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29 July 2007

This Week's Semantic Web

Selected links related to Semantic Web technologies for the week ending 2007-07-29

Docs

Software News

Events etc.

Calls for Papers

Miscellany

Quote of the Week

I treat my head as the normative copy of my filing system algorithm. The real world is just the place I keep the physical files: not the filing algorithm itself.

- Sean McGrath

Semantic Web Search Engines of the Week

See also: thread on crawling the Semantic Web

Graph Chart of the Week

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Posts to semantic-web@w3.org

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Sources include Planet RDF, various other blogs, Semantic Web Interest Group IRC Chatlogs & Scratchpad, ESW Wiki, SemWebCentral, Sweet Tools, W3C Semantic Web Activity, mailing lists, personal emails etc etc. If you see anything suitable this coming week, please mail meor use the del.icio.us tags "semweb weekly" - thanks!

Posted by Danny Ayers at 08:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

21 July 2007

This Week's Semantic Web

Selected links related to Semantic Web technologies for the week ending 2007-07-22

Yahoo! Pipe for "This Week's Semantic Web" posts

In the Media

Docs

Software News

Events etc.

Calls for Papers

Miscellany

Thread of the Week

Quote of the Week

Semantics isn’t just for kids anymore.

- Kurt Cagle

~

Sources include Planet RDF, Nodalities, various other blogs, Semantic Web Interest Group IRC Chatlogs & Scratchpad, ESW Wiki, SemWebCentral, Sweet Tools, W3C Semantic Web Activity, mailing lists, personal emails etc etc. If you see anything suitable this coming week, please mail meor use the del.icio.us tags "semweb weekly" - thanks!

Posted by Danny Ayers at 11:57 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

19 July 2007

Open Data Licensing, An Unnatural Thought

The first steps of the Semantic Web are now a short distance behind us and some organisations are starting to pick up the pace. With more and more data coming online, marked up for linking and sharing in a web of data, perhaps it’s time to look again at the trade-off of different intellectual property rights.

Back in November of 2004 James Boyle published A Natural Experiment in the Financial Times. This piece sees him debating the merits of intellectual property rights over data with Thomas Hazlett and Richard Epstein. His primary thrust is that we should be making policy decisions in this area based on empirical data about the economic benefits one way or another. Something all three protagonists agree on.

Much has changed between 2004 and now, not least our understanding of how the web can affect the way we collaborate, share, communicate; it fundamentally affects the way we live. We chat, we blog, we Twitter, we Flickr and we Joost. Content flows from person to person in unprecedented ways and at unprecedented speeds. This changes the nature of the experiment that Boyle talks about.

If the database right were working, we would expect positive answers to three crucial questions. First, has the European database industry’s rate of growth increased since 1996, while the US database industry has languished? [...] Second, are the principal beneficiaries of the database right in Europe producing databases they would not have produced otherwise? [...] Third, [...] is the right promoting innovation and competition rather than stifling it?


Boyle’s first two questions centre around the creation of databases and his third, by his own admission, is difficult to measure. If one of our primary goals for the growth of the Internet is to have a web of data that can be linked and accessed across the globe we may be better served by assessing how companies might make data open.

Boyle asks for, and discusses, the empirical evidence of databases being created in the EU and US. The differences in numbers should provide insight into the economic ups and downs as the EU adopted a robust database right in 1996 while the US ruled against such protection in 1991. I am interested in how we expect the growth of data on the Semantic Web to differ in the two jurisdictions.

Boyle explains that the US Chamber of Commerce oppose the creation of a database right in the US

[The US Chamber of Commerce] believe that database providers can adequately protect themselves with contracts, technical means such as passwords, can rely on providing tied services and so on.


And therein lies the rub. Without appropriate protection of intellectual property we have only two extreme positions available: locked down with passwords and other technical means; or wide open and in the public-domain. Polarising the possibilities for data into these two extremes makes opening up an all or nothing decision for the creator of a database.

With only technical and contractual mechanisms for protecting data, creators of databases can only publish them in situations where the technical barriers can be maintained and contractual obligations can be enforced.

