(by [URL=http://www.cs.vu.nl/%7Efrankh]Frank van Harmelen[/URL])

The following could well be a very significant development (dare I use the word “watershed”?). It’s the first time that I see the words “ontology” and “semantic web” in a Microsoft press release, and this is Microsoft linking the Semantic Web to one of its flagship products, under open source license no less!

The signficance of this is not per se in the performance of the particular plugin (various other pieces of software already aim to do similar things, even in the same domain), but IMHO the signficance lies in the fact that Microsoft wants to be seen to be doing this.

In an [URL=http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/mar09/03-11MSCreativeCommonsPR.mspx]official press release[/URL], Microsoft writes:

    “Microsoft Releases Open Tools to Enhance Scientific Research Effort Building on Science Commons Ontologies” […]
    “the release of the Ontology Add-in for Microsoft Office Word 2007 will enable authors to easily add scientific hyperlinks as semantic annotations, drawn from ontologies, to their documents and research papers” […]
    “This Add-in will make it easier for scientists to link their documents to the Web in a meaningful way. Deployed on a wide scale, ontology-enabled scientific publishing will provide a Web boost to scientific discovery.” […]
    “Microsoft’s openness in working with the Science Commons has significant implications for the scientific research community because it will make it easy for authors to link their documents straight into the semantic Web of science — making that research, data and material easier to find and use”[…]
    “it will make it easy for authors to link their documents straight into the semantic Web of science”

This announcement was done at the [URL=http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/03/microsoft-and-science-commons.html]O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference[/URL]:

    Microsoft will be releasing, under an open source license, Word plugins that will allow scientists to mark up their papers with scientific entities directly. […]
    you want to do links directly to the gene sequences in the database.
    This makes it easy to add scientifically accurate, persistent hyperlinks to articles […]
    when you put it all together, it starts to allow for some lightweight but very powerful semantic publishing inside Word.

More techy pointers at
[URL=http://savas.parastatidis.name/2009/03/11/4ff8e6be-3740-4d8c-9737-30877883339b.aspx]http://savas.parastatidis.name/2009/03/11/4ff8e6be-3740-4d8c-9737-30877883339b.aspx[/URL]