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30 November 2007

Talis Platform featured on Read/Write Web

Rrw-20071130-1

In the space of 24 hours, two articles on popular tech blog Read/Write Web have featured Talis.

The first, 'Ten Semantic Apps to Watch', was by Richard MacManus. In it, the Talis Platform was one of ten examples of deploying semantic technology picked out for examination. As Richard commented,

“They are a bit different from the other 9 companies profiled here, as Talis has released a platform and not [just] a single product. The Talis platform is kind of a mix between Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web, in that it enables developers to create apps that allow for sharing, remixing and re-using data. Talis believes that Open Data is a crucial component of the Web, yet there is also a need to license data in order to ensure its openness. Talis has developed its own content license, called the Talis Community License, and recently they funded some legal work around the Open Data Commons License.”

Marshall Kirkpatrick followed up with 'Semantic Technology in Action', interviewing me. As well as some broader questions, we also dug down into the Platform a little and looked at how it supports Talis and third-party developers in building those semantically capable applications.

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Posted by Paul Miller at 01:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Tim Berners-Lee talks with Robert Scoble

Tbl-Scoble-Interview

Robert Scoble reached out to his Twitter followers and blog readers earlier this week, mentioning that he was to interview Sir Tim Berners-Lee for PodTech.net. People piled in with questions, ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous.

The interview took place after Tim delivered a presentation at HP Labs, and video for both the formal presentation and the subsequent interview are now available on PodTech.net. First, the presentation. Then the Q&A. And finally the interview. Take a look.

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Posted by Paul Miller at 11:47 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

28 November 2007

Cindy Ché and other interesting people

Last Friday a few of us went down to HP Labs offices in Bristol for a great free event hosted by Andy Seaborne - including free lunch. Free food always seems to make a difference, is that just me?

Nadeem's blogged some of the sessions in detail over at Virtual Chaos and Ian Davis over at Internet Alchemy gives his own perspective. Other people covering off much of the detail is one of the great benefits of leaving the blogging for a few days after the event ;-)

A few of us are down at HP Labs in Bristol. Andy Seaborne is hosting a great free event for those interested in Semantic Web developments in the UK.

After Andy's welcome, Ian opened the day with a presentation on where we've got to with the Talis Platform - over the past 3 years we've come a very long way, as you can from Ian's Slides and Nadeem's Summary. Our platform is an example of PaaS (Platform as a Service) - that is, we hope to do the heavy lifting of managing large volumes of data, indexing it, making sure it's backed up and so on so you can concentrate on building applications. That's a message that seemed to go down really well with lots of people grabbing us for more information during breaks and lunch.

For the rest of the day there were a good handful of very interesting sessions from a whole host of people trying to do real, practical things with semantic web technologies.

There were a few things that seemed to stand out as threads through the day - a lot of people using Jena, Redland got a couple of mentions, but mostly it was Jena. I had a great chat with Chris Dollin and it's obvious that they take great pride in Jena, not only in the codebase and what it can do but also in the developer and user community that has formed around it. There was also a lot of interest in ontologies with people focussing on the use of ontologies to assist in user-interactions and various people mapping overlapping ontologies to allow semantic relationship to be recognised between disparate datasets.

In essence this was about people starting to do very real things, a point emphasised by Alberto Reggiori of @semantics when in one slide he announced that RDF is dead, only to have it resurrected 3 days later, complete with a slide featuring the risen Christ - award for best laugh of the day goes to Alberto. To hear more from Alberto, listen to the podcast he just did with us.

Most worthy project of the day has to go Health-e-Child, a project that is helping paediatric medical research by providing federated search services across medical data at several participating European hospitals. The hospitals have to keep their own data, due to confidentiality concerns and this data is in any number of different schemas with varying vocabularies. Ontologies feature heavily in what Peter Bloodsworth has been doing and it will be interested to see how this project progresses. It's great to hear more from him in his podcast with us.

The back-channel chat on IRC (#swig on irc.freenode.net) was, as usual, a light-hearted and useful tool, with people sharing the links from the presentations in almost real-time. It even resulted in Sir Tim pitching in with a correction for Ordnance Survey's site:

14:40:24 <timbl> ooops http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/ontology/SpatialRelations.owl is Content-Type: application/octet-stream
IMG_0621.JPG

Catherine Dolbear did a great job of describing the ways in which OS are playing with small RDF datasets. With Ordnance Survey's current business model (which she stated was unlikely to change without Government changing it for them) the data is their crown jewels, so you don't get to play with new technologies with; especially when they'd be talking about more than ten billion triples. They have published some ontologies, see timbl quote above, but unfortunately these have been released under cc-nc-sa license, making it hard for them to be widely adopted. In questions later she told me that wasn't something they would change. Unwittingly, Catherine also provide us with the great slide on the right.