We don’t tolerate this with creative works, our photographs, our blog posts and so on. Why would we expect it to make sense for databases? Whether or not it makes sense comes down to whether or not it is beneficial to society. We allow Copyright in order to provide adequate remuneration to be collected by the creator of a work. We allow patents to allow the recovery of development costs for an invention. Which is database right more like?

Patent is a very broad monopoly. If I had a patent on the clock, a mechanical means of measuring the passing of time, nobody else would be able to make clocks. Copyright, on the other hand is much narrower only allowing me to protect the specific design of my clocks. This is where it can get confusing with databases. Database right in the EU is like Copyright. It is a monopoly, but only on that particular aggregation of the data. The underlying facts are still not protected and there is nothing to stop a second entrant from collecting them independently.

Richard Epstein points to this in his contribution

The question is why do databases fall outside [the general principle of copyright], when the costs of compilation are in many cases substantial for the initial party and trivial for anyone who receives judicial blessing to copy the base? In answering this question, it will not do to say, as the Supreme Court said in the well known decision in Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service, (1991) that these compilations are not “original” in the sense that it requires no thought to check the spelling of the entries and to put them all in alphabetical order. But that obvious point should be met with an equally obvious rejoinder. If it requires no thought or intelligence to put the information together, then why not ask the second entrant into the market to go through the same drudge work as the first.


This is exactly what we see happening with Open Street Map. Ordnance Survey in the UK have rights over the map data they have collected. The protection covers the collection of geospatial data that they have created, they are not granted a monopoly in geospatial data.

This leaves a special case of databases, those which are created at low cost as a by-product of normal business. Examples used in Boyle’s article are telephone numbers, television schedules and concert times. Boyle gives us the answer directly

the [European] court ruled that the mere running of a business which generates data does not count as “substantial investment” enough to trigger the database right.

This reminds me strongly of The Smell of Food and the Sound of Coins a folk tale in which a wise judge decides that a restaurateur may charge for the smell of food wafting from his restaurant, however the appropriate price is the sound of coins chinking together.

That a database right may not and should not apply in all cases, and that there is a requirement to restrict anti-competitive practices, does not necessarily extend to the conclusion that a right is not required.

It seems to me that much of the debate around intellectual property rights has focussed on how they are used to keep things closed. Having suggested earlier that we have only the abilities to keep databases locked away or in contrast open them completely, I’d like to consider what it might mean to have a database right for keeping things open.

In response to Thomas Hazlett’s contribution Boyle asks

How many databases are now created and maintained entirely “free” and thus escape commercial directories altogether? There are obviously many, both in the scientific and the consumer realm. One can no more omit these from consideration, than one can omit free software from the software market.


This strikes me as a great comparison to consider. Taking one of the most prevalent free software licenses, the Gnu Public License, what might that look like for data?

One of the primary functions of the GPL is that it enforces Copyleft – the requirement to license derivative, and even complimentary, works under an the same license. That is, any commercial software that makes use of GPL code must, under the terms of the license, also be released under the GPL. The viral nature of this license is possible only because of the backing of Copyright.

Without a database right communities have no mechanism to publish openly and still insist upon this kind of Share-Alike agreement.

Consider the impact of this for situations where you you might use the idea of promiscuous copying to maintain the availability of data. Promiscuous copying relies on two things, lots of copies being made and lots of copies being available. Without the necessary licensing in place there is no mechanism with which to compel those who have copies to make those available. Public Domain means, by definition, no restriction - that means I can lock it away again.

Copyleft is just one position along a spectrum where ‘locked away’ and ‘free as a bird’ sit at each end. What the web shows us is that other business models form crucial parts of the eco-system. Epstein picks up on the controlling aspect of Boyle’s argument:

They can control their list of subscribers; give them each passwords; charge them based on the amount of the information that is used, or some other agreed-upon formula; and require them not to sell or otherwise transfer the information to third parties without the consent of the data base owner.


Imagine if this were true of Copyright material on the web? It has been, and still is on the occasional site. But mostly copyright owners are starting to see the value of publishing content online and they are underpinning the delivery of that content to consumers with other business models. Without Copyright the types of business that could participate would be reduced.

