Radar Networks

Radar Networks is a San Francisco based company developing semantic web applications for the general public. The company was founded in 2003 by Nova Spivack and Kristinn R. Thórisson (co-founder).

History

The company was founded in 2003 by web entrepreneur Nova Spivack, grandson of the late Peter Drucker, and AI researcher Kristinn R. Thórisson. They were soon joined by Jim Wissner, who is now the company's Chief Architect. Thórisson was CTO of Radar Networks until 2004 when he joined Reykjavik University.

In February 2008 it was announced that the company raised a Series B venture round led by Velocity Interactive Group, Vulcan Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. .

The company's first product, Twine.com, is in Beta.

Technology

Radar Networks works on semantic web, online applications intended for the general public. Semantic web technologies are often referred to as quintessential to Web 3.0, and are intended to extend the World Wide Web by adding a new, machine processable layer of data. Several large organizations, such as Citigroup and Eastman Kodak Co., are using semantic technologies to handle their data to increase efficiency, but applications for the general public have remained harder to implement.

The modern web (or Web 2.0) introduced some services to tag data in order to make it easier to browse and find relevant information. Flickr and Technorati tags are an example of such services, where users can add additional information (metadata tags) to a photo or blogpost that describes or relates to the content. Semantic web services are similar as they involve adding machine-processable tags to data with a markup language (like RDF). The essential difference between the current usage of tags and semantic tags is the addition of an ontology that describes what things in the world are and how they are related. Such a contextual framework is intended to enable computers to understand and reason with data, thus making way for more intelligent data handling methods.

Other companies working on similar technologies are, for example, AskMeNow, Garlik, Metaweb and Powerset.

Products

Twine.com is Radar Networks' first consumer application, which was first announced on 19.10.2007. It is a semantic social network through which people will are able to collaboratively track their interests. As of August 2008, the application is in Invite Beta and has been described as enabling both manual and automatic 'tagging' of these pieces of data with semantic markup (see above), so that computers can process it more intelligently. The company is calling Twine an interest network rather than a social network. Group and interaction capabilities have been announced and the application can thus also be considered a social network that allows people to share and collaboratively edit data around interests.

See also

• Earthweb — company founded by Nova Spivack in 1998
• Metaweb — developers of the online semantic database Freebase
• Resource Description Framework (RDF)
• Semantic Web
• Web 3.0 & Web 2.0
• Web Ontology Language (OWL)

References

External links

• Radar Networks Home Page — Radar Networks website
• Minding the Planet — Nova Spivack's personal blog, CEO of Radar Networks
• Twine — online service of Radar Networks