The point of the slide was to indicate the complexity of some of the queries that geo-data requires to be useful, things like "inside" - it just made me laugh inside that "Every island is a kind of land that is surrounded by water" constituted a complex statement. That little laugh, of course, belies much of the problem we have developing the semantic web - stating the bleeding obvious in ways that are complete and unambiguous.

As a nice counter-point to Catherine's presentation, Richard Cyganiak presented on Sindice (or Cindy Ché as it came up on the #swig back-channel). Sindice is pulling in data from Linked Data sources such as dbpedia, geonames and everyone's foaf files and indexing them in a semantic search engine offering. What makes the nice contrast with Catherine's presentation is the scale, 20M+ documents, 80M+ URIs, 4M+ IFPs, 2B+ triples - that's 2 billion triples... indexing is using Solr, and there's some hadoop in there for parallel data processing.

It's great to see the UK semweb community thriving like this. Get-togethers are so important in allowing people the time to do show 'n' tell to their friends and peers. Perhaps we should organise another one soon, making sure to find a good caterer for lunch of course.

Posted by Rob Styles at 09:35 AM | Comments (0)

27 November 2007

Bill Hutchison Talks with Talis about classification, Wordmap, and the role of the Semantic Web

Bill Hutchison

In our latest Talking with Talis podcast, I talk with Wordmap founder Bill Hutchison. We discuss the relationship between folksonomy, taxonomy, thesaurus and ontology, and draw upon Bill's experience in the market to explore changes in the users and usage for these technologies.

Listen Now

Download MP3 [52 mins, 25Mb]

During the conversation, we refer to the following resources;

This conversation was conducted using Skype on Monday 26 November, 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.

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Posted by Paul Miller at 05:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Peter Bloodsworth Talks with Talis about multi-agent systems, Ontologies, and the Health-e-Child project

Peter Bloodsworth
In our latest Talking with Talis podcast, I talk with Dr Peter Bloodsworth of the University of the West of England (UWE) in Bristol. We discuss his research background, and the evolution of his interests from multi-agent systems toward the use of Semantic Web Ontologies. We conclude by looking at the ways in which this research is being put into practice with the European Health-e-Child project.

Listen Now

Download MP3 [49 mins, 23Mb]

During the conversation, we refer to the following resources;

This conversation was conducted as a SkypeOut call on Monday 26 November, 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.

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Posted by Paul Miller at 01:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Nick Carr reckons Google's is not the model to emulate

Nick Carr

Talis CEO Dave Errington pointed us to Nick Carr's latest post this morning, commenting 'good analysis'.

The post is quite a short one, but points to a longer piece of Nick's in strategy+business magazine. Refreshingly for a print publication, the usual pay-wall doesn't appear to be in evidence, at least for Nick's article. So hop on over and have a read.

As Nick writes in his blog post,

“I argue that the wide scope of Google's interest and activity is a natural and inevitable result of the fact that everything that happens on the internet is complementary to the company's core business. When looked at in this light, Google's strategy is revealed to be at once simple and extraordinarily unusual - so unusual that it's probably of limited use as a model for other companies.”

From the article itself,

“Whenever a company becomes wildly successful in a brief span of time, it naturally becomes an object of fascination for corporate executives and even the general public. More than that, it comes to be presented as a new model for business success. Reporters and scholars scour its history and its practices, looking to distill general lessons for other firms to copy. Google is no exception.”

and

“But business executives have at least two reasons to think twice before leaping aboard the Google bandwagon. First, for all its success, Google is still a young company, and it has yet to be tested by adversity. We don’t even know whether its approach to management, and in particular its approach to innovation, is a cause of its success or a product of its success — a crucial distinction. Second, we don’t know how well Google’s example applies to other businesses. Google is certainly a different sort of company, but is it so different as to be anomalous? Is the company an exemplar or a freak?”

Carr takes a good look at the diversity of Google's endeavours, both core and complementary, clearly identifies the main source of actual hard cash, and comments;

“The economics of Google’s business may simply be too different [to that of you/us/anybody]. By following its lead, you may go broke.”

He goes on to suggest that most of Google's recent 'successes' have been acquired rather than developed, postulating that;

“When it comes to creating hit products, Google may actually be hampered by its unique economics. Because the cost of failure is so low, it can experiment in all sorts of areas and rush new services to market in the early stages of their development. That kind of freedom brings many benefits, but it can also lead to an erosion of discipline. In the absence of strong economic pressures, it’s easy for companies like Google to put off making the hard choices and difficult trade-offs that lie at the heart of long-term business success.”

There's plenty more, so have a read and think about whether or not he's right...