Epstein goes on to say:

The contractual solution is surely preferable, because general publication will allow for use by others that may not offend the copyright law, but which will block the possibility of payment for the costly information that is supplied.

And again, the very heart of the matter. If we are to encourage those who have large databases to make them open, to post them on the Semantic Web, we must provide them with models and solutions that are preferable to technical barriers and restrictive contracts. Allowing them to pick their own position on the spectrum seems to me to be a necessity in that. You can see any form of protection in two lights. When Boyle says

They make inventors disclose their inventions when they might otherwise have kept them secret.


I say

They allow inventors to disclose their inventions when they might otherwise have had to keep them secret.


That's why we've invested in a license to do this, properly, clearly and in a way that stays Open.


Rob Styles is Programme Manager for Data Services at Talis, a UK company building Semantic Web
technologies. Rob Styles is not a lawyer.

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Posted by Rob Styles at 12:12 PM | Comments (1)

17 July 2007

How Open is Facebook, asks Richard MacManus

Facebookweek 16-20July07

As part of 'Facebook week' over on Read/WriteWeb, Richard MacManus asks “How open is Facebook, Really?”

His post covers some of the ground I've been probing recently, and ends with;

“Facebook is an excellent web development platform - there is significant activity and innovation happening on it (which is why we're devoting a whole week to Facebook on R/WW). But in the end, the data isn't out in the open and developers must adhere to Facebook standards (FMBL, FQL) as well as some Web standards (REST APIs). So Facebook is not open, really.

I guess the real question is: does it matter? Well the Web's history gives us the answer to that. Yes it does matter, because when any company controls a closed, proprietary Internet platform - history shows that it ends in hubris (e.g. AOL, Microsoft). Facebook doesn't control social networking yet, far from it. But it's feasible that they will in future, if/when MySpace is vanquished.”

It's good to see this topic continuing, with the ideal solution being the further opening up of Facebook rather than its bypassing in favour of more web-friendly players...

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Posted by Paul Miller at 04:28 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

A good reason to license your 'open data' ?

Cr03-1
Digital Curation Centre Director Chris Rusbridge offers an interesting Open Data-related post over on the Digital Curation blog.

Chris' first point would appear to back our assertion (eg listen to Rob Styles make his opening statement in the Linked Data panel at WWW2007) that 'simply' throwing data out onto the web to be re-used and abused is a bad idea.

Even (especially?) if you wish data to be as widely and freely used as possible, it is important to apply an appropriate license. Such licenses make it clear to the scrupulous (who will interpret the absence of explicit permission as “All Rights Reserved”) that reuse is permissible, and can act to prevent the subsequent lock-down of 'public domain' data by those who follow. As well as the examples that Chris provides, the CDDB/Gracenote case serves as yet another warning of what happens when good intentions are not expressed with sufficient legal rigour.

The Talis Community License is one example of an explicit Open Data license, and we are working with a number of partners to 'finish' this license, rename it, and hand it off for independent upkeep moving forward. As always, I'm happy to discuss this further...

Recent podcasts with Peter Murray-Rust and Jamie Taylor also delve into this area.

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Posted by Paul Miller at 10:44 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Jamie Taylor of Metaweb joins the Talis Platform Advisory Group

#9202A8C04000641F8000000004515949

I am pleased to announce a fifth acceptance to the invitation I recently issued for our new Platform Advisory Group.

Today I welcome Jamie Taylor, Minister of Information at Semantic Web startup Metaweb.

To quote from Jamie's bio (inside the currently invitational alpha of Freebase);

“Jamie Taylor is the Minister of Information at Metaweb Technologies, where he tends to Data Gardening and Community Building. His interest in large scale, non-relational data stores grew while managing Enterprise Software projects which used Dynamic Object patterns in his role as CTO and VP Engineering at DETERMINE Software (now a part of Selectica.) He was the founder of one of San Francisco's first ISP's and has a Ph.D. from Harvard University in Behavioral Economics.”

Jamie also participated in one of our Talking with Talis podcasts recently. Have a listen to learn more about Metaweb and their first visible offering, Freebase.

Welcome aboard, Jamie, and I look forward to continuing the conversations we began over hot rocks and beer in Banff...

