The semantic web platform, OpenAmplify, is today launching its new community area to encourage more collaboration in developing semantic tools for the web. And alongside the launch, it has a new promotion to hopefully improve Gmail.
The community area is exactly what you’d think it would be: An area for people with like-minded thoughts about the semantic web to gather and hash out ideas. The semantic web, of course, deals with looking beyond simple links that make up the web, to try and understand a deeper meaning and context behind that content. The development of the semantic web has been what OpenAmplify is trying to foster using its Natural Language Processing technology.
So far, OpenAmplify highlights three things that its members have built:
• Drupal PlugIn – a community-developed module that permits Drupal users to enrich their content with semantic metadata
• TweetyPants.com and tweetSentiments.com – Web destinations that present Twitter users’ sentiments in interesting ways
• ampCloud – tag cloud for blogs and other Web sites to determine writer sentiment around specific subjects, terms and key words
That’s all well and good, but the most interesting thing is the challenge the company is launching alongside this rollout. From now until July 16, OpenAmplify is challenging users to build a Firefox add-on that extends the functionality of Gmail. Obviously, some of those already exist, but a killer semantic web add-on could actually make email handling a lot better. So we’ll see what comes from that.