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Posted by Paul Miller at 11:53 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

26 November 2007

This Week's Semantic Web

Selected links related to Semantic Web technologies for the week ending 2007-11-26, all weeks. Also available in RDF as linked data or via GRDDL.

In the Media

Docs

Software News

Events etc.

Calls for Papers

Jobs

Miscellany

Thread of the Week

Quote of the Week

'A gruffalo! Why, didn't you know?

He has terrible triples, and terrible graphs, and terrible OWL in his terrible ontologies.'”

-Paul Miller, from Julia Donaldson

~

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 08:00 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Who is afraid of the GGG?

Cover art from The Gruffalo

The GGG, or Giant Global Graph. It sounds like something with which you might terrify a child at bed time, but this is no Gruffalo, no Jabberwock, no Smaug. Rather it's father-of-the-web Tim Berners-Lee's label for his latest attempt to express the power of the Semantic Web's core technologies in ways that will resonate beyond the established SemWeb literati. In the post he writes;

“So, if only we could express these relationships, such as my social graph, in a way that is above the level of documents, then we would get re-use. That's just what the graph does for us. We have the technology -- it is Semantic Web technology, starting with RDF OWL and SPARQL. Not magic bullets, but the tools which allow us to break free of the document layer. If a social network site uses a common format for expressing that I know Dan Brickley, then any other site or program (when access is allowed) can use that information to give me a better service. Un-manacled to specific documents”

As we might expect when someone like Berners-Lee posts, his thoughts sparked the usual flurry of interest, picked up by The Guardian, Read/Write Web, ZD Net, Nova Spivack, GigaOM, Nick Carr, and a host of other bloggers. The compulsory Wikipedia stub is already in place, and anticipating (at the time of writing) that

“it may become a common expression.”

So what is this Giant Global Graph, how's it related to the Semantic Web, and what does it all mean?

In his post, Tim clarifies the distinction between the Net(work of computers) and the (World Wide) Web offered up over that network;

“So the Net and the Web may both be shaped as something mathematicians call a Graph, but they are at different levels. The Net links computers, the Web links documents.

Now, people are making another mental move. There is realization now, 'It's not the documents, it is the things they are about which are important'. Obvious, really.”

He then goes to the next level, to connect the statements in that web of documents to form a graph;

“We are all interested in friends, family, colleagues, and acquaintances. There is a lot of blogging about the strain, and total frustration that, while you have a set of friends, the Web is providing you with separate documents about your friends. One in facebook, one on linkedin, one in livejournal, one on advogato, and so on. The frustration that, when you join a photo site or a movie site or a travel site, you name it, you have to tell it who your friends are all over again. The separate Web sites, separate documents, are in fact about the same thing -- but the system doesn't know it.

There are cries from the heart (e.g The Open Social Web Bill of Rights) for my friendship, that relationship to another person, to transcend documents and sites. There is a ”Social Network Portability“ community. Its not the Social Network Sites that are interesting -- it is the Social Network itself. The Social Graph. The way I am connected, not the way my Web pages are connected.

We can use the word Graph, now, to distinguish from Web.

I called this graph the Semantic Web, but maybe it should have been Giant Global Graph!”

Tim concludes;

“In the long term vision, thinking in terms of the graph rather than the web is critical to us making best use of the mobile web, the zoo of wildy differing devices which will give us access to the system. Then, when I book a flight it is the flight that interests me. Not the flight page on the travel site, or the flight page on the airline site, but the URI (issued by the airlines) of the flight itself. That's what I will bookmark. And whichever device I use to look up the bookmark, phone or office wall, it will access a situation-appropriate view of an integration of everything I know about that flight from different sources. The task of booking and taking the flight will involve many interactions. And all throughout them, that task and the flight will be primary things in my awareness, the websites involved will be secondary things, and the network and the devices tertiary.

I'll be thinking in the graph. My flights. My friends. Things in my life. My breakfast. What was that? Oh, yogourt, granola, nuts, and fresh fruit, since you ask.”

So not, then, anything radically new. This is the long-held promise of the Semantic Web, but it is valuable to see that promise rearticulated in something akin to the language of the social network. Those involved in the Semantic Web probably 'knew' all of this at some level, but had perhaps become too caught up in the mechanics and the model, too distant from the point. This is why the Semantic Web matters; the graphing of relationships between resources on the open Web. Not ontology wars. Not RDF-is-better-than-microformats. Not demonstrations of concept in the laboratory and behind the firewall. Not the creation of a shadow web. This. So thank you, Tim, for reminding us. That said, might Nova's 'semantic graph' not be a better label for this important restating of the point than the rather obtuse GGG? 'Giant' and 'Global' set too many alarm bells ringing for me, and hint way too much about all-encompassing-ness and top-down-ness... even if that's (probably) not what Berners-Lee intends. We got waylaid by misconceptions of ontologies as all-encompassing and all-pervasive. Rubbing everyone's noses in 'Giant' and 'Global' just sets us up for yet another round of that particular debate, and I for one have better things to do...