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GRDDL Specifications (and Quick Reference)

The big news is that the GRDDL specifications just moved to Proposed Recommendation status at the W3C, which means it "...is a mature technical report that, after wide review for technical soundness and implementability, W3C has sent to the W3C Advisory Committee for final endorsement.". To coincide with this I've prepared a laminator-ready GRDDL Quick Reference (PDF) card.

The purpose of GRDDL is to allow data contained in HTML and XML documents to be transparently interpreted as RDF, in other words making those documents first-class information on the Semantic Web. For most document authors there's virtually no work necessary to put their material on this Web of Data. For example, if they're using microformats then in effect the job is already done. (If the author wishes to create a proper chain of authority, they should use XHTML 1.0 and include a profile attribute in their document's <head> element).

GRDDL is already supported by a fair number of programming libraries and tool implementations.

To get an immediate view of the kind of things that can be embedded in HTML, you might like to try the Tabulator Semantic Web data browser in Firefox - the 0.8 stable version of Tabulator is probably best right now. First you'll need to make a quick change to Firefox's settings (see the right-hand column on the Tabulator page). Then copy & paste Dan Connolly's home page URI (http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/) into the "URI" box at the top and click "Add to Outline". You can now browse the information embedded in Dan's page as well as any linked data (if you View Source on Dan's page you'll see the it contains a mix of microformat data as well as more general Embedded RDF).

Like most of the other W3C Semantic Web specifications, GRDDL is described in a suite of documents:

The core technique is for the GRDDL-aware agent (which may be part of a browser script or a server-side system) to transform the syntax of the source document into an RDF format, typically using XSLT. To anyone familiar with XML technologies this might sound simple enough, but there are several rather elegant mechanisms through which the required transformation(s) can be identified.

For HTML, the transformation(s) can be identified in an profile document, for XML the transformation(s) can be identified in an XML Namespace document. In each of these cases no extra work is required of the individual document author to enable interpretation of the document as RDF. If reasonable care is taken, the maintainer of the profile/namespace document can add the necessary material post hoc, bringing all documents using their profile/namespace document onto the Semantic Web in one fell swoop. The GRDDL-aware agent will see the profile attribute or namespace URI and "follow its nose" to the profile or namespace document, pick up and apply the transformation to produce RDF. This is a creative use of HTTP and the formats but is entirely in line with the letter and spirit of existing Web specifications. It also fits nicely with Tim Berners-Lee's Linked Data recommendations for maximising the findability and (re-)usability of data on the Web.

This blog is hosted by Talis, so it would be remiss of me not to mention the connections. Ian Davis (Talis CTO) and myself are both members of the W3C GRDDL Working Group, with Ian acting as an editor of the Primer. Quite a while before GRDDL's specification process began, Ian came up with Embedded RDF (as found in Dan's home page linked above) which enables arbitrary RDF data to be included in a standard HTML document. It's a neat solution to this long-standing problem in the Semantic Web community, and (because it's standards-based) it also happens to be compatible with microformats. With GRDDL, this data can be automatically extracted.

It's still early days, but support for GRDDL is planned in the Talis Platform, following the commitment Ian expressed in this testimonial:

"Talis believes that GRDDL represents one of the most important steps along the road to the Semantic Web. It provides a very simple yet extraordinarily powerful mechanism to uplift documents into the web of data. Talis intends to fully support GRDDL in our Semantic Web Platform, allowing our customers to automatically extract searchable RDF metadata from their existing content with very little effort."

Posted by Danny Ayers at 07:59 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

15 July 2007

This Week's Semantic Web

Selected links related to Semantic Web technologies for the week ending 2007-07-15

In the Media

Docs

Software News

Events etc.

Calls for Papers

Miscellany

Thread of the Week

Quote of the Week

That is not a term that I invented.

- timblon Web 2.0

~

Sources include Planet RDF, various other blogs, Semantic Web Interest Group IRC Chatlogs & Scratchpad, ESW Wiki, SemWebCentral, Sweet Tools, W3C Semantic Web Activity, mailing lists, personal emails etc etc. If you see anything suitable this coming week, please mail meor use the del.icio.us tags "semweb weekly" - thanks!

