The semantic web, a term coined by Tim Berners-Lee, is an initiative being developed under the auspices of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). It aims, through the use of standardized tags and formats, to build a framework where content on the web has machine-understandable meaning, rather than simply being searchable by keyword.

Asked by GigaOM Research analyst George Gilbert how best to tap a variety of information repositories without having to “hardwire” the language interface into each one separately, Sejnoha said the answer lies in an open approach:

“The conversation stack… has to interact with content sources, other services, applications and devices. Today, integrating those interfaces into those resources is a one-off job. Some applications on the market make choices on behalf of the user, and this brings important questions about openness. I do think the promise of the semantic web remains very important there.

“I hope we get to the point where people who have important services or content on the web publish them in standard formats that we can connect to and [use] almost automatically… I am hopeful that this will gain greater support in the industry as these folks realize without something like this the interface might become opaque to new entrants.”

However, Gilbert demurred, suggesting that incumbents have “no incentive to make a common interface.”

Check out the rest of our Structure:Data 2013 coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below:

A transcription of the video follows on the next page

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On Thursday, Nuance updated Mobile Assistant’s feature set. You can now play music by telling Dragon you want to listen to a particular artist or track in your song library. You can also open third-party apps with a voice command. Another small but highly useful enhancement is the ability to set an alarm with a simple spoken command.

The app is still technically in beta, but it’s downloadable in the Google Play store (U.S. only). Mobile Assistant was initially available only on smartphones with Ice Cream Sandwich and Jelly Bean (Android 4.0 and 4.1), but the new release will now work on older Gingerbread (Android 2.3) phones. No version is available on the iPhone yet, though it has promised an iOS version of the app. The move is a bit odd since Dragon would compete with Apple’s Siri, which is powered in part by Nuance technology.

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The company believes that with Nuance technology its platform can do more than just answer questions or perform simple voice search —  a not-so-subtle dig at Apple’s Siri and Google’s voice command based search. Expect is one of the companies I am most excited about as it represents big progress in how we consume information and interact with devices.

In case, you were wondering what is this anticipatory computing, here is how I described it in my initial piece about MindMeld.

Tuttle started the company two years ago to develop a platform that would “continuously pay attention to what happens in your life and pick up ambient information and then start to surface relevant information.” Why? Because be believed that our computing habits were going from being desktop bound to completely mobile, and that would essentially mean a different usage behavior.

With more devices and more sensors coming into our lives, the amount of data being generated will reach a point where the machines need to start anticipating our needs. Search as a way to access information doesn’t and won’t work — mostly because search can only respond to questions we ask. Also, if most of our computing is shifting to devices that are always with us, the idea of how to compute also has to change.

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There are two features I’m keen to try out, although – indeed, because – I already have them. One is ‘gesture typing’, which I already use through Swype’s implementation, and the other is the photo filter functionality in the camera app.

By all accounts, and judging by the screenshots and videos people have posted, gesture typing really is like Swype. In fact, it looks so similar that I’m quite surprised it’s not Swype – has Nuance done a quiet deal with Google? If not, I’d expect a lawsuit at some point.

(Side note: Check out The Verge’s video on the creation of the new Nexus devices. I was particularly amused by Hugo Barra’s response to the suggestion that gesture typing is like Swype. “Whether it’s like Swype or not, I think, is less interesting, uh…”.)

But Swype is one service. The photo filter thing is another ballgame altogether.

(EDIT: Yes, there were already filters in Android but they were very basic. The newer ones, from what I have seen, veer into retro territory.)

It’s hard to look at photo filter functionality and surmise that Google is taking the wind out of any particular company’s sails. Indeed, the obviousness of the feature, along with the relative ease of implementation, is one reason why there are so many photo filter apps out there.

But, as Android 4.2 and later versions gain a bigger share of the Android installed base (as they will, given the hyper-aggressive pricing of recent Nexus devices), all those startups may find themselves in trouble.

The question is, how much of the attraction of a service such as Instagram or EyeEm is to do with that functionality, and how much is to do with the community and discovery features that flesh those apps out?

My suspicion is that it’s a case of ‘come for the filters, stay for the follows’. And, if that’s the case, then user acquisition may become something of a problem – on the Android platform, that is.

