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28 January 2007
John Davies talks with Talis about the Semantic Web and ongoing research at BT
In our latest Talking with Talis podcast, I speak with John Davies, Head of Next Generation Web Research at BT. We discuss some of John's views around the current and emerging value of the Semantic Web, and take a look at some of the Semantic Web research projects with which John's team is currently involved.
John and I are members of the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) new Semantic Web Education & Outreach (SWEO) activity, and we finish the call discussing some of the misconceptions around the Semantic Web.
Listen Now | Download MP3 [17 mins, 12 Mb]
During the conversation, we refer to the following resources;
- BT
- Data, Information, and Process Integration with Semantic Web Services (DIP) project
- Semantically Enabled Knowledge Technologies (SEKT) project
- Friend-of-a-Friend (FOAF)
- World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
- W3C Semantic Web Education & Outreach (SWEO) Interest Group
This conversation was conducted by telephone on Thursday 18 January 2007.
Technorati Tags: BT, DIP, Podcasting, SEKT, Semantic Web, SWEO, Talis, Talking with Talis, W3C, Web 2.0
Posted by Paul Miller at 03:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
23 January 2007
Making a free map of London
Steve Coast over at the OpenStreetMap project just IM'd to draw my attention to the 'London mapping party' they're planning for this weekend. Multimap are helping out with office space, and nestoria are rewarding everyone's efforts with post-mapping drinks.
If you're in or near London, why not pop along and help out with this great effort?
OpenStreetMap has made something of a name for itself - including frequent mentions in the mainstream press - with its efforts to build a free and open set of mapping data in the UK and elsewhere. Their best-known efforts have tended to be based upon sets of points derived by people driving, walking or riding around, logging position data from a GPS unit of some kind, and joining up the points to represent the streets along which they have just passed. They make the point, though, that
“The London mapping party will try to use aerial photography to create a map of London, rather than the traditional GPS units”
As well as challenging the ridiculous prices imposed on map data by organisations such as the UK's Ordnance Survey, OpenStreetMap has played a role in highlighting some of the deliberate errors that traditional mapping companies have tended to introduce into their data.
In a similar vein to our arguments about Open Data, OpenStreetMap argues that a more affordable pool of basic map data will lead to innovation, increased use of mapping, and (potentially) increased rather than decreased revenues in the sector.
Steve and I have a panel proposal in for this year's World Wide Web conference in Canada, and I look forward to working with him if the proposal is accepted.
Technorati Tags: open data, Ordnance Survey, openstreetmap, Talis
Posted by Paul Miller at 11:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
17 January 2007
Second Chance Tuesday
Having picked up the pointer from Sam Sethi over at Vecosys, Richard Branson permitting I'm going to be at Second Chance Tuesday down in London next week.
If you're going to be there and fancy a chat, feel free to get in touch; paul [dot] miller [at] talis [dot] com, +44 7769 740083, AIM/MSN/iChat talis_paul [at] mac [dot] com, Skype napm1971 [and yes, wouldn't a single identity across platforms be nice!]
Technorati Tags: Calypso, Second Chance Tuesday, Talis, Vecosys
Posted by Paul Miller at 10:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
16 January 2007
Wikiseek launches
Mike Arrington has the scoop on Wikiseek, “A better way to search Wikipedia”.
Mike reports that the site has just gone live, and intermittent problems I'm seeing with browser authentication challenges would suggest that some of their servers possibly haven't noticed that they're open for business yet.
The model is an interesting one, and it's a great example of taking open data, adding value to it, and making a business for yourself whilst also feeding revenue back to the providers of the original data. As Mike reports,
“SearchMe is donating 'the majority' of revenue generated from advertising on WikiSeek to the Wikimedia Foundation. Adams told me earlier this evening that WikiSearch is a showcase product for their technology, and they are happy to help the Wikipedia community as much as possible by donating those revenues.”
Wikiseek has the essential browser search plugin, and whether you use that or visit the home page, you get a rapid search across Wikipedia content and across any page referred to from within Wikipedia. As the About page explains,
“The contents of Wikiseek are restricted to Wikipedia pages and only those sites which are referenced within Wikipedia, making it an authoritative source of information less subject to spam and SEO schemes.
Wikiseek utilizes Searchme's category refinement technology, providing suggested search refinements based on user tagging and categorization within Wikipedia, making results more relevant than conventional search engines.”
I've only just started playing, but one thing that surprised me was the way in which they've decided to display results from your search; you get (and ignore) the usual ads down the right hand side. To the top is a useful tag cloud with which results can be refined, and to the bottom of the main area - in white - are the results from pages to which Wikipedia points. To the top of the main area are the results from Wikipedia itself, but oddly these are displayed on a light blue background exactly like a Google sponsored link. Surely the savvy net user is going to apply skills learned on Google, and simply tune out those results with the blue background, assuming that they're just ads?
I remember - but only vaguely, so can't cite anything - some research from inside the BBC about uses made of their internal search engine. For a time, they were promoting “BBC recommended” (ie editorially vetted, rather than advertising) results to this same area of the screen... and they were finding them almost universally ignored. Moving the results physically to a different area of the page (as I remember it), solved the problem. Might Wikiseek have to do something similar?
Technorati Tags: open data, Talis, TechCrunch, Wikipedia
Posted by Paul Miller at 10:07 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
14 January 2007
Tag clouding presentations
Over on Read/WriteWeb, Richard MacManus draws my attention to a tag cloud of Bill Gates' CES keynote last week. The tag cloud was prepared by Todd Bishop at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and illustrates the frequency with which Gates used particular words. No real surprises on the top words, but some of the supporting language is interesting.
In comments to his original post, Todd says he's going to try and get hold of a Jobs transcript, and do the same with that.
