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21 November 2006
When Research and Practice collide ?
Along with many of you, I received the call for papers for the 4th European Semantic Web Conference in my email this morning.
Nothing unusual about that, you may think, and you'd be right. The world is full of academic conferences issuing calls ahead of the event, soliciting submissions of 'scholarly' papers, reviewing those, and then printing a subset of them in some worthy journal bound to grace the shelves of many a university library. So far, so good, and the wheels of research keep on turning.
The thought that occurred to me as I read the call, though, was that the organisers kept stating their desire to see submissions from 'industry'. For example;
“We particularly encourage the submission of papers on industrial efforts and experiences with Semantic Web projects.”
There are plenty of examples of big companies such as IBM, HP or BT that maintain well-resourced research groups and encourage them to engage with academic processes and ways of working, but how much of the innovation we all need to know about is actually happening in far smaller organisations such as my own? How many of those smaller organisations can seriously look to invest the effort in writing lengthy papers on their real-world implementations of the Semantic Web so far ahead of the date on which they may - or may not - be invited to speak? The conference poster session is little better; one of many crammed into a room, trying to attract the attention of delegates more intent on their coffee, discussing the last presentation they saw, or catching up with friends they haven't seen since last year's event? The barrier isn't the preparation and delivery of a compelling, engaging and informative plenary presentation. The barrier is the hurdle of the printed paper, and the requirement that it be delivered so far ahead of time for 'publication' in a locked box to which neither your employer nor your peers are likely to subscribe.
To compare Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web is perhaps not a wholly fair mixing of apples with oranges, but I am tempted to pose the question anyway. To what extent, then, has the far more rapid and public adoption of 'Web 2.0 technologies' been because of the far less onerous process of sharing the state of the art with one's peers? Someone issues a call for expressions of interest. You respond with an abstract. That abstract is accepted or not. You prepare and deliver a presentation, and make that freely available for anyone to see on the Web. The conversation moves forward on blogs, wikis, mailing lists and the other channels so often used, and barriers to entry are (relatively) low.
There is undoubtedly a place for the scholarly process, and academic conferences. The letters in front of my name testify to my past engagement with that, and the Semantic Web is certainly an area ripe for lengthy academic discourse. There's also a place for nimble, accessible, and open; for good enough as well as for unanimous consensus atop rigourous theoretical construct.
Can the Semantic Web, and the events at which it moves forward, straddle that particular divide? Is ESWC a place to build a better bridge?
This image of Innsbruck is by Junichi Azuma, shared on Flickr with a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial licence.
Technorati Tags: eswc2007, eswc07, Semantic Web, Talis
Posted by Paul Miller at 10:35 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
10 November 2006
If all you have is a hammer....
A previous boss of mine was well known for coming up with a suitable saying for many a situation. One of his favorites was "When all you have in your toolkit is a hammer - everything starts to look like a nail"
This came to mind whilst reading Ian Davis' latest report on events at the Web 2.0 Simmit in San Francisco. He was in the session from MySql's Mårten Mickos. - Read what he has to say and you'll see what I mean:
I’m baffled.
I’ve just watched Mårten Mickos from MySQL give a 10 minute talk on what he terms the “Great Database in the Sky” almost exactly describing the our community’s vision of a “web of data” while remaining completely ignorant of the semantic web.
To start, he characterised Google as giving unstructured people access to unstructured data whereas MySQL gives structured people access to structured data, meaning that MySQL is targeted towards developers who understand how to structure data “properly”. A strange polarisation in my view, but I guess he’s trying to put clear blue water between the Google approach and the traditional database approach. At Talis, we don’t see this distinction at all and our core platform technology, Bigfoot, unifies structured and unstructured data.