Posted by Danny Ayers at 11:13 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

12 July 2007

Jack Schofield asks if “Freedom From Choice” is an asset for Facebook

Jack Schofield offers an interesting addition to the ongoing Facebook-as-Platform theme in today's Technology Guardian.

Towards the end of the piece, Jack writes;

“[Jason Kottke] is right in principle, but what if he's wrong in practice? Developers might not like the idea of a Balkanised internet - with incompatible services dominant in different countries - but if Facebook users like what they've got, why should they care?

Some might see the internet as a confusing mess. They don't want to waste time figuring out which sites are best: they don't want freedom of choice, they want freedom from choice.”

He has a point, which only increases the need to find compelling ways to argue and demonstrate the benefits of a more open alternative as I've been doing in these three posts.

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Posted by Paul Miller at 11:48 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

11 July 2007

Mills Davis talks with Talis about multi-billion dollar markets and the Semantic Wave

Team Mills

In our latest Talking with Talis podcast, I talk with Mills Davis about Semantic Technologies and his work with Project 10X on the prospects for the Semantic Wave.

During our conversation, we look at Mills' assertion that Semantic Technology will be a $52.4bn market by 2010, and dig into the importance of the consumer internet in driving the next generation of semantic applications. We touch upon some of the findings in a new Project 10X report, to be released over the summer.

Listen Now

Download MP3 [57 mins, 39Mb]

During the conversation, we refer to the following resources;

This conversation was conducted as a SkypeOut call on Monday 9 July, recorded with Ecamm Network's Call Recorder for Skype, and edited on a Mac with Garageband.

For further Talking with Talis podcasts on the emerging Web of Data, see here.

Posted by Paul Miller at 10:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Talis Platform News launches

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Today marks the release of a new monthly newsletter from Talis.

Talis Platform News will contain information on the evolving Platform, highlight ways in which it is being used, and track external trends that have a bearing upon ourselves and our partners (all of you, potentially) in building upon the Semantic Web to realise the full potential of the Web of Data.

Take a look and sign up to receive email notification of each new issue's highlights as it becomes available.

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Stefan Decker joins the Talis Platform Advisory Group

Stefandecker
I am pleased to announce a fourth name accepting my invitation to join the new Talis Platform Advisory Group, membership of which is shaping up rather nicely.

Today's addition is Stefan Decker, Director of the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) at the National University of Ireland, Galway.

To quote from Stefan's biography;

“I am professor at the National University of Ireland, Galway, director of the Digital Enterprise Research Institute and Cluster Leader of the Semantic Web Cluster within the institute.

Previously I worked at ISI, University of Southern California (2 years, Research Assistent Professor and Computer Scientist), Stanford University, Computer Science Department (Database Group) (3 Years, PostDoc and Research Associate), and Institute AIFB, University of Karlsruhe (4 years, PhD Student and Junior Researcher).

My main research field is the Semantic Web.”

Welcome aboard, Stefan.

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10 July 2007

Mills Davis joins the Talis Platform Advisory Group

Team Mills
I'm delighted to announce that Mills Davis is the latest invitee to agree to join the new Talis Platform Advisory Group.

As Mills' biography states, he

“is the founder and managing director of Project10X, specializing in industry research and strategic programs. Mills consults with technology manufacturers, global 2000 corporations, and government agencies on next-wave semantic technologies and solutions. Mills serves as lead for the Federal CIO council’s Semantic Interoperability Community of Practice (SICoP) research into the business value of semantic technologies. Also, he is a founding member of the AIIM interoperable enterprise content management (iECM) working group, and a founding member of the National Center for Ontology Research (NCOR).”

Mills also participated in one of our podcast interviews earlier this week, and it will be available via this blog shortly.

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Ning rings in the cash...

Marc Andreessen announced yesterday that Ning just raised $44million in a 'Series C' investment round. Not bad for a 'platform' that received some negative press in the months after it emerged from its stealth mode disguise as 24 Hour Laundry back in 2005...

Ning continues to improve, and to demonstrate interesting potential. Could it become the solution to the problems I've recently been discussing with regard to Facebook et al?

