tweaks which will further reduce the time taken to complete a transaction on Alabot.

It also has an enhanced context switching module which allows us to mesh more than one vertical into one. We would be launching the travel vertical with the movie vertical to test this concept.

(Alabot travel on gtalk is only doing bus tickets for now - the flight API is being updated with the new algo)

Will send a mail as soon as its done.

Gday All

Ala has partnered with Slamcore for the Italian market

http://demo.slamcore.com/

We will be getting into the local and travel verticals there with content partners with Italian as the main language.

Wish us luck.

Akshat

v

its 11 25 pm - london - just came back from the award ceremony.

Thank you to the panelists..

ROCK on!!!

Alabot Help Video here -  http://t.alabot.com/demo.html

Alabot Travel FAQ

Q:     Why do the links expire after some time?
Ans : Our Session expires within 5 minutes from the time of search.

Q:        Which cities do we support currently?
Ans      http://blog.alabot.com/2008/07/19/list-of-cities-handled-by-alabot-travel/

Q:  How about some sample conversations guys?

Ans: Good point - we know this stuff is new and our users need some hand holding at first.

Our help video is being made so please bear with us. In the meantime please check out some sample conversations below.A word to the wise….alabot has not been injected with the sarcasm present in most human interaction….but it has everything else. speak to it like you would to your buddy, spelling mistakes and all. It understands…. and doesnt judge you……….:)

Q:  How do i restart the conversation - sometimes Alabot doesnt respond. Why does this happen? grr
Ans:    Just type exit anytime in the conversation process - you can then restart from the top. This may happen in instances when our engine is not able to comprehend certain spellings and iterations - it will go away in some time as Alabot will self learn and heal itself. The more users interact with him, the more intelligent he becomes.


Q: Are the flight prices the cheapest compared to other portals?
Ans: Our intent is to tie up with “best of breed” content partners, we do not add any surcharge or fees on top.  Check the rates out for yourself!!

Q: Is this a free service?
Ans: Yes - it will be free for all our users.

Q: Do you support other languages?
Ans:  Our vision is to make applications interactive across language and demographics. Our next release will have a flavour of a few Indian languages as well.

Q: Are you adding anything else?

Ans: Yes, lots more - including deep dive local search, scores, news, other travel related stuff.. soon… we are waiting for Ala’s brain to get mature..