Let's turn to look at some of the commentary that Berners-Lee's post received.

Journalist and author Nick Carr, for example, remarks;

“Sir Tim suggests that the Semantic Web (recently dubbed 'Web 3.0') was really the Social Graph all along, and that the graph represents the third great conceptual leap for the network - from net to web to graph”

and concludes;

“But while it's true that technologists and theoreticians desire to abstract the graph from the sites - and see only the benefits of doing so - it's not yet clear that that's what ordinary users want or even care about. That'll be the real test to whether the graph makes the leap from mathematician to mainstream - and it will also tell us whether a social network like Facebook has a chance to become a true platform or is fated to remain a mere site.”

Nick's concluding point is certainly well made, but probably in the early mobile phone camp (who knew they wanted one?) rather than presenting any insurmountable unwillingness to adopt and adapt. The onus is clearly on us to move beyond the talk, and to demonstrate compelling and desirable benefits to being in (on?) the Graph. Tim O'Reilly's damning criticism of Open Social offers a lesson that we would do well to learn;

“If all OpenSocial does is allow developers to port their applications more easily from one social network to another, that's a big win for the developer, as they get to shop their application to users of every participating social network. But it provides little incremental value to the user, the real target. We don't want to have the same application on multiple social networks. We want applications that can use data from multiple social networks.”
“Set the data free! Allow social data mashups. That's what will be the trump card in building the winning social networking platform.”

Surely we can all agree with those sentiments?

The scepticism is in evidence elsewhere, perhaps most noticeably when Pete Cashmore writes;

“Much like 'Web 2.0', 'ajax', 'crowdsourcing', the 'wisdom of crowds', 'UGC' (user generated content) and other catchy terms before them, the social graph looks set to become a bullet point on every web startup’s VC pitch in 2008. The blessings this week from Tim Berners-Lee make that inevitable.

Let’s leave aside the fact that the 'graph' isn’t a graph in the sense that most people think of it (most would describe it as a 'network') or that the phrase 'social network' could already serve this purpose: there’s a sense that we need a new word for the concept now that these networks are becoming portable, and the term can ride a wave of Facebook hype to become the de facto nomenclature for this latest piece of the portable identity puzzle. Beyond that, the Webfather’s latest blog post gives us a meandering introduction to the social graph’s role in the development of the web.

For the record, I’m not bothered by the phrase: it’s nice to have new labels for specific parts of the solution. I am, however, adopting a new lexicon for my day-to-day life in keeping with the trend: making a landline phone call will now be 'unSkyping', Post-It notes will henceforth be called 'retro-Twitters', going outside will now be 'outdoorsing', a paperback book will be known as a 'Kindle Alpha' and Wednesdays will be Day 3.0. No need to remember any of these, of course: I’ll rename them all next month.”

Recent podcast subject Yihong Ding offers a thoughtful consideration of Tim's post, opening with;

“Sir Tim Berners-Lee blogged again. This time he invented another new term---Giant Global Graph. Sir Tim uses GGG to describe [the] Internet in a new abstraction layer that is different from either the Net layer abstraction or the Web layer abstraction. Quite a few technique blogs immediately reported this news in this Thanksgiving weekend. I am afraid, however, that few of them really told readers the deeper meaning of this new GGG. To me, this is a signal from the father of World Wide Web: the Web (or the information on [the] Internet) has started to be reorganized from the traditional publisher-oriented structure to the new viewer-oriented structure”

and continuing,

“Both Brad Fitzpatrick and Alex Iskold presented the same observation: every individual web user expects to have an organized social graph of web information in which they are interested. Independently, I had another presentation but about the same meaning. The term I had used was web space. Due to current status of web evolution, web users are going to look for integrating their explored web information of interest into a personal cyberspace---web space. Inside each web space, information is organized as a social graph based on the perspective of the owner of the web space. This is thus the connection between the web spaces under my interpretation and the social graphs under the interpretation of Brad and Alex. Note that this web-space interpretation reveals another implicit but important aspect: the major role of an web-space owner is a web viewer instead of a web publisher”

before concluding that;

“The emergence of this new Graph abstraction of Internet tells that the Web (or information on Internet) is now evolving from a publisher-oriented structure to a viewer-oriented structure. At the Web layer, every web page shows an information organization based on the view of its publishers. Web viewers generally have no control on how web information should be organized. So the Web layer is upon a publisher-oriented structure. At the new proposed Graph layer, every social graph shows an information organization based on the view of graph owners, who are primarily the web viewers. In general, web publishers have little impact on how these social graphs should be composed. 'It's not the documents, it is the things they are about which are important.' Who are going to answer what are 'the things they are about'? It is the viewers instead of the publishers who will answer. This is why information organization at the Graph layer becomes viewer-oriented. The composition of all viewer-oriented social graphs becomes a giant graph at the global scale that is equivalent to the World Wide Web (but based on a varied view); this giant composition is thus the Giant Global Graph (GGG).”