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9 July 2007

Some follow-up Platform thoughts

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Last week I wrote a blog post looking at some of the different ways in which 'Platforms' are being brought to web scale and pervasiveness. In writing, I concentrated upon the quite different approaches that I saw Facebook and ourselves taking, and went on to link that with some fuzzier notions on the manner in which each 'Platform' participated in the life of the wider web.

Kingsley Idehen and others extend and clarify my thinking in the comments, and the topic is also expanded by fellow Talisian Danny Ayers in a post of his own. Paul Walk, an appointment to UKOLN after my time there, has independently given some thought to the same question, and he appears to share my view that Facebook's kind of Platform is in danger of being a regressive return to all that was worst about the mega-portals...

“I just can’t get all that excited about facebook as a platform. From my point of view, in an exciting era of mashups, facebook is only seriously mashable in one direction, and it’s the wrong direction. If facebook’s social networks were exposed to the web, ‘mine-able’ and mashable - now that would be exciting.”

Paul also has some valuable links out to relevant commentary from Marc Andreesen, Jon Udell (did I mention that he's accepted my invitation to join our new Advisory Group?) and others.

Facebook, of course, appears to have a business model that relies upon drawing a large community to their site, again and again and again. Opening up in order to allow Facebook's members, partners and parasites to expose some of that content and capability in other contexts might make Facebook a better web citizen and a poster child for Linked Data... but it won't pay the bills unless their business model is quite dramatically re-engineered. Even if Facebook wants to participate and become truly 'of' the web [and there's nothing, actually, to suggest that they don't], can they afford to?

In his comment, Kingsley makes the point that there are 'Platforms for Exposing Data & Services on the web' (those I suggested were 'on the web') and 'Platforms for injecting data and services into the web' (my 'of the web'). There are viable business models for both. Facebook and other high profile 'Web 2.0' darlings are clear examples of the former, and they're doing well just now. Examples of the latter include ourselves, Kingsley's own Virtuoso, Nova Spivack's Radar Networks [podcast], Metaweb [podcast], etc. As more and more data become visible to the web, and as we get a handle on the usage ambiguities that surround this area, we enter an interesting period in which the slow burn toward a Web of Data becomes ever more visible, and ever more compelling.

Those who can harness the best of the 'old' to this new breed of Platform will be in a powerful position to move far beyond the narrow slices through a fragmented Web that are the useful yet ultimately disappointing best Facebook and their ilk can currently offer.

The trick is finding ways in which existing businesses can evolve themselves, their communities, and their revenue streams in order to benefit from change, rather than being overwhelmed and consumed by it. Maybe it's time for the Web of Data proponents of the world (of which I'd count myself one) to sit down with the successful social networking destinations, and to pragmatically explore our middle ground. We have much to learn from one another.

Today's picture by Derrick Mealiffe shows what can happen to Platforms that fail to adapt.

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Nova Spivack joins the Talis Platform Advisory Group

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I mentioned our new Talis Platform Advisory Group - and its first sign-up - on Friday.

I'm delighted to bring news of our second confirmation this morning; CEO and Founder of Radar Networks, Nova Spivack.

Nova's bio describes him as;

“Nova Spivack is a technology visionary and entrepreneur with nearly two decades of experience in pioneering ventures.

Mr. Spivack is CEO and Founder of Radar Networks (http://www.radarnetworks.com), a stealth-mode technology venture located in San Francisco. Radar Networks is developing a fundamental new technology for enriching content that will open up a new dimension of the Web. The company anticipates releasing its first products in 2007.

In 1994, Mr. Spivack co-founded EarthWeb (http://www.earthweb.com), one of the first Internet companies, where he was Executive Vice-President for Products, Strategy and Marketing. EarthWeb went public in 1999 and resulted in the Nasdaq's largest IPO single-day percentage point gain up to that point, spawning a wave of Tech IPOs. Mr. Spivack left EarthWeb’s board of directors in 1999 and began advising startups and angel investing. During the down-years of the post-Internet-bubble, EarthWeb’s content properties were acquired in 2000 by Internet.com (http://www.internet.com). The company’s Dice.com (http://www.dice.com) property remained a strong stand-alone business until it was acquired for approximately $200 million in 2005.