If I could find a way to easily, cheaply and reliably capture transcripts of talks I give, I wonder what a similar tag cloud for them would look like? Would I be able to see if the key topics I thought I was going to talk about actually came near the top? And how close a match is there between frequency and either the importance my audience attaches to a topic, or the likelihood that they'll retain it?
Update: a comparison of Jobs, Gates, and Michael Dell as a control.
Technorati Tags: Apple, Microsoft, Talis
Posted by Paul Miller at 08:45 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
12 January 2007
'New wave computing' programme from the BBC
A colleague of mine draws my attention to last night's episode of In Business on BBC Radio 4. He was clearly listening to that whilst I got stuck into a bit of Vogels...
To quote the programme's web page;
“Peter Day talks to some of the rising stars of the new revolution and finds out how the computer industry is changing yet again.
The world’s biggest computer companies are being threatened by a host of new start-ups powered by open-source software, strings of inexpensive computers, and ‘mash-up’ websites which combine information in innovative ways.”
Interesting stuff, and it can often be valuable to take a step back from issues we think that we understand in depth, and just listen to how they're discussed in a more mainstream channel such as this one.
How might you explain your work to Peter Day? Having to think it through in this way certainly helps me to challenge some of my own assumptions, and to become far clearer in my own thinking.
The programme is available through the BBC's Listen Again service for the next week. It's also part of their podcast and download trial, which means you can grab a copy and keep it after the week is up.
Technorati Tags: BBC, mashup, Podcasting, Talis
Posted by Paul Miller at 11:08 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Werner Vogels talks about scalability and Amazon's technology platform
One of the podcasts queued up for the drive home last night was a good 'un; Amazon's Chief Technology Officer, Werner Vogels, talking to the audience at Supernova 2006 about building and maintaining a technology platform upon which you and others can rely.
The points that Werner was making sounded very similar to internal discussions at Talis as we continue to grow the Calypso Platform.
To quote the IT Conversations site, where this podcast is hosted;
“Amazon is not a website anymore. It is a platform that enables its customers to develop on top of it. Look at the NBA Store, for instance. From the looks of it you cannot tell that it is built on top of Amazon until you either read the footnote or proceed to check out, which is when you're asked for an Amazon ID as an option for identification. Even Amazon continuously dogfoods its own services to build products on top of it.
When you're building a Web application that relies on services developed by a third-party, one of the major factors to the success of your business is the uptime and availability of the third-party service. At some point in time or another, everything can break -- hardware, data centers, nodes, computer systems, power backup, you name it. They are all susceptible to downtime. Everything breaks. Amazon does not.”
Technorati Tags: Amazon, Calypso, Platforms, Podcasting, Talis, Talis Platform, web services
Posted by Paul Miller at 09:36 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
11 January 2007
It all starts to make sense
A year ago, I conducted a podcast interview with the very interesting (and great to watch) Dick Hardt. Dick is CEO of Sxip Identity, one of several companies competing for mindshare in the increasingly important online identity management space.
A week ago, Richard blogged about OpenID;
“an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity”
Today, Sam Sethi blogged about Sxipper;
“One Firefox plugin that came out recently from SxIP called Sxipper brings the whole OpenID capability to life. I simply downloaded it and then entered my existing OpenID details into sxipper and it takes care of the rest working very much like the autofill feature on the Google Toolbar. i.e it pops up when it thinks I needs its help to login to website or fill in forms with my personal details.”
I just downloaded it, and shall be seeing how well it works to help manage the way in which I declare my various (personal, corporate, professional, etc) personas to the Web. I may not like being portrayed as a dog (why, Dick, why?), but the tool certainly looks to have potential.
Although a conversation around the kettle this morning (it's January; “water cooler conversation” migrates to the kettle) makes me wonder how big a market there is for managing diverse identities. As Bill Thompson noted on the BBC site last week, users of sites such as MySpace seem to discard their identities with abandon. Maybe they don't want more than one at a time, and maybe they don't want to invest too much in it?
I may actively want to maintain different facets of myself online, and I may want to manage those relatively painlessly. Am I an edge case, an early adopter of some sort, or one of the masses?
Technorati Tags: Identity 2.0, sxip, sxipper, Talis, Vecosys, web services
Posted by Paul Miller at 01:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
8 January 2007
Second Life Client Source released under GPL
As I broadly hinted at last month, Linden Lab has announced today the release of the source code for the Second Life client under the GNU GPL v2. license.
Linden see this as embracing the inevitable:
In 1993, NCSA released their liberally licensed, but proprietary, Mosaic 2.0 browser with support for inline images arguably heralding the start of the web as we know it today. In an act of either acceptance of the inevitable or simple desperation, Netscape Communications released the bulk of the Netscape Communicator code base to form the foundation of projects as Mozilla, Firefox, and Thunderbird.
We are not desperate, and we welcome the inevitable with open arms.
They also provide a vision of the way forward beyond this initial release of client source
A lot of the Second Life development work currently in progress is focused on building the Second Life Grid — a vision of a globally interconnected grid with clients and servers published and managed by different groups. Expect many changes and updates in the coming months in support of this architecture. Much of the recent work has centered on securing the code against potential threats. More recently and still in development, we are moving more of the communications to reliable and cryptographically strong secure channels.
Definitely a platform play.
Unlike the few doom laden end-of-Second-Life-as-we-know-it prophets sprinkled through the comments on the announcement, I share the majority view and welcome this announcement. Having had a browse around the segments of the Second Life Wiki dedicated to this release, I have a few concerns that Linden are new to the support of Open Source projects - no live access to a version control repository yet for instance. They will soon learn that letting the code out of the door is just the start.
Now lets see what the world can do with it...
Technorati Tags: Second Life, Platform, Web 2.0, Linden Lab
Posted by Richard Wallis at 11:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