Writing for GigaOM, Anne Zelenka worries that the GGG is not best-suited to the modelling of inter-personal relationships;

“But the Giant Global Graph itself is like Dustin Hoffman’s autistic savant character Raymond Babbitt in the 1988 movie Rain Man. Raymond knew all about plane trips but couldn’t make sense of human relationships.”
“...though Berners-Lee borrows social graph talk, he’s not really concerned with human relationships, but more about things that computers can understand, things like plane trips”
“The semantic web has always been about computers taking on more processing for us, not about computers allowing us to be more human, which is where the social graph might more naturally aim.

Semantic web fans would like to suggest otherwise. Nova Spivack, founder of semantic web startup Radar Networks, as well wants to make everything into a semantic graph story. 'The social graph is a subset of the semantic graph,' he told me.”

Whilst Tim's examples might support Anne's point, I'm unconvinced. The semantic technologies behind the GGG are all about expressing relationships between things, and those relationships might as easily be human or social as a manifestation of the airline timetable. Those social relationships, though, are about far more than the zombification of your 'friends' on Facebook. Rather, we can reach through to the implicit and explicit pattern of relationships between professional peers, students in a class, or citations of an author. We can map the shape of those relationships, and we can leverage existing capabilities to expose them back to participants in the relationship in order to allow them to see it, understand it, and use it in new and beneficial ways.

Richard MacManus also covers the story for Read/Write Web, concluding;

“I'm very pleased Tim Berners-Lee has appropriated the concept of the Social Graph and married it to his own vision of the Semantic Web. What Berners-Lee wrote today goes way beyond Facebook, OpenSocial, or social networking in general. It is about how we interact with data on the Web (whether it be mobile or PC or a device like the Amazon Kindle) and the connections that we can take advantage of using the network. This is also why Semantic Apps are so interesting right now, as they take data connection to the next level on the Web.

Overall, unlike Nick Carr, I'm not concerned whether mainstream people accept the term 'Graph' or 'Social Graph'. It really doesn't matter, so long as the web apps that people use enable them to participate in this 'next level' of the Web. That's what Google, Facebook, and a lot of other companies are trying to achieve.”

I'm not sure that Nick's concern was with acceptance of the term, so much as acceptance of the concept that their data become (potentially) more portable than they understand or wish. And Google, Facebook and the rest have a very long way to go in achieving (or even, in some cases, recognising) an open and actionable graph.

“Incidentally, it's great to see Tim Berners-Lee 're-using' concepts like the Social Graph, or simply taking inspiration from them. He never really took to the Web 2.0 concept, perhaps because it became too hyped and commercialized, but the fact is that the Consumer Web has given us many innovations over the past few years. Everything from Google to YouTube to MySpace to Facebook. So even though Sir Tim has always been about graphs (as he noted in his post, the Graph is essentially the same as the Semantic Web), it's fantastic he is reaching out to the 'web 2.0' community and citing people like Brad Fitzpatrick and Alex Iskold.”

On the Web 3.0 blog, we learn that;

“We sometimes forget the real use of data - that of providing value to humanity in various forms, and providing true functionality as the humans need it. Connections are good, but functionality is paramount. The fact that a company can store ticket information on the web is not sufficient, but the user being able to buy it is significant. A company storing data is not sufficient, it being able to sieve out information from it, transforming it into knowledge, and converting to action is paramount. Someone along this, functionality becomes the significant aspect.

URLs are becoming more potent with XML wrappers (RDF/OWL/SPARQL) around it. The new generation of applications will be playing on these enhancers to achieve seamlessness that we have sorely been lacking in the last 25 years.

The WebTop is becoming more significant than the desktop. Browsers that were a mere window to the world may become a real wide entrance to the world itself. In a very short time, local resources on a computer may have no significance in how users achieve functionality.”

Nova Spivack also offers a long and considered response, picking up on some of Anne's concerns;

“But if the GGG emerges it may or may not be semantic. For example social networks are NOT semantic today, even though they contain various kinds of links between people and other things.

So what makes a graph 'semantic?' How is the semantic graph different from social networks like Facebook for example?”

He continues,

“A semantic graph is far more reusable than a non-semantic graph -- it's a graph that carries its own meaning.