To be clear, I don’t think Google’s done anything wrong by adding photo filters to its core camera app – it’s an obvious feature. The Swype-alike feature is less obvious, but – appearance aside – it is also just an idea (yes, I’m an anti-software-patents guy). I also realise that many manufacturers put their own camera apps on their Android devices, making this less of an issue on those phones and tablets.

But this is yet another reminder that the power on any platform lies with the entity that owns or sponsors the platform. Everyone else is along for the ride until they’re no longer useful – which is why the likes of Instagram and EyeEm had better keep innovating to stay relevant.

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Lexee actually builds off Nuance’s technology for online speech recognition and speech to text, so it’s similar in actual performance. The system is designed to help users accomplish tasks and interact using conversational speech. But Angel believes Lexee can stand out because of the ease with which developers can create their conversation flows and the analytical data that they can get back from Lexee.

Lexee uses a simple point-and-click system called SiteBuilder, a toolkit that Angel first developed for IVR and call center applications. It allows non-developers to easily apply voice to any customer interaction. Lexee will also rely on Angel’s analytics, so developers will get back information on how consumers are interacting with Lexee and where any problems might arise in conversation flows.

Angel President Dave Rennyson said neither Nina nor AT&T’s Watson, which also has its own SDK, provides that mix of ease of use and reporting. He said Lexee was used to voice-enable a Salesforce.com application in just four days. Angel, a division of MicroStrategy, currently has about 1,000 enterprise customers using its existing customer experience management tools including Best Buy, Pfizer, Barnes & Noble and Facebook. He said those companies could be interested in re-using some of their work and applying Lexee to their mobile applications.

Lexee is just another sign of how our future will be filled with voice-enabled personal assistants. Siri has opened a lot of people’s eyes as to how speech can be used to get at complex tasks and can be combined with other tools to make us a lot more efficient.

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Called Nina, the new virtual assistant software is targeted at the growing number of customer service apps companies are stockpiling in the iTunes and Google Play stores with a particular focus on mobile banking apps. According to Nuance VP and GM Robert Gary, customer-facing mobile apps have become increasingly complex which makes navigating the multiple layers of options available all the more difficult.

Nina aims to cut through that clutter, allowing a user to perform thousands of different tasks within a customer care app by simply stating what he wants to do, Gary said. For instance a simple credit card payment could require a dozen different actions on a mobile app: navigating to the payments section, selecting the card receiving payment and the account the transfer comes from, entering the date of the transaction and finally amount being paid.

Nina can reduce all of those steps down to a single simple command: “Pay $300 to my gold card from my checking account.” Nuance’s speech servers not only understand the words, but also mines them for as much information and context as possible. Whatever additional information Nina needs, it prompts the user with spoken follow-up questions. So in the example above, Nina would immediately navigate to the appropriate payment screen and populate the fields for a $300 transfer from the customer’s checking account to his gold card. Nina would only need to ask the customer whether he wanted to make the payment immediately or schedule it for a future date.

Nuance is offering Nina to customers as a white-label service they can customize and embed into their applications. In the demo I saw, Nina’s voice was that of Siri – Apple licenses the Siri’s audio library from Nuance – but Nuance has library of 40 different voices it plans to offer to developers so everyone doesn’t wind up with the same Siri clone. Enterprise customers can hire their own voice “talent” to further differentiate their virtual assistants from the field.

Nina’s first customer will be USAA, the financial services provider of the U.S. military. It plans to launch the voice assistant as part of pilot within its mobile banking app this month and then offer it to all of its members by early next year.

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• We know Apple’s sitting on plenty of cash. The New York Times‘ mergers and acquisitions reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin took a shot at making up a shopping list of some prospective game-changing acquisitions that CEO Tim Cook could pull off — despite Apple’s tendency to shy away from blockbuster deals. The list includes a wireless carrier, a smartphone maker, two social networks, a mobile payments pioneer and the technology the powers Siri.
• Rumors abound that Apple is planning for a big wave of products this fall. Apple number cruncher Horace Dediu looks at patterns in Apple’s financial data to predict just how many iOS devices the company is planning to ship during the last quarter of the year.
• The Independent has more quotes from Apple’s Jony Ive at the British Business Embassy event in London this week. He adds a bit more color on what we already know about Apple’s highly focused, intensive product design process.
• The Apple-Samsung patent trial is in full swing right now, and Samsung’s head of product sat down with Wired to give its side of the story.
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This Box OneCloud conglomeration is just the latest volley in an increasingly frenzied move by cloud storage vendors — startups and established players alike — to win business accounts that will hopefully pay for the service.

