2013-01-10

Hubject : the story so far

I coined the word hubject back in 2005. At the time I checked the pun was new, or at least unknown by Google. All I found were typos in the spelling of subject. The word and underlying concepts had not the success I secretly expected, adoption was actually limited to a relatively small circle of readers of this blog. Thinking there could be a business model I bought the domain name hubjects.com, which I never used beyond hosting this blog. I used hubject for a while as a pseudonym on Twitter, but with time came to the conclusion that the idea and the word were bound to slowly fade away.
Last year I discovered hubject.com was the Web of a company "connecting emobility across Europe", in plain words dealing with infrastructure for electrical vehicles. What was aimed at being a common name is now the proper name of Hubject GmbH, Torgauer Straße, 12-15 10829 Berlin. I sent them a mail asking if they were aware of previous use of the word, and as of today got no answer [1]
Yet I have not surrendered completely. Yesterday I reinstated the cloud of tags in the left menu. I never liked "tags" too much so I entitled it "hubjects" instead.

That's the story so far. Next summary around 2020.

[1] Update: On 2013-01-29 I eventually received a polite answer from hubject.com. "It is interesting for us to get to know that hubjects is used in a completely different context." 

2013-01-08

Everyone knows what a Semantic Dog looks like

A fierce debate is raging those days on the lod-public list between +Kingsley Idehen and +Hugh Glaser, plus a couple of others. The question is to know if the huge efforts to publish mountains of linked data have produced so far any kind of visible and useful applications consuming them. In other words, where are the semantic dogs consuming those heaps of Semantic Web Dog Food? Kingsley holds it of course that they have invaded all the Web avenues, and Hugh that they are nowhere to be seen. Obviously they are not looking for the same kind of dogs, or they don't agree on what a semantic dog could look like, making me wondering if such dogs might be akin to the dragon of the story.
This debate is to compare with +Amit Sheth's recent post entitled "Data Semantics and Semantic Web - 2012 year-end reflections and prognosis" suggesting among other things that although another five years or so could be necessary for the Linked Open Data to gain enough quality to allow building upon it seriously, on the other hand things like Google Knowledge Graph are opening the way to pervasive semantic applications. 
Beyond those ongoing cries of  "Publish more linked data" and "Show me the applications" why not try in this New Year time to think about linked data in a Long Now perspective?