The semantic graph is not merely a graph with links to more kinds of things than the social graph. It's a graph of interconnected things that is machine-understandable -- it's meaning or 'semantics' is explicitly represented on the Web, just like its data. This is the real way to make social networks open. Merely opening up their API's is just the first step”

and concludes with;

“The Giant Global Graph may or may not be a semantic graph. That depends on whether it is implemented with, or at least connected to, W3C standards for the Semantic Web.

I believe that because the Semantic Web makes data-integration easier, it will ultimately be widely adopted. Simply put, applications that wish to access or integrate data in the Age of the Web can more easily do so using RDF and OWL. That alone is reason enough to use these standards.

Of course there are many other benefits as well, such as the ability to do more sophisticated reasoning across the data, but that is less important. Simply making data more accessible, connectable, and reusable across applications would be a huge benefit.”

So where does all of that leave us?

Well, I don't think we saw something new created last week. What we saw was a restating of some principles at the heart of the Semantic Web, a recognition that the social graph so frequently mentioned in relation to the big Social Networking sites shares many of those principles. Finally, we saw the beginning of an informed discussion that might - finally - see the fruits of many years of Semantic Web research and development surfaced in language that can be used in conversation with the pragmatists building the mainstream Web of today, aligned to technologies and techniques fitting for that Web, rather than simply making the gloomy shadows a bit more pronounced.

Which brings us, with all due respect to Julia Donaldson, right back to the Gruffalo! :-)

“'A gruffalo? What's a gruffalo?'

'A gruffalo! Why, didn't you know?
He has terrible triples, and terrible graphs, and terrible OWL in his terrible ontologies.'”

Hmm. Maybe not. Read the original anyway, it's good...

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Posted by Paul Miller at 12:56 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

24 November 2007

Kaila Colbin and Branton Kenton-Dau Talk with Talis about VortexDNA and the Mapping of Human Intention on the Web

Vortexdna-Logo
In our latest Talking with Talis podcast, I talk with Kaila Colbin and Branton Kenton-Dau of VortexDNA. We discuss their ideas on mapping human intention, and the uses to which this information can be put in enriching users' experience online.

Listen Now

Download MP3 [40 mins, 19Mb]

During the conversation, we refer to the following resources;

This conversation was conducted using Skype on Thursday 22 November, 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.

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Posted by Paul Miller at 10:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Daniel Lewis Talks with Talis about the Social and Semantic Webs

Daniel Lewis
In our latest Talking with Talis podcast, I talk with Daniel Lewis. We discuss some of his ideas about the 'Social Web', and the relationship between this and the ideas and technologies of the Semantic Web.

Since recording our conversation, Daniel has left Curverider and is seeking new work.

Listen Now

Download MP3 [32 mins, 15Mb]

During the conversation, we refer to the following resources;

This conversation was conducted using Skype on Tuesday 20 November, 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.

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Posted by Paul Miller at 07:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Alberto Reggiori Talks with Talis about Asemantics and the Semantic Web

Alberto Reggiori
In our latest Talking with Talis podcast, I talk with Asemantics' CTO, Alberto Reggiori. We talk about the evolving semantic web, and the realities of maintaining a business delivering semantic solutions to enterprises outside the traditional Semantic Web community.

“Alberto Reggiori is co-founder and CTO of Asemantics S.r.l., a company working on cutting-edge Web technologies. He started to work on the Web back in 1995, and now specialises in new media, metadata and web data services. He has been prime developer of RDFStore, a native Semantic Web storage engine started back in 2000; and he is author of a number of open source packages and he participated to W3C standardistion activities related to SPARQL. While at Asemantics, Alberto has been working and consulting for companies like Skype, Joost, and recently for the BBC bringing innovative technologies into the customer Web infrastructures.”

Listen Now

Download MP3 [44 mins, 20Mb]

During the conversation, we refer to the following resources;

This conversation was conducted using Skype on Tuesday 20 November, 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.

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22 November 2007

Searching sucks

Apologies for some self-indulgence.

I've not been posting day-to-day blog posts over here on Nodalities because usually when I urge I spew forth on my own blog. Personal motivation. Known only to myself, not my wife, but usually 2/6 cats. So they tell me. But I have to break this block somehow, so I'll type what's on my mind.

Here's the thing - I was asked earlier if I had a photo of myself from my wannabe '80s pop style days (the question was put more diplomatically, appreciating the niceties of obscure late 20th century art movements conceptuality, yet still implying I should look young and enthusiastic, ideally with leather trousers). I *know* there's a photo online of me at 17, posing before an Elvish microphone (still can't sing), looking pretty good in a retro form. I think I probably blogged it at some point (with appropriate irony, knowing looks from the wisdom of decades, struggles with 7th chords and actually not having taken anywhere near the quantity of chemicals such work demands).

I can't find this photo. I know everything I need to tell my brother how to find the photo (he took it), but there seems absolutely no way of touching this piece of information on the web that, in now a very personal way, I want to find.

