Silk (Haskell-based semantic web startup) raises seed funding | Hacker News Reader

Silk (Haskell-based semantic web startup) raises seed funding

techcrunch.com

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Nice to see a Haskell/dutch startup getting funding, but I'm still not sure what exactly this app does. Is there a tl;dr explaination why I might need this, how does it make it easier? The alpha version didn't really make anything easier for me.

It appears they started out trying to be a sort of knowledge aggregator (that probably used NLP and some semantic resources like DBPedia or Freebase to glean the knowledge) but they seem to be emphasizing structured knowledge creation now.

Which is cool. Because the "Semantic Web" has a chicken and egg problem - the standards, knowledge, &c... all exist; but no one is producing "semantic" content. Primarily because it's a pain in the ass to do so. Some people have a tried a mix of NLP processing with automated annotation of recognized keywords, triples, &c... but it never seems to catch on. So it really looks like Silk is trying to produce an attractive and easy to use semantic editor.

Once you have people producing semantic content, then other services like semantic search can make use of it - Silk also appears to be providing analytics and analysis software for the content you do create.

What I don't like about this is (I'm guessing here) it remains on their servers; so instead of using Google Docs you would use Silk. I guess.

You're right: content is on our servers so we can build up all the indexes to allow for fast searching and querying.

Not sure why that would be a problem though. We don't intend to lock-in peoples content and we'll provide a REST based read/write API – so you can get the content in and out whenever you want.

I think what you're doing is super cool and as long as you do indeed provide an easy route to getting the data off the servers then I don't see a problem at all. Is this meant to be a freemium model? Or is it going to be a paid service?

How do you go and use this in a website though? That's another facet of the semantic web that I think needs to be addressed too - content is great but if I have to export it from your servers then stick it into my website, that could get to be a pain.

Is Silk maybe going after a Semantic Cloud sort of model? I think that would not only be tenable but a really smart move. I would use a Semantic Cloud service.

Yes, it's going to be freemium like. We'll be announcing various stuff around the actual product really soon, but the idea is that Silk could become your website, in the same way that Tumblr works as a website for a lot of people.

I love the idea of a "semantic cloud", it's exactly what we're going for actually. I'm going to use that if you don't mind :-)

About a year ago, they claimed they were developing a web-based editor. That is some significant focus shift.

Does anyone have information on what triggered it?

(Silk co-founder here)

We haven't changed course. As Ixiaus mentions, there are several chicken and egg problems involved around the 'semantic web'.

We're starting with specific content publishers right now that use a combination of our web-based editor (which looks like a normal editor, but allows structured content creation) and APIs to get information in to Silk. This allows them to create sites where people can play around with the structured data, create visualizations, etc.

Longer-term, we'll open up the editor to the general public. Our goal is to do to structured content what Blogger and Wordpress did to weblogs.

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