With Box OneCloud, a smartphone or iPad user can pull up QuickOffice to create or open a document, save it back to Box and share it with colleagues. A reviewer use Nuance Paperport  to annotate it. And. when it’s ready, users can sign it with Adobe Echosign. All from their device of choice.

The goal is to re-create a desktop application suite for use first with iPhones and soon with Android devices, said Matthew Self, VP of platform engineering for San Francisco-based Box.  Box said earlier this year it would focus on Android and iPhone — but Windows? Not so much.  Last seek Self said the company will work on a Windows phone version “in proportion to its market share.”

Box now claims 10 million users, up from the 8 million it had claimed as recently as last month.  But the company does not break out how many of those users are paying customers.  Box is free for the first 5GB of storage.

The battle among cloud storage vendors to become the “Dropbox of the Enterprise” continues at a frenzied pace with companies like Egnyte, Accellion, GroupLogic, SurDoc , Intralinks, YouSendIt  (see disclosure) and others vying for the title.  Dropbox is the prohibitive leader in consumer-oriented cloud storage with 50 million users claimed. Again, it’s unclear how many pay.

All of this maneuvering happens even as Google preps its long-rumored Google Drive storage  offering and Microsoft pushes Skydrive  and Windows Azure storage. This is going to be a long fight.

Disclosure: YouSendIt is backed by Alloy Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. 

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Although I’m not a regular Swype user, I installed the beta on my Galaxy Nexus smartphone and used it for several emails this afternoon. Because you can swipe keys with a single finger with Swype, you can often type faster than on a standard software keyboard: you trace your words and only lift a finger for the space between words. There’s also a word suggestion feature. Even though I haven’t used Swype for a few months, I was quickly inputting text with this new version.

Nuance also includes integrated support for Dragon Go! in this beta version of Swype. Dragon Go! is a free app in the Android Market that offers Siri-like voice search functionality. You can tap-and-hold the Dragon Go! button and ask, for example, “What is the square root of pi?” and Dragon Go! will return the answer from Wolfram Alpha. Searches for movie times and locations return results from Fandango, and there are several other search functions included. Just tapping the button activates the voice input function, which I found to be very accurate.

Nuance says that Dragon Go! needs to be installed for the search functionality to work, but the Android Market won’t allow me to install the app to my Galaxy Nexus. It’s likely a problem unique to me as I’m running a custom ROM and my handset is from the U.K.; Dragon Go! is available on U.S. Android handsets.

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Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the acquisition will bring together the company behind the PC-based Dragon speech-recognition software and Vlingo, which has been increasing dubbed “the Siri of Android,” in reference to the speech-driven personal assistant found in Apple’s new iPhone 4S. Vlingo has been hitting back at comparisons to Siri on its corporate blog, but from a very basic standpoint the services are similar: both allow you to use voice commands to look up information and operate the core parts of a smartphone.

Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) acquired Siri a year and a half ago for its speech expertise, and this is also an area that Google (NSDQ: GOOG) has spent years and millions in hopes of gaining an edge. Speech technology has been promised for years by computer scientists as a universal input system that nearly anyone can understand, but the user experience is often still a work in progress as software can struggle to interpret slang, dialects, and background noise.

It sounds like Nuance wants to build an answer to Siri, the centerpiece of Apple’s marketing campaign for the iPhone 4S. While Siri uses some of Nuance’s technology at the heart of the software, Siri co-founder Norman Winarsky told 9to5Mac.com that the Nuance technology is really just a small part of the overall Siri experience.

Notably, Nuance and Vlingo have tussled for years over patents, which means the combined entity will likely possess a strong portfolio in this patent-mad age of the mobile industry.

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