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Scott Wilson offers food for thought

Another good diagram from Scott Wilson over at CETIS. He's done quite a bit to think about the ways in which we need to explode the institutional desire to control absolutely everything about the process of learning, and this diagram represents the latest iteration.

Ple And Institution

Follow the arrows, and have a think...

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John Doerr on Web 3.0 and more at the Web 2.0 Summit

John Doerr
An interview with John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers was the final substantive element of the programme at the recent Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. I was clearly flagging, as my notes at the time do him no justice at all.

In my retrospective I was a little more forthcoming;

“'Semantic' has arrived; the Metaweb/ Radar Networks/ Powerset pow wow with Tim O'Reilly (pictured) on the final afternoon was great, and was just beginning to go places when they ran out of time. More debate and analysis would have been nice, with (a lot) less demo. This was followed up by John Doerr recognising the whole space as a compelling investment opportunity, echoing trends that Brad Feld highlighted in his recent podcast with me. I found Danny Hillis' explicit distancing of himself from the Semantic Web odd (Shelley just found it funny...); I'll admit that I've done a little of the same, but more to demonstrate that there is plenty that the Semantic Web's building blocks (RDF, GRDDL, etc) can do right now, without needing to await the arrival of The Semantic Web. We do need to find better ways to describe this space, though; 'Web 3.0' can be unnecessarily confrontational/epochal, and 'Semantic Web' carries way too much baggage...”

VentureBeat's reminder that video from his session is available offered a welcome chance to go back and consider John's comments at leisure... and they're well worth your time, too.

John Battelle starts off by looking back to Doerr's early investment in Google, questioning whether or not Doerr had any idea as to how big it would get. This is brought up to date with probing into the increasing diversity of Google's portfolio; a diversity that Doerr describes when he says that Google is

“about ads and about applications”

“It's a very clear set of opportunities that continues to grow enormously”

Doerr's honest admission of his concern about rate of growth at Google is telling; although he also points to the benefits of hiring large numbers of highly talented engineers.

Battelle also asks why KPCB didn't back Facebook, to which Doerr responds that they were already backing Friendster (number 13 by traffic worldwide, apparently, and already number 3 in the Chinese market despite just entering) and that 'loyalty' therefore prevented them from also supporting Facebook. Doerr goes on to talk about the importance of supporting those companies that they fund to the bitter end, “digging their heels in” as they're “dragged over the cliff.” Loyalty is commendable, but does it really make sense for an investor to hang on for that long? We all make mistakes. Shouldn't we be able to recognise them, learn from them, and move on... rather than plummeting over the cliff to our shared doom?

Moving on,

“Search is the killer app, but it's really clear that in addition to search we're going to do Discovery. Discovery and radical personalisation... [such as] Zazzle [with its] highly personalised commerce”
(Doerr's emphasis)

The next block digs into Doerr's interest in Green, which he backs up with compelling statistics. Looking from Europe, it's been quite remarkable to see the sudden eruption of environmental angst in the Valley... and comparing it to the evidence on the ground, walking around San Francisco, that very little has really changed yet. It is interesting, though, to compare Doerr's comments with those coming out of the Governments of Europe; both agree that 'green' doesn't have to mean giving up our current standard of living... if we innovate technologically, if we do the small things such as not leaving devices sat on standby, and if we bring pressure to bear upon the incumbents to innovate along with the entrepreneurs.

Right at the end (at 37:45 on the timeline), things turn back to the Semantic Web and the direct interests of this blog. Troy Williams (formerly CEO of Questia, now at PeoplePad) asks,

“What do you think of the Semantic Web companies we saw earlier, and of the Semantic Web generally as an opportunity?”

Doerr responds,

“So, I'm very excited about the prospect of a Semantic Web. I don't think it's clear yet. I don't think we've seen the 'clear winner' in those, but for us that falls in the category of this more immersive... experience. I think when we get to Web 3.0 that may be that cooler, more radically immersive web. We'll see. Next year, the year after?”

We're pretty excited about the opportunities offered by semantic technologies, too, although I would argue that we can do a lot to enhance today's web with those technologies long before we reach immersive nirvana. All those connections out there on the social graph, all those intentions, all that attention; it's just begging to be used, don't you think?

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21 November 2007

Semantic Structures for Teaching and Learning ?

Over on eFoundations, former colleague Andy Powell offers an interesting post triggered by his reading of position papers for a session today at this week's JISC CETIS conference here in the UK.

As the session's abstract describes;

“It is ten years since the W3C released its first working draft on RDF and its Introduction to RDF Metadata. RDF and related standards such as RDFs and OWL are the building blocks which promised to make the vision of the semantic web a reality. A decade on and semantic technologies have been embraced by a wide range of sectors including government, financial services, manufacturing, logistics, transport and communications, energy, health and life sciences, media, and business services. Semantic technologies are widely used to facilitate identity management, language processing, ontology development, knowledge representation, data integration and clustering, information management and 'meaning extraction.'