While at EarthWeb he helped key cultural institutions and businesses develop their first large-scale Web presences, including the New York Stock Exchange, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, BMG Music Club, Sony, AT&T, US West, and others. He also helped to catalyze the adoption of Java technology by leading the production of large on communities for the IT professionals, including Gamelan.com (http://www.gamelan.com), Developer.com (http://www.developer.com), and Datamation.com (http://www.datamation.com).

Prior to EarthWeb, Mr. Spivack worked in a variety of roles from technology marketing to software engineering at artificial intelligence and next-generation computing ventures including Individual, Inc., Ray Kurzweil’s pioneering OCR company, Kurzweil Computer Products which was sold to Xerox, and at Danny Hillis’ legendary supercomputing venture, Thinking Machines. Mr. Spivack is also the founder of Lucid Ventures (http://www.lucidventures.com), an early-stage incubator that originated the technologies that are now Radar Networks. Mr. Spivack is a co-founder of the San Francisco Web Innovators Network (SFWIN) (http://www.sfwin.org), a network of several hundred technology innovators and business leaders who meet monthly in the Bay Area.

Mr. Spivack has extensive experience working on knowledge representation and the Semantic Web, and has authored and helped to design several large (500 to 3000 class) ontologies in the OWL language (http://www.w3.org/2004/OWL/), the W3C open standard for ontology specifications. Mr. Spivack has also been a lead advisor to SRI International (http://www.sri.com) on the DARPA CALO program (http://www.ai.sri.com/project/CALO), a distributed research program encompassing several hundred top researchers across over 20 major research institutions focused on next-generation semantically-aware machine learning applications, and in particular on the IRIS Semantic Desktop project (http://www.openiris.org). Also with SRI and Sarnoff Laboratories, Mr. Spivack helped to co-found nVention (http://www.sri.com/about/nvention.html), SRI’s in-house technology incubator.

Mr. Spivack has co-authored several books on Internet strategy and technology and led the EarthWeb Press publishing imprint with Macmillan Computer Publishing, one of the largest computer book publishers, which resulted in a series of publications by leading authors on technology. He has been featured and cited in Business Week, CNN, CNBC, CBS Evening News, CNN-FN, Discovery Channel, The New York Times, Washington Post, WIRED Magazine, Chronicle of Philanthropy, Communications Week, Interactive Week, Internet World, Reuters, Newsweek, Red Herring, Silicon Alley Reporter, Interactive Age, Web Week, Java Developer’s Journal, and has spoken at numerous conferences and industry events. Mr. Spivack also helped to invent key technologies for interactive television and Web convergence in the early days of the Web, as well as several pending patents for Radar Networks.

Mr. Spivack has a long-time interest in cognitive science, artificial intelligence, emergent computation, knowledge management and the emerging Semantic Web. As a grandson of management guru Peter F. Drucker (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Drucker), Mr. Spivack shares his family’s heritage of interests in management theory, nonprofits, and knowledge work. In addition, he has been a student of Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, art and culture for nearly 20 years and has pursued this interest extensively in monasteries, refugee camps and communities in Nepal, India, Europe and the USA. Mr. Spivack focuses his philanthropic activities on helping to fund the preservation of Tibet’s unique wisdom culture as a world-heritage treasure for the benefit of future generations.

Mr. Spivack has a BA in Philosophy, with a focus on cognitive science and artificial intelligence, from Oberlin College and a CSS degree from the International Space University (http://www.isunet.edu) a NASA-funded graduate professional business school for the space industry. In 1999 Mr. Spivack’s interest in space gave him the opportunity to help pioneer the early days of space tourism when he flew to the edge of space with Space Adventures (http://www.spaceadventures.com) and did micro-gravity parabolic flight training with the Russian air force.

Mr. Spivack’s weblog, Minding the Planet, focuses on Radar Networks and emerging technologies and can be read at http://www.mindingtheplanet.net”

He also makes me very jealous, having almost reached space in 1999. And, more recently, he was an early participant in our Semantic Web-focussed series of podcasts.

