Sindice Support Comes to an End
June 18, 2014
Another semantic system turns out the lights. SemanticWeb hosts a guest post from the founders of Sindice titled, “End of Support for the Sindice.com Search Engine: History, Lessons Learned, and Legacy.” The article delves into a wealth of technical details. It opens, however, with this modest introduction:
“Since 2007, Sindice.com has served as a specialized search engine that would do a crazy thing: throw away the text and just concentrate on the ‘markup’ of the web pages. Sindice would provide an advanced API to query RDF, RDFa, Microformats and Microdata found on web sites, together with a number of other services. Sindice turned useful, we guess, as approximately 1100 scientific works in the last few years refer to it in a way or another.”
The team decided to end support for the specialized search engine in order to focus on serving enterprise users. Besides, they say, their vision has been realized. They write:
“With the launch in 2012 of Schema.org, Google and others have effectively embraced the vision of the ‘Semantic Web.’ With the RDFa standard, and now even more with JSON-LD, richer markup is becoming more and more popular on websites. While there might not be public web data ‘search APIs,’ large collections of crawled data (pages and RDF) exist today which are made available on cloud computing platforms for easy analysis with your favorite big data paradigm.”
The account begins at the beginning, with the team’s first goal of developing a simpler API, and ends with their transition to the startup SindiceTech. In between are interesting details, like a description of their 60-machine “Webstar” operations cluster and details on how they leveraged Hadoop for their RDF analytics. We may be sad to see support for Sindice.com go, but at least the team has shared some of their wisdom on the way out.
Cynthia Murrell, June 18, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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