Given that semantic technologies have the unique ability to dynamically describe complex and evolving concepts, resources and relationship one would expect these technologies to be highly applicable to the domain of teaching and learning. And yet, to date, the majority of standards, tools and applications which we recognise as 'educational technologies' have been heavily based on grammatical approaches such as XML, HTML, etc. Accessible applications, such as those designed to support the development and analysis of conceptual relationships (e.g. mind mapping tools), are not always based on open standards and have not been particularly widely or effectively exploited by the teaching and learning community. To many teaching practitioners semantic technologies have largely remained a peripheral academic interest.”

Lorna Campbell, one of those leading the session, picks up on a point made in David Millard's position paper, entitling her own blog post on the event,

“The Semantic Web hasn’t failed, it just hasn’t succeeded enough”

Is that true, and what's success anyway? Talis Platform Advisory Group member Mills Davis is certainly able to point to plenty of success in his recent report on the 'semantic wave'.

The main thrust of Andy's argument draws upon his experience in the sometimes (often?) frustrating world of consensual standards development, a world in which he has suffered and contributed for many years. He draws upon experiences there, and applies them to the Semantic Web in order to pose questions;

“So, what about the Semantic Web? Well, it suffers from a classic chicken and egg problem. Not enough content is exposed by members of the first group ['those who have content to make available'] in a form suitable for members of the third group ['those that are building tools to put the first two groups in touch with each other'] to develop effective tools for members of the second group ['those who want to discover and use the content provided by others']. Because the tools don't exist, the potential benefits of 'semantic' approaches aren't fully realised. Members of the second group don't use the tools because they aren't felt to be good or comprehensive enough. As a result, members of the first group perceive the costs of exposing richer Semantic Web data to outweigh any possible benefits because of lack of critical mass.”

Hmm. Maybe. There certainly is a problem, but is it this problem? Activities such as the Linking Open Data community project are making large quantities of data available for working with, the necessary licensing frameworks are moving forward apace, and there are a growing number of toolsets with which the sufficiently motivated can get to work and do some interesting things.

The bigger problem today, surely, is one of marketing. Almost no one is really engaging in a conversation that explains and demonstrates the ways in which semantic technologies might improve current applications and make new applications better. Instead, there is an implicit or explicit presumption that the Semantic Web is 'simply' better... that then descends all too quickly into turgid detail, triples, and ontologies. Where is the compelling story to encourage that break-out from the early adopting zealots into more of a mainstream? Where are the easy small steps that require small changes in current practice, and result in incremental improvement today that opens the door to more tomorrow? Where are the real applications (like our very own Talis Engage) that meet real requirements of real people regardless of whether they want, recognise or understand the Semantic Web underpinnings at all? Where, bluntly, are applications that don't look scary, turgid, and actively un-designed?

The answer doesn't have to lie in more standards, in homogenisation, and in institution-spanning top-down frameworks. The answer lies in getting on and solving the real problems that real learners and real researchers really face today... problem by problem and person by person. The right small solution, seeded in the right way, can grow virally and be far more successful than the most high-profile of expensive all-encompassing monoliths. Grow enough, and network effects take over.

Andy concludes with;

“What do I conclude from this? Nothing earth shattering I'm afraid. Simply that for semantic approaches to succeed they will need to be low cost to implement, of high value, and adopted by a critical mass of parties in all parts of the system.”

And with that, I wholeheartedly agree.

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19 November 2007

This Week's Semantic Web

Selected links related to Semantic Web technologies for the week ending 2007-11-19, all weeks. Also available in RDF as linked data or via GRDDL.

In the Media

See also: Talking about that Semantic Web thing - looking for new podcast subjects

Docs

Semantic Web Challenge Winners

The Semantic Web Challenge 2007 was organized in conjunction with the Sixth International Semantic Web Conference in Busan, Korea. It has been noted that "Almost 100% of the presentations or the posters [at ISWC '07] were using Arial typeface". See also: ISWC First Day, iswc 2007 in Technorati, photos on Flickr.

Software News

Events etc.

Calls for Papers

Miscellany

Quote of the Week

...if you care about not wasting lots of your customers’ time and money, unless you are developing a service for a single consumer who demands them, I would strongly advise you DO NOT use WS-* at all.

-Paul Downey, Best Practice for Web Services

~

Sources include Planet RDF, various other blogs, Semantic Web Interest Group IRC Chatlogs & Scratchpad, ESW Wiki, SemWebCentral, Sweet Tools, W3C Semantic Web