He went on to describe his vision of a skype for database access, combining my data, your data and public data into the next generation OLAP, running a trillion transactions per day. An example could be weather data and he asked what if you could run a SQL statement across all the data sources in the world, something like SELECT CurrentWindDirection, CurrentWindSpeed FROM AllTheWorldsWeatherStations, MyOwnWeatherStation, MyFriendsWeatherStation.
It’s a noble goal, but he’s not the first to suggest it. It’s also not a future vision because you can do it today with Sparql. It’s at the heart of Bigfoot and there are many other public services that can be used to learn and experiment. You can even query across HTML pages containing embedded structured data.
He followed it up by saying if this were achievable then a whole new generation of web 2.0 applications could be possible. Nothing controversial there, we share the same vision! But we think it’s closer than he does.
What else? Oh yes, he said “we may need a DNS of SQL servers” and that “routing may be an issue”. Another point of agreement, that’s why we built a directory of data collections and services and built web services to route straight into that content.
Then, “how do you make data definitions understandable to others?”. That’s almost like a problem statement for RDF! And yet he didn’t mention it in his list of technologies that might be candidates for the solution: RSS, Atom, Jabber, HTML, HTTP, XML, SQL and SMS.
He concluded his talk with the tagline “The data is the platform” and then took a question from the audience: “How is this different from the semantic web?”.
This is where it became evident that there is a deep disconnect between the traditional database community and the semantic web community. Mårten’s response was rather vague, that this wasn’t as broad as the semantic web and that the semweb includes unstructured data so wasn’t appropriate.
What a shame and what a failure of the semantic web community if the CEO of MySQL AB cannot see how his vision for an interconnected web of data is the same as ours! We must try harder and demonstrate at all levels the value of the semantic web approach to people like Mårten. SWEO and SWIG will help, but the convincing arguments will come from the practical applications of the semantic web being developed to solve real world problems.
Which is why I’m at Talis.
See what I mean.
Ian is right though, Mr Marcos' limited vision may equally be because of a failure of communication from the semantic web community as his conviction that database technology (but bigger and more distributed) is all we need. I suspect that it would not be too difficult to find some semantic we fundamentalists with with equally strong but opposite opinions.
As with most real world issues, the best solutions occur when [often previously apposing] communities work together.
But if all you think you need in your toolkit is a hammer....
(Hammer image taken by darkmatter uploaded to Flickr)
Technorati Tags: web20summit, Web 2.0, Semantic Web, Talis, Talis Platform, rdf, mysql
Posted by Richard Wallis at 07:59 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
9 November 2006
Web 2.0 Summit
Two of my colleagues Ian and Sam are taking in the renamed Web 2.0
With the impressive set of speakers on the programme, its hardly surprising that they are churning out an interesting set of postings from the sessions, on their personal blogs.
After arriving in SF from the International Semantic Web Conference in Georgia they immediately got stuck in to the Summit programme.
So far Sam has posted from the following sessions:
- The Next Internet Infrastructure
An open services archictecture. needs to be freely licenced, hostable, extendable and be capable of supporting a emergent ecosystem. The web contains plenty of open content, but islands of authentication. Authentication needs to be first order in next generation architecture that is becomes possible to extend the way we do things on the web now to things that we currently can’t because of the lack of inbuilt trust mechanisms. i.e. you can’t apply web principles to healthcare, finance etc yet.
- Advertising 2.0
The panel predicts the emergence of a new network not of content producers but of content distributors. Shifting dynamics of web advertising - away from measuring success in terms of direct response to advertising and toward brand building which has been more prevalent in traditional media, but which has the potential to be much more accountable & measurable as user behaviour becomes more visible across the web and through time. To me, this needs to dovetail with the ideas explored in the previous session around making identity data available while preserving anonymity.