Welcome aboard, Nova... and maybe we can convince our fellow members to hold a physical meeting here, prior to doing this?

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6 July 2007

Jon Udell joins the Talis Platform Advisory Group

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I mentioned our new Talis Platform Advisory Group in the previous post.

I'm delighted to announce that the first confirmed member of this group is Jon Udell.

As his bio describes,

“Jon Udell is an author, information architect, software developer, and new media innovator. His 1999 book, Practical Internet Groupware, helped lay the foundation for what we now call social software. Udell has been a software developer at Lotus, was BYTE Magazine's executive editor and Web maven, and has worked as an independent consultant.

A hands-on thinker, Udell's analysis of industry trends has always been informed by his own ongoing experiments with software, information architecture, and new media.

From 2002 to 2006 he was InfoWorld's lead analyst, author of the weekly Strategic Developer column, and blogger-in-chief. During his InfoWorld tenure he also produced a monthly series of screencasts about software, and a weekly series of audio interviews with innovators.

In January 2007 he joined Microsoft as a technical evangelist. In his new role he'll continue to explore and explain a broad portfolio of technologies, both inside and outside Microsoft. He aims to build bridges not only within the technical community but also, and crucially, across the chasm that divides elite technologists from everybody else.”

He's also a very well known ponderer, tinkerer, and pusher of boundaries, and I'm delighted to have him on board.

Welcome, Jon!

Today's CC-licensed visual goodness from Flickr is by James Duncan Davidson/ O'Reilly Media, and shows Jon Udell speaking at the 2006 O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference.

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With a little help from our friends...

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It will not be news to regular readers of this blog that we at Talis have been working for a while on the Talis Platform.

This builds upon our market-leading position supplying information management systems to traditional markets in the UK and Ireland, and we have spent the past couple of years investing significantly in the organisational and technological change required to deliver a robust and modern technology Platform capable of global reach. Soundly based upon Semantic Web, 'Web 2.0’ and existing Internet technologies, a set of open RESTful APIs, and a fundamental rethinking of the value and ownership of data, Talis' Platform enables innovative applications that learn from and assist their user to be created by any software developer. Some of the rationale behind the decisions made to date is outlined in a recent Talis white paper [PDF].

We've been working on the Platform for a while and are very pleased, both by our technical progress and by our ability to engage with and attract respected members of the community such as Danny Ayers to share the journey with us.

As we reach the point at which aspects of the Platform begin to see the light of day outside our offices, it's time to further validate our ideas with leading practitioners across the sector, and to ensure early engagement with their perceptions of change. To that end, we are forming a new Advisory Group over the summer of 2007, and I very much look forward to engaging in the discussions to come.

More details to follow, as some of those I've approached begin to step forward.

Today's CC-licensed picture from Flickr is by Matt Chan, and a great example of good advice!

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Posted by Paul Miller at 09:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

5 July 2007

The Platform and the Web - what can Facebook and Talis tell us?

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There has been much talk of Platforms in the context of the Web recently, although usage has proved somewhat troublesome to pin down. In a recent podcast conversation with me, Tom Heath probed some fledgling ideas about the way in which resources might be considered as on or in the Web. I'm not certain, but it appeared to me that this useful distinction was taking form in Tom's mind as we spoke (although he's subsequently found a similar expression from way back in 2002). Thinking about 'on' and 'in' more over the past few days led me to wonder if the distinction might also be usefully applied to some of the different flavours of Web Platform that we see springing up around us at the moment. I also began to wonder if 'of' (yes, one 'f') might be more compelling than 'in', other than the likelihood for everyone to read the dichotomy as 'on' or 'off' the Web, which would be exactly wrong.

I'd like to share some of these ideas here, and see whether or not they have substance. Examples for my hypothesising will be drawn from Facebook and the Talis Platform, but I'm sure that other platforms might also be examined in a similar vein.

The rise of the Web Platform

A couple of years or so ago, when Talis developers began working on our Platform in earnest, 'platform' and 'web' didn't really go together in most people's minds. As Wikipedia notes, computer scientists are liberal in their use of the 'p' word, and it cropped up in almost every part of our industry except in direct as