- Enterprise 2.0 Mashups
Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com is on stage now. He makes the claim that Salesforce are doing for enterprise services what Amazon is doing for infrastructure, i.e. removing the “muck” and enabling innovation. He characterises one aspect of salesforce as an “Elastic Database, that scales” and in that regard, I can see a lot of overlap with some facets of the platform we’re building. If I were in hyphen overdrive, I might describe Bigfoot , as ultimately-flexible-data-storage-discovery-and-retrieval-as-a-service (but with added semantic goodness, of course). AppExchange is a marketplace for business services built on the salesforce platform, and I see parallels between it and the Content Orchestration components of our platform, like Silkworm and Symphony. These sorts of components are all really about making it easy to compose applications by plugging together bits of data and functionality from all over the web.
- Ning
Marc Andreessen and Gina Bianchini from Ning are up now. Gina says they launched their first products a couple of months ago, but I remember checking out Ning at least a year ago. Oh dear, they’ve ground to a halt, looks like the presenters aren’t immune from the connectivity problems either.
Whilst Ian has so far commented on:
- Yahoo!'s Web 2.0 Strategy
The first workshop of the first day. I got into the room early and am right at the back in the corner… next to the power!! Why, oh why don’t these conferences ever sort out the power? That’s what comes of choosing a 150 year old building to host the conference, beautiful though it is. Onto the workshop… Brief notes only… First up is a set of slides describing Flickr’s building blocks of participation which is very similar to our thinking at Talis: user generated content - not licensed from providers but contributed by users user organised content - tagging, categorising user and publisher distributed content user developed functionality - exposed api etc The discussion moves onto tagging and how it gives social context particularly through the recent introduction of geocoding.
- Whose Data?
I’m now sitting in the Whose data is it?
- Hmmm SOA?
Being more resource-oriented than service-oriented, I approach this session with trepidation. First up is Carol Jones from IBM to talk about a trio of software patterns for Web 2.0. The first is “Software as a Service” which has the following characteristics: Service, not software User-driven adoption Value on demand Low cost of entry Public infrastructure Most importantly… tight feedback loop between providers and consumers
- It's All About the Infrastructure
One thing that strikes me about all the talks and presentations at this conference is that they all assume ubiquitous net access. Kind of ironic then that the wireless access here has gone the way of oceanic flight 815. So, since this is the web and I like to link in my posts, having two out of three page requests fail makes for very little blogging from me at the moment. Even though I’m sitting right under what looks like a huge wifi access point bolted to the ceiling and have great signal strength, it’s completely wasted when DHCP and DNS are out. You’d think at the Web 2.0 conference they’d actually have wireless that worked, wouldn’t you?
By some ultimate form of serendipity we just had Debra Chrapaty from Microsoft with a 10 minute presentation which gave me the inspiration for this post’s title. The presentation was a rather interesting tour of the new data centres that Microsoft are building. Truly awesome investments. It also illustrated the depths of competition that Google and MS find themselves in - literally competing for electricians to kit out their data centres.
I look forward to many other good posts from the intrepid duo on the last day of the ConferenceSummit.
Technorati Tags: Web 2.0, Talis, Talis Platform, web2summit,
Posted by Richard Wallis at 09:50 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
7 November 2006
Minibar offers Web 2.0 chatter in London
Christian Ahlert over at OpenBusiness just sent notice of the new 'MiniBar';
“I know all of you like to discuss and think about web 2.0, music and film sharing/remixing, p2p, or Creative Commons. San Francisco has the Creative Commons Salon, other cities regular BarCamps, or so called new media gatherings. But there is no regular meeting space for this London. It should be a good opportunity to meet new and interesting people, discuss creative ideas and have some fun.
So we - Creative Commons England&Wales, Openbusiness.cc, OpenMute and The People Speak - are organizing the first MiniBar on Friday the 17th in the Truman Brewery. There will be some free beer (as in Free).”
I can't attend this first one, but look forward to more opportunities in the coming months. Thanks, Christian, and thanks to Magnatune for sponsoring drinks that I won't get to sample!
Technorati Tags: openbusiness, barcamp, Talis, Web 2.0
Posted by Paul